Wednesday Weekly Reading Meme
Apr. 3rd, 2013 10:07 pmI'm reading the manhwa The Moment When the Fox Became thea Wolf, in which Eun Song, a poor, meek "wallflower" girl swaps bodies with Yoo Ha, a rich, violent delinquent, when both hide in a wardrobe for different reasons. It's very entertaining but sometimes a bit much. A lot of it so far has been people's reactions to the two suddenly behaving conventionally for their opposite gender, and the two learning about each others problems and trying to fix them in ways the person who actually belongs in the body wouldn't. Yoo Ha's family issues would put a lot of soap operas to shame and thanks to the gender confusion and bodyswapping, you almost need a pie chart to keep track of who likes who in what body (Not to mention "wait, under the circumstances, does this count as slash and/or incest or not?") if you stop to think about it, but is easy to follow when you're actually reading. The end of the 5th volume has a twist that could go a lot of ways, and I have no idea which way it'll go.
And I'm reading Dime Store Magic, the first Paige Winterbourne-centric book in the Kelley Armstrong series. I'm fairly spoiled for the big parts, as both Industrial Magic and Haunted are direct sequels, but itisn't affecting my enjoyment. Though, I have to say, I liked Savannah's father in Haunted, but if he's approving of the things being done to Paige in his name here, I'll have to change that, and Lucas is certainly different here than in the other books, once paige and Savannah have unbent him a fair bit.
What did you recently finish reading?
I finished reading Kelley Armstrong's Haunted, which I enjoyed a lot, even though it went a bit close to slasher territory for my taste at one point. (Err...by "slasher," I am referring to the gory horror subgenre that I don't find tense or scary, just icky, not shipping. In case there was any confusion.) I also read her Broken, which I enjoyed more than the oprevious Elena/werewolf material that I read, but still less than the others. The central romance there is less creepy, but I still think he's borderline abusive (definitely obsessive and controlling) and while I'm neutral about how graphic consentual sex scenes come in my fiction, I'm a bit bitter in that, of the canon pairings in this series, the only one that I don't like it the one that gets the least "fade to black." It's also still very "one special girl in all the world...and there are no other girls in her world," but at least Elena acquired a few female friends who can at least pop inn from time to time.
And then I also read Catherynne M. Valente's Six-Gun Snow White, whivh reimagines "Snow White" as a western in which Snow is the daughter of a Crow woman and a white land baron. The book is very interesting and Valente does a very good job with the oral western narrator approach to the prose, and weaves in other fairy tales very interestingly. That said, while I liked it a lot, something about it felt a bit off to me ,and I can't quite pin down what. I think it's partly that I think Valente may have been a bit more concerned with "not your average Snow White" than with "her" Snow White (if that makes sense), and the stepmother wasn't given as much focus as I expected. I think Valente conveyed her motives and the "abuse begets abuse" element of her background, but the last few versions of "Snow White" that I've encountered have spent more time developing and delving into the stepmother than this did, so I guess I'm expecting a lot more of that now.
What do you think you'll read next?
The rest of the Hwang Mi Ri manhwa, and whatever is due back at the library next.
For the curious, in March I read 6 prose books and 35 graphic novels.