Of Swords and Parasols

What are you currently reading
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 9-11

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What did you recently finish reading?

Lost in Translation by Margaret Ball. Hilarious 90s portal fantasy in which a liberal arts student is forced to go to university in France AGAINST HER WILL by her father and accidentally ends up in fantasyland at a university of magic. She decides it's a quaint rustic town where everyone REALLY REALLY likes D&D and is in constant RenFaire mode, and takes about half the book to realize that she isn't in Kansas anymore. she also latches on to the evil mage who brought her to fantasyland so that he could sacrifice her sole, and promptly both projects her daddy issues onto him and decides he's the Best Teacher Ever. Said evil mage then starts having awfully conflicted feelings about the sacrifice thing. Not because of trivial things like morals, but because it's like a kitten staring up at you going "Pet me, pet me! Will it be easier to to pet me if I claw my way up your robes and sit on your shoulder?" Funniest portal fantasy to not be a parody EVER. I first heard about the book through skygiants 's great writeup here.

Adaptation by Malinda Lo. YA SFF with multiple queer and POC (with overlap) characters. Reese and her debate partner, David, are away at a meet when hundred's of birds throw themselves at planes in flocks, causing multiple planes to crash and the airlines to be grounded. Driving home in a rental car, another bird throws itself at their car, causing a wreck that leaves both teens in a coma for almost a month. When Reese returns home, she finds that her body seems to be changing, and thinks someone is following her. She also meets a beautiful and mysterious girl, Amber, and discovers that the birdpocalypse is still an ongoing Thing. Romance, conspiracy theories, genetic experimentation and whatnot ensue. This is possibly the only minstream published fiction i've read in which people sit down and discuss how "queer" is used in modern culture, the negative connotations associated with it and the reclamation of the word. I'm not sure where it's going to go in the sequel, but it was rather grand.

Born Wicked by Jessica Spotswood. YA fantasy set in an AU 19th century England in which the premise seems to be that witches are real and the Inquisition never ended, and the Inquisitors, now called "Brothers" now rule. Witches are no longer burned at the stake, but are instead sent to sanitariums, and when they come of age young women are forced to either marry or join the "Sisters," supposedly allies of the Brothers. If young women do not make their choice in a timely manner ,the Brothers will choose for them. The main character, Cate, is the oldest of three sisters, all witches, who will have to make her own choice soon, and discovers that her mother, also a witch, may have kept secrets about her and her sisters from them that could change their lives. The world building and mythology are pretty complex, but barely touched on in the first book, and the plot, IMO, very interesting, and I very much liked the focus on Cate and her sisters. There's a lesbian subplot that doesn't actually get a lot of attention in the first book, but that I suspect will play a much larger role later on. On the downside, it's first person present tense, which is my mortal narrative enemy, and it took me a while to stop being distract by how much I hate first person present tense.


What do you think you'll read next?

Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal, the Taken by Vicki Petterson, or a nonfiction book about an ambulance corps in WWII whose title and author I forget just now.

What are you currently reading
Legend of the White-Haired Demoness by Liang Yusheng, ch 2-4.

( spoilers )

Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman by Elizabeth Abbott. Nonfiction about famous (and less so) mistresses throughout history and in literature. I'm on page 77 out of 500, and it's a bit of a "cliffnotes: version: in addition to various cultural and historical notes for each of her categories, Abbott looks to have at least 70-80 entries, each with a minibiography of 3-7~ pages, so there isn't room to get into a lot of depth with most of them. Pretty good so far, though.


What did you recently finish reading?

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead. WWII nonfiction about 230 women in the French Resistance who were captured and sent to Auschwitz, only 49 of whom survived. The first half of the book focused on the women's work and how they were captured, and the second half on their experiences while imprisoned. Moorehead interviewed the 7 survivors she was able to locate who were still living when she began work on the book, and so there's considerably more detail about their experiences than in other book about captured spies in WWII that I've read (the others were also about SOE agents, and so also spent quite a bit of time focusing on homefront operations which, if you're familiar with the SOE, can inspire a whole different kind of rage.) It's good and fascinating in the most awful way, and I feel I need to consume about 5000 hours of fluff and love and joy to recover from some of it.


I read a bit of Kelley Armstrong's Men of the Otherworld collection, but then realized that it was all about the werewolf dudes, and decided there were much better ways to spend my time.

What do you think you'll read next?

More Legend of the White-Haired Demoness and Mistresses, library books