Reviews and Comments

Went looking for reviews and supposedly it's fantastic and funny, hilarious even. The closest i can find to humour is ungenerous digs at various characters. There's an ugly gruesome murder. There's maybe some profundity in the end, though perhaps not particularly original. by the time I got there I was tired from the details, so many details, many disjointed. If there was symbolism connecting them it's beyond me, other than a surreal nightmare. Images of grief, yes, The zombie apocalypse as ungenerous comedy horror as a metaphor for grief? I suppose. Well, it is a different approach. That's the most generous thing I can find to say about this. Others seem to love it so maybe I'm just thick. No catharsis or sense of understanding, being understood for me in this. I'm left feeling sad, sitting with my own grief, and thick.

review from Mastodon: mastodon.social/@MythingPerson/111450928969059007 Magician, by K.L. Noone, is the gentlest, most lyrical romance fantasy I’ve ever read. A young Prince comes to ask for help for his small mountain kingdom from the world’s most powerful, and most reclusive, sorcerer and, in the process, teaches him to care again.

Warning: it does include several sex scenes that are hard to blindly skip past because they’re often funny. Choose wisely.

#HopePunk

this is a short story but as i haven't managed past the first chapter of anything in months and it's published as a stand alone, i'll let it be counted towards my goal.

it's moody and evocative, told as a single paragraph interior monologue of an experience the narrator/protagonist doesn't understand himself, but in the end it's perhaps quite simple.

There's a very old Jewish teaching which says "whoever saves a life, saves an entire world." This gentle and reflective novella, in which nothing much happens and yet lives change, is a version of this, told through the details of the quiet life of a man in an Irish village.

The combination of outrageous memoir and opinionated insights on being a woman is more than the sum of its parts. Many nods of recognition, though not the outrageous parts :)

Big things happen but it's told in a low stakes kind of way. Easy to read, calm, measured, with simple insights.

Chosen as my first loan from the ebook service the library system uses, but mostly out of frustration because everything I had hoped to use it to read isn't available through it. Becky Chambers (solarpunk), which the central library has physical copies of, ok, that's niche. Hilary Mantel though? If I didn't have a deadline to be done with this one, read or not, I'd probably set it aside and who knows, maybe try again, or not. I'm 50 pages in and really only one thing has happened, the rest has been scene/relationship-setting. Ok, vent over :)

For a book about cutting out unnecessary work in the garden, parts of this are a lot of less than necessary work to read. Especially in the early chapters I found myself just wanting the author to get on with advice for what to do and how to do it more efficiently, but I suspect he rather enjoyed the cathartic snark in writing it. The fruit section was probably the most useful to me, but only because I know so little. Tidbits buried in the rest.

Five stars is frustrating. I'm inclined to rate is comparison with others in its genre (very broadly speaking), thus four stars, but if I were to compare it to other books I'd have to give it three at most, probably two but that feels so very low. It was good, not great, and succeeded at what it was trying to do.

I read this as a free e-book. It was a pleasant way to spend some evenings.

The mid-twenties protagonist is growing up and also inclined to imagine a bit too much, which is a good way of writing a low-stakes "cozy crime" novel. The genre-driven nature of publishing seems to push books into either crime or romance, but neither are truly central here. Instead it's more about the young woman, her aunt and creating a life worth writing about.

(posted this to mastodon at the time) am reading the novel of Manon Lescaut, mostly because Dumas' heroine who became Verdi's Violetta owned a copy and I wanted to understand the references in Dumas' #LaDameAuxCamillas better; but also in hopes I might learn to appreciate Massanet and Puccini's Manon operas. Instead, wherein Massanet's upsets me because the young man seems noble and good and his life is ruined by this love, I'm now fed up with his self-involvement. This was not the plan. #opera #ReadingOpera

PS La Dame Aux Camillas is brilliant. Read that instead. Ebook for free on Project Gutenberg. Search for Dumas.