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General announcement: succumbed to the siren call of a cash prize and started posting a Webtoon in this year’s contest, please read it and like share subscribe (there will be 5 more episodes, updating every Monday)

I read 16 books in March but it felt like less because each book seemed to take me forever to finish. At least most of them were good this time!

The Books! )

 

Tsuge review here.
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It was a very slow month at work so I got a very normal amount of reading done! Structured in order of when I read them, because I have a narrative arc in the middle there.

 

The Books! )

 

Check back in with me next month when I read... probably less, because our busy season is starting up again and also I have less hours in March for some reason and I mostly read at work lol.


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My reading preferences are more similar to my mother's than I would like to think.
My mom has read pretty much every piece of SFF literature available in the Russian language, including translated classic American stuff like Harry Harrison and Zelazny. Since the invention of the web serial, she's mostly been reading those, also in Russian but otherwise very similar in subject matter, tone and quality to SFF webnovels from East Asia or the US. (The main difference is that Russian portal fantasies don't usually involve dying and reincarnation, afaik. Her favorite is one called "the elf bull.")
She doesn't like anything too bleak, grim or depressing. She likes funny books with quotable lines that she then reads out loud to me hoping I'll share in her mirth. The word she uses to describe her preference is стёб, a word which the internet tells me means "banter" but my mother explains as "a kind of sarcastic, self-critical sense of humor". Мне нравится стёбные книжки, she says. She's the one who introduced me to the Discworld series when I was in middle school.
I find the term "cozy fantasy" deeply and profoundly grating, even when I like a book and then find out other people categorize as "cozy fantasy" (Howl's Moving Castle, which??? I GUESS???). Part of this is probably my inherent contrarian hater nature. But I also don't really understand it as an emerging genre. A lot of the more recent books I've seen categorized as such seem to hinge on the protagonist actively leaving a distinctly uncozy scenario, such as a war or revolution in which they are a principal figure, to run a small business in the countryside, a scenario I also find uncozy due to my not great experience as an employee of an Independent Bookstore Everyone In Town Fucking Loves Because They Don't Know How Badly The Staff is Treated (it's fine. I'm fine). (I am thinking of the plot summaries I've read for Legends and Lattes, Can't Spell Treason Without Tea, the Spellshop and like five other things I just opened in a new tab from this Goodreads list of cozy fantasy titles.) I guess for some people that element of escape is relatable, and the catharsis of leaving something dramatically horrible to then arrive somewhere peaceful is something that appeals to them? But for me these kinds of stories are not interesting or likeable and in fact kind of annoying. It's like... I don't like it when I can feel the author trying to make me feel a specific emotion, but I don't mind it when the author is trying to make me laugh if it works.
I don't read to be comforted. I read to be entertained. Like my mom, I want to read things that are funny, maybe even funny in a kind of mean way. Even though I make a point to read a variety of genres, the books that tend to hit best for me are the funny books. The стёбные книжки.
When I was pitching my new idea (a workplace comedy set in a fantasy bookstore based on my very real bookstore experiences) for the upcoming webtoon contest to my friends, a few of them were like "oh that sounds like a super cozy fantasy slice of life", and I immediately went like "no no way I don't want to do that". Besides my reflexive haterism of Cozy Fantasy, plotless slice of life is way harder for me than comedy as a genre.
I have a lot of respect for good slice of life media. Hirayasumi was one of my best reads of last year. A good slice of life makes small things (e.g. buying groceries) seem bigger and more entertaining without making it melodramatic, and to do it well you need to understand realism and character very very deeply. It's so easy to make slice of life feel boring or shallow.
Personally, I am very shallow, and also, I love jokes that make me laugh for real.
So as soon as I mentally reframed my new comic idea as a "fantasy workplace comedy", the story ideas for it started flowing and wouldn't stop. A workplace comedy means my characters can be mean to each other if it's funny. A workplace comedy means things are allowed to go poorly if it's funnier that way. A fantasy workplace comedy means people can end their days covered in slime. I'm drawn to imbalance and toxicity in my comics in a way my prose usually avoids. I think the pictures let me access a part of my subconscious words alone don't.
I don't wanna do a cozy bookshop story. I wanna do It's Always Sunny in Barnes & Noble: Ankh-Morpork location. Wait no: God's Blessing On This Wonderful Barnes & Noble. I haven't watched IASIP or Konosuba I am going off vibes and will also probably tone down the awfulness a little bit.
Really I wanna do Shortpacked! with wizards and jokes about whatever the latest booktok discourse is instead of transformers jokes. I've been rereading Shortpacked! to get a better idea of how to structure a workplace comedy webcomic and it's still great even if I don't understand the transformers references lol.
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Here are once again my books of the previous month in reverse chronological order because that’s how Storygraph sorts them!

I read 15 books and no VIZ manga volumes because I got COVID and had no motivation to do anything at all for a good chunk of the month there.
If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang- god she's so funny. Funniest YA writer working today. Really well-drawn portrait of a very specific environment, really clever gimmick and way of using it. All of the characters felt believable and varying degrees of likeable, and I really felt for Alice's struggles. I can't believe this was her first book. And she was still in college when she wrote it! What am I doing with my life. Also I just realized the title is a pun lol.

Wellness by Nathan Hill- Sad, but also funny. Some of the psychology stuff was interesting. The length of the bibliography was also interesting. It’s kind of refreshing to see a novel with so much research put into it. I think I liked it overall, but it’s hard to tell.

How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang- Sex scenes were pretty good, if het. Somehow very obvious the author is an experienced TV writer but a debut novelist. A little weird that the characters are from a similar part of the country to me, but not as weird as reading Suburban Dicks. I don’t know if the whole... dead sister thing is handled as well as I’d like it to be. I also kind of wanted it to be more about the TV show than their personal lives lol.

The Price of Salt, or Carol by Patricia Highsmith- Slower-paced than I expected it to be. Also less explicit than I thought it would be. And a lot more focused on both the roadtrip and Therese’s life ambitions. The happy ending was sweet though.

Flung Out of Space: The Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith by Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer (reread, because I’d started reading Carol and thought wait what was her life story again)- Ughhh still so good so beautiful and well-paced we have no choice but to stan (Ellis/Templer, not Highsmith) etc.

The Wake-Up Call by Beth O'Leary- Cute and funny! Both of the leads made sense to me, and their relationship developments also made sense. And the premise was really fun too. I liked this one.

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich- Read it because my girlfriend read it and asked me if it was accurate about working in a bookstore. Unfortunately the bookstore I worked at is a lot worse than most bookstores, so I couldn’t really say. Hard to read when in the middle of having COVID, which was when I had it checked out.

Funny Story by Emily Henry- If I had a nickel for every book I read in August with a male protagonist raised by a narcissistic mother, I’d have two nickels (the other being Wellness) which isn’t a lot but it is weird it happened twice. I did enjoy this one, but I’d put it in the middle of my Emily Henry tierlist (Book Lovers and Beach Read are my favorites, personally.)

Hilariously while I was reading it at work some patrons walked by carrying Funny Story tote bags and I mentioned this to them and they said they were a bunch of bookstagram friends meeting up together at my workplace. Wild.

A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid- I liked this more than I expected. The oppressive cold wetness was a very strong vibe for an atmosphere, and I liked the worldbuilding even though it felt kind of decorative. I had a hard time buying that everyone was just sooooooo obsessed with this one recently-dead author, though. I feel like it normally takes a little longer for someone to become a classic. The romance was okay.

Reboot by Justin Taylor- I’ve been thinking a lot about Extremely Online Books (as an extremely online person) and I think where Reboot and Exalted work and where My First Book (Honor Levy) and Fake Accounts (Lauren Oyler) don’t is the specificity of the way they are both online. By not trying to portray every single way someone can be Online, they portray an Onlineness that feels real. I did enjoy Reboot, though it is absolutely not a “voice of my generation” book on account of it is at the very least the voice of the generation before mine. I thought it would be more Bojack Horseman-like but then they referenced Bojack and I realized it was not that at all. Also, it has scenes, in which characters interact with each other and say words, and sentences of different lengths instead of all annoyingly short sentences (Levy) or all painfully long sentences (Oyler). Or maybe I’m just bitterly resentful of the fact that someone my age got a book out already and that’s why I’m so annoyed with Levy and her onlineness. 

Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater- I can see the influence of JSMN on this, so it’s a good thing I read that one first. I thought it worked well, the romance felt believable and the more fairytale aspect worked for me. I wish the aunt who sucked got more retribution in the end though.

Women of Good Fortune by Sophie Wan- Generally pretty fun and interesting choice of setting, but I feel like Jane was a little too hard to like for too long. Also Lulu should’ve been a lesbian sorry.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke- Extremely elaborate lore, dryly funny, the footnotes and all the fairy stories and the fairy world stuff was all really imaginative and interesting but the commitment to that 1800s aesthetic made it dense and kind of difficult to read. I felt like it took me forever to finish reading it, even though I did enjoy it all the way through.

The Self-Made Widow by Fabian Nicieza- I can’t talk about this book in too much detail without doxxing myself. It gave me psychic damage. The plot worked for me, and the ending was satisfying. Otherwise. It sure is a book that takes place in locations that exist. Including. My fucking workplace!!!! How's that for a jumpscare!!!
Personal update: thinking real hard about Querying my Book and getting scared and going back in to revise it again. Signed up for the Daisuga big bang. Finished a comic and got it printed in time for Flamecon and Anime NYC, then got COVID and missed Anime NYC.


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