any three points
Jan. 12th, 2024 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI guess any three points define a triangle, but in this case it must be a pretty big triangle, because gosh these are three extremely unrelated books (related only in that I happened to finish all three today).
The Awakened Kingdom is NK Jemisin's 2014 post-Inheritance-trilogy novella that I somehow misread as being a 2024 work and moved to the upper ranks of my reading list before I realized. I don't *think* I ever read it in 2014? It was fine. Bit heavy-handed - Jemisin seemed determined to hit us over the head with the point to a degree that actually took me out of the story somewhat - but it reminded me how much I liked the trilogy, and I thought it was a neat epilogue.
Slippery Creatures, KJ Charles. The first book in of one of Charles' many historical-romance trilogies. This one is a working-class soldier home from WWI and an aristocrat and there is ~espionage~. I somehow still haven't binge-read everything Charles ever wrote, but gosh I eat this stuff up. I feel like the aristocrat character here might be exploring some Peter Wimsey-adjacent territory (if you had a Wimsey who was actually gay, I mean, not just sometimes gay on AO3).
The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht. 2023 picture book. Let's be real: I would not have been especially interested in this if it didn't have Watterson's name on it, and, having read it, I think my biggest takeaway was "huh, I guess I'm glad Watterson is still out there exploring as an artist". Something like 35 two-page spreads, where the lefthand page has a sentence, and the righthand page has a black-and-white illustration, which I guess are a mix of photographs of sculptures (Kascht) and drawing (Watterson). The story is an ambiguous and inconclusive fable; you could read it a few different ways. I didn't, on a first read, find any of them hugely compelling or memorable (although who knows, occasionally something ends up staying with me much more than I would have guessed from the initial impact), but it was a fine little interval of contemplation. (Not comics but I'm tagging for comics because I might later think that's how I would have tagged it...)
The Awakened Kingdom is NK Jemisin's 2014 post-Inheritance-trilogy novella that I somehow misread as being a 2024 work and moved to the upper ranks of my reading list before I realized. I don't *think* I ever read it in 2014? It was fine. Bit heavy-handed - Jemisin seemed determined to hit us over the head with the point to a degree that actually took me out of the story somewhat - but it reminded me how much I liked the trilogy, and I thought it was a neat epilogue.
Slippery Creatures, KJ Charles. The first book in of one of Charles' many historical-romance trilogies. This one is a working-class soldier home from WWI and an aristocrat and there is ~espionage~. I somehow still haven't binge-read everything Charles ever wrote, but gosh I eat this stuff up. I feel like the aristocrat character here might be exploring some Peter Wimsey-adjacent territory (if you had a Wimsey who was actually gay, I mean, not just sometimes gay on AO3).
The Mysteries, Bill Watterson and John Kascht. 2023 picture book. Let's be real: I would not have been especially interested in this if it didn't have Watterson's name on it, and, having read it, I think my biggest takeaway was "huh, I guess I'm glad Watterson is still out there exploring as an artist". Something like 35 two-page spreads, where the lefthand page has a sentence, and the righthand page has a black-and-white illustration, which I guess are a mix of photographs of sculptures (Kascht) and drawing (Watterson). The story is an ambiguous and inconclusive fable; you could read it a few different ways. I didn't, on a first read, find any of them hugely compelling or memorable (although who knows, occasionally something ends up staying with me much more than I would have guessed from the initial impact), but it was a fine little interval of contemplation. (Not comics but I'm tagging for comics because I might later think that's how I would have tagged it...)
