Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

This has not been a great run of books. Expect an overall sense of "meh" under each cut.

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

Loved the medical stuff, loved the day-to-day life parts, loved the characters of Hema and Ghosh and how they adapted to unexpected parenthood...and was distracted from all of that by the weird misogyny underlying everything about the narrator's childhood sweetheart. He gets mad at her that she didn't want to save herself for him, and when she meets him much later while sick, they sleep together in a kind of rapey scene, and then she disappears from his life. And guess what! He gets a life-threatening STD from that encounter, and everyone feels very sorry for him!

So uh, yeah, very strong male author syndrome even as it's ostensibly sympathetic to female characters like Hema.

The History of Pirates by Angus Konstam (Non-Fiction)

Covers a broad range of pirates in general, with more chapters devoted to the golden age ones that gave piracy its fame. Unfortunately, those chapters felt more like one pirate's blurb of a life story one after another, with little coherence or structure to it, and so I retained very little. It did give me a lot of names and places and things to look up though, so I look forward to that.

The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Of all the books with m/m or f/f romance I've read this year, this might be my least favorite. I couldn't really get into the book itself or the romance. Which was disappointing, I should be here for a ruler/bodyguard ship with all that loyalty kink and torn allegiances potential, but in this case uh, I very much didn't think the ruler deserved that loyalty. Mostly, I thought she was an ass, and was unimpressed by Ead falling for her, which meant I wasn't very sold on the Inysh side of things.

I liked Tane and Loth fairly well too, but I think by the end my favourite narrator was Niclays. What a wretched coward, I'm so happy that he gets the ending he does, that quiet moment with Jannart's wife. That is probably also a side-effect of me not caring much for the main plot. The most excited I got about it was when Kalyba revealed the origin of Virtudom, because that was such a petty, personal origin story and that's way more entertaining that the Nameless One shit.

Final note: Being a best friend in this story is the most dangerous occupation, and I was not about that :(