The image is technically from the next volume, but it illustrates well where the story ends.

Love this quote from the final chapter, when he overreacts to being asked about Luo Binghe: “It was Shen Qingqiu who was overthinking the skeletons in his closet.“

That sounds about right for Shen Qingqiu!

Anyway, as ever, loved this reread, and feel like I notice/absorb more and more each time.

“It's only, long ago, I began to suspect that Cucumber-bro was a faithful reader, just one who didn't like expressing his feelings in a normal way. To think you were able to recall an obscure, throwaway plot point that I used only once. I'm very moved.“
- Shang Qinghua aka Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky to Shen Qingqiu, aka Peerless Cucumber

And yep, SQH, that's about right in summing up SQQ.

Choosing this image as my favourite for this chapter feels heartrending, given how the chapter ends. I actually forgot that there's a little more after the fall, since the donghua ends with it. One more chapter to go, a short one.

I'd say I don't get how Shen Qingqiu doesn't notice/understand Luo Binghe's crush on him, but the man's powers of self-delusion are unbelievably strong. Love him strutting his stuff to impress Binghe re: the monsters.

Another chapter finished! Shen Qingqiu just keeps jumping in front of Luo Binghe -- technically this image is from the previous chapter, but he does it again in this one already. Binghe is running away with all sorts of confused ideas about why his Shizun is protecting him, poor boy.

But then, he's beginning to be cared for, for the first time in a long time, so “poor boy“ might not be the right words.

I think this was the first collection of Duffy's I read, after encountering her selected poems at GCSE. I think I liked them better now, though some of them still feel like copout cheap-shots, savagery for the sake of it.

The Anne Hathway sonnet is still the best:

“I hold him in the casket of my widow's head
as he held me upon that next best bed.“

(In Shakespeare's will, he gave his wife, Anne Hathaway, the second best bed.)

And that's chapter two read! I love how quickly Shen Qingqiu begins to forget that he's in a story. In the clash with Sha Hualing and her minions, he's all about protecting all the disciples of Cang Qiong Sect, and risks himself selflessly, even under threat of death. He's far braver than he thinks he is; throughout, it's very obvious that he has very little insight into himself, so this isn't surprising.

And Liu Qingge's joined the story! 💙

This was one of my favourite collections by Duffy, so I wanted to revisit it while I happen to be in the same location as my copy. And I love it still, so full of jewels it'd be hard to choose just one to highlight. If I did, it'd be 'Art':

“Art, the chiselled, chilling marble of our kiss;
locked into soundless stone, our promises,
or fizzled into poems; page print
for the dried flowers of our voice.“

Time for a reread! I love these books: they were the first danmei I read. The setup (a master/student relationship) is immensely problematic to a Western reader, but it's important to consider the context and also how the story absolutely mitigates that and rebalances the power scales between the two. In this TED talk I will...

Anyway, so far in this reread I have been enjoying how genre-savvy SQQ is, and how that is his strength AND weakness.

Apparently reading for four hours in total on Thursday wasn't enough for me, despite being 4x as much as I usually manage, so I read for another hour before bed to finish this. I liked it a lot, though as ever I'd have liked it more with numbered citations and I wish the nature of evidence for his assertions had been discussed, e.g. *why* does he assert that "Chickpea" and Cleopatra IV were a love match? On what evidence?!

[Received to review, from the publisher]

Ooh, I'm going to need time to digest this one before I actually write a proper review. I think I prefer the first book, and I think any climax would have difficulty living up to all the mystery, but I enjoyed myself very much.

Started this because I love the tagline ("be gay, solve crime, take naps") and it all sounded fun (and of course it's on my #BookSpinBingo card), but I'm not entirely sure if it's for me. Not sure what's bothering me, just... vibes. I'm cognisant that it's longer than 400 pages, so I might just be getting daunted due to most of my reading being significantly shorter than that. Silly, but it's a thing that does happen to me these days.

I found the start of this was a bit daunting because I came back for Sophy and Vyerin, and Henery and E., and the first bit made it seem like it was going to be about the aftermath of their doings or something? I'm not sure *quite* what gave me the impression that it was a bit distanced from them. But now I'm solidly into it, and very interested to learn what comes of all these mysteries...

You can't let an Eleven go unpetted and ignored, Lizel!

The invasion of Marcade continues. Lizel's mind is wheels within wheels, and I confess I still don't entirely follow his plotting, even on this reread -- the general strokes are clear, but every so often I'll go “huh?“ I'm not sure if it's translation/format issues, or if I'm just not being clever.

Lizel begging Gil to arm-wrestle to win a book for him... (He does. 💙)

I struggled to pick a favourite panel/page to share from this one, because there are some lovely moments -- like the ridiculously happy look on Gil's face when he understands that Lizel isn't trying to go home to his own world yet.

And yet this volume is also the start of a honest-to-god plot arc that doesn't resolve until vol 9. Unusual for this series!

I really liked this. In flipping through the book I'd caught a spoiler, but I hadn't connected all the dots, so it was fun to see how it all unfolded. In many ways there's nothing surprising about this because it's very much written in a fairytale setup, if not style.

If some Welsh spellings, why not all Welsh spellings, though?

So here's how I stand on #BookSpinBingo post-weekend. I didn't read as much as I'd like yesterday evening due to household annoyances, but I got a second bingo already, and I'm already partway through four more of the books. It's a month where this is working well for me, clearly! And I have plenty of time to read, which helps.

Many thanks to @TheAromaofBooks as always for this challenge! 💙

This is lovely in so many ways. I don't quite know why I kept stalling with it.

Here's my endorsement: I settled down to read a bit, with 115 pages left. I was cross-legged on the floor. By my wife's account, I then barely even shifted for 40 minutes -- until I'd finished the book.

At that point I remembered I'm 35 and shouldn't sit like that without moving for even 10 minutes, let alone 40. Ow!!!

Struggles to separate paedophilia and homosexuality. Author seems almost regretful that being gay is okay now (despite being gay himself) because he mourns the furious vitality of the community under threat.

The final chapter doesn't see the transphobic movement coming at all, and I'd lay bets from his attitudes that he finds it frustrating to be told to use someone's pronouns etc.

A bingo so early in the month?! Unprecedented for me. And yet here we are.

#BookSpinBingo

I felt like this had quite a bit of filler? Or at least, it didn't feel like it solidly came together as a single story for me.

The frog scene is very cringe.

Overall, I didn't like this as much as previous volumes, somehow. Maomao is still a very fun character, though.

I really liked this! I started being less engaged with the more modern history toward the end -- just not my thing -- but I loved the mix of archaeology and contextualisation. Exactly what I'd hoped for.

This so far is basically what I'd hoped for from another book I read semi-recently about shipwrecks, a bit of underwater archaeology, a bit of context for each ship, and discussion of what they tell us. I've always had a bit of a fascination for underwater archaeology, since there were some episodes of Time Team about it when I was a kid!

Oh goodness, Seiichirou's reaction to the letters from Aresh is even cuter in the manga than in the light novels.

Interesting that we get a touch more of Aresh's POV, too.

I have the weirdest urge to immediately reread the light novels, even though I only finished them like two weeks ago.

I had never come across Mary Fitt before, but this was fun. Fairly “classic“ Golden/Silver Age crime in setup (honestly it's hard to distinguish the two “generations“ sometimes, I don't even try), but with a fascinating amount of emotional insight on the characters.

This didn't quite have the focus I was interested in, but it's beautifully presented, with colour images. If you're interested in the history of magic and augury in the medieval period, it's perfect.

As usual with these anthologies, this was more than the sum of its parts -- it's fascinating to get a survey across the “classic“ period for mysteries from different authors and perspectives. There were some fun stories in there, but a certain amount of meh too, as always.

The first weekend of the month was very successful, #BookSpinBingo-wise! I was hoping to read more, but that wasn't really realistic. 😅 I'm just in such a reading mood, gaaah. Let me read all the time!

I feel like this one didn't quite connect the dots up fully before the dramatic ending, but it was okay. It felt very transitional as a book, somewhere between the classic crime of Lorac etc al and the gory details of a lot of modern crime.

Enjoyable in the sense of being interesting to me, but not a favourite of the series. Lots of unpleasantness.

I know nothing about architecture, so for me this was more about reading someone being enthusiastic about their subject. I don't know enough to judge opinions; buildings are usually just buildings to me -- but by reading this, I could share in Jenkins' fascination and delight. It might be best for those with a *bit* of knowledge but not a lot.

Would be better called “English“ architecture, though. References to Wales/Scotland are sparing indeed.

Well. I'm not quite sure what I think of this, ultimately. The bad guys here are Welsh, in the period of Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, and have established basically a little Welsh commune in medieval style. The daughter of a Victorian clergyman is the heroine (though her mother was Jewish, she is also very Anglican Christian). It all... reads badly. There isn't any outright outage I can quote, I'm just uncomfortable with all of it. 1/2

I'm fairly sure that the Welsh guy complaining of the way the English treat the Welsh is going to turn out to be the bad guy here, for all that his words are portrayed as sounding reasonable. I'm getting very very uncomfortable.

It's also definitely a look to have a Victorian clergyman's daughter visit Wales and complain about Welsh people not being religious, given Brad y Llyfrau Gleision was 1847.

Welp, a character just got announced as “Arthur, Prince of Gwynedd“, and... this is a definite choice. This might be where I depart from this series, depending on how things go. Who knows, maybe it'll be amazing and not weird about “Wild Wales“ (quote) in a book set in the Victorian period, but I'm bracing to be severely exoticised and, thanks, I hate it.

Ohhh this autopsy scene is very un-classic. Which makes sense, this is from the 60s and about the outside of this series' usual range, but I was not expecting it in a British Library Crime Classic. Much more like a precursor of the modern police procedural type stuff; Rankin, McDermid, etc. Not my comfort zone at all.

I'll have to give my ultimate rating some thought, but it felt like it just kind of fizzled out. Even given it's mostly about the robots finding a cosy found family, and not about the world it's set against, the pace suddenly accelerated to smooth everything out in a handful of pages at the end.

Yay, it's #BookSpinBingo time! I guess the colours are a bit autumnal, but I always pick them out of the palette of the #BookSpin choice... which this time is the fourth book of a series where the third was also on the list. Oh noes!

And finished! Note: I received this via Netgalley, with the expectation that I would review it.

Aaaand I've gobbled it up so quickly (sort of makes sense for a book about famine). It made me realise I don't remember the first couple of books in the series super well, and that makes me tempted to reread. This one's a harsh one, a sad and hungry one. It does well at that.

It was not a great month for reading (by my standards). I can see the impact of my assignments here pretty starkly laid out (albeit slightly camouflaged by the days where I read a few manga). The reading genuinely picked up on the 20th, and I've been steadily settling into reading for much bigger proportions of the day. It's a relief; I don't feel like me when I'm not reading!

Cute. It's very “cosy fantasy“, with very little drama, limited miscommunications, easily solved issues between the MCs. The worldbuilding doesn't go very deep.

All in all, a nice light read, but not one I'll be rhapsodising about, if that makes sense.

Yessss. I might even start reading it today, once I'm done with The Baby Dragon Cafe. Nghi Vo's an auto-read for me, especially the Singing Hills books.

Written my list for May already, for once! I have somewhat got my reading mojo back after a cascade of awful and stressful events, and I'm looking forward to plunging in.

#BookSpin

"I'll just read a chapter to get started," they said.

It's not particularly brilliantly different to other romances; it'd be basically the same story if it were a cafe for baby horses, in many ways. But it's light and fun and quick, so it's working for me right now.

I found this completely riveting. I read someone critiquing it because they said the very idea of “Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world“ doesn't work, and I think that's to miss the point of what this is: it's a homage to the idea of Sherlock Holmes, but it is very much not a retelling, it's imagining how this fascinating, wild, awful fantasy world might grow that kind of intellect, and what it might be used for. The worldbuilding is amazing.

I am furious that I have to go to bed instead of reading more!

I've read 15 chapters so far and though I have stopped a couple of times along the way, I never actually wanted to. It's grabbing my attention even when I've generally found that my attention is fragmented and messed up (too much going on).

That was fun! Aelis still talks to herself too much and I keep losing track of the various types of magic etc etc, and the twist at a certain spot didn't surprise me much, but somehow... fun.

And finally, a #BookSpinBingo.

Some miscommunication/lack of communication stuff that drove me loopy, but mostly a dramatic and fitting ending for Aresh and Seiichirou, in which they both show full commitment to their relationship.

I'm keeping these light novels, I can see myself rereadigng them.

I didn't find this one terribly well-organised, not to give a particularly deep insight into some of the women it discusses. It does best with Christine de Pizan and Margery Kempe, but doesn't give us nearly as much of Marie de France or Julian of Norwich -- which, arguably there isn't that much info, but it does make things feel unbalanced.

This was interesting and clearly involved a lot of research, though I eventually found myself glazing over because it felt a bit repetitive. The problems with Spotify boil down to the same basics: remuneration of artists is poor, it's built to make money for the creators, it pivots at random to any metric where it can make the numbers go up, it's opaque...

Oh nooo, Aresh, that's going too far with a romantic gesture without discussing things properly. 🫣

But I am pleased that the controllingness seems somewhat... better? in the light novels? Maybe it just makes sense a bit more? I'm not sure.

I was a little worried that it'd be all the way to the end of the story before Seiichirou explicitly acknowledges Aresh's feelings (and his own), but nope! Which is kind of a relief. I loved the extra from Norbert's point of view, and the inclusion of Seiichirou's (unsent) letters to Aresh while he was away -- awwww.

I thought that the light novels might add quite a lot, but I always get surprised by how much detail a manga/manhua can pack in. There wasn't much added by reading the original light novel here, but I did enjoy it, and it does give a bit of an extra insight into Seiichirou's thoughts at some points.

In this volume, Aresh's controllingness is... there, but not so bad yet. We'll see I guess. I hear they eventually fight about it.