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the new normal
Apr. 11th, 2024 07:00 pmBack again after yet another longish disappearance (sorry). It's been a tougher adjustment since my car got stolen than I was really anticipating, and I feel like I'm only starting to emerge from a fog of tiredness and deep but indistinct distress.
( More details under the cut )
I have done other things besides mope! Sort of. I've been reading! For instance, I've read Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf and Starhawk fantasy trilogy, about which I have complexly mixed feelings that I won't go into here on this already-long post. And last night & today I read K J Charles's latest, Death in the Spires. It's a bit of a departure for Charles in that it's almost not a romance. (There is a love story, but it's not really central; one interesting detail is that this book has no explicit sex scenes whatsoever.) Formally it's a mystery, but really the mystery elements are pretty perfunctory. What it actually is, or wants to be, is a crime novel exploring a group of friends and how that friendship fails in various ways both before and after the crime. Charles tips her hat textually to Sherlock Holmes, but the influences I felt at work were different: Barbara Vine, Tana French, perhaps Donna Tartt. To be clear, Charles's reach exceeds her grasp here--the novel needed to be longer and to explore the characters more, particularly by giving our protagonist clearer and more consistent motivations. But my sense of Charles's most recent, oh, 6-8 books is that she's been straining at the limits of genre romance for quite a while now, and I'm happy to see her try for something beyond them. I'm curious about where she goes next. I'd actually love to see more of these characters, but I don't see how Charles could get another book out of them without abandoning even the pretext of male/male romance. I guess we shall see.
And I'm watching Taskmaster S17. Not loving the cast so far, but sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to them. And S16 is going to be a hard act to follow.
( More details under the cut )
I have done other things besides mope! Sort of. I've been reading! For instance, I've read Barbara Hambly's Sun Wolf and Starhawk fantasy trilogy, about which I have complexly mixed feelings that I won't go into here on this already-long post. And last night & today I read K J Charles's latest, Death in the Spires. It's a bit of a departure for Charles in that it's almost not a romance. (There is a love story, but it's not really central; one interesting detail is that this book has no explicit sex scenes whatsoever.) Formally it's a mystery, but really the mystery elements are pretty perfunctory. What it actually is, or wants to be, is a crime novel exploring a group of friends and how that friendship fails in various ways both before and after the crime. Charles tips her hat textually to Sherlock Holmes, but the influences I felt at work were different: Barbara Vine, Tana French, perhaps Donna Tartt. To be clear, Charles's reach exceeds her grasp here--the novel needed to be longer and to explore the characters more, particularly by giving our protagonist clearer and more consistent motivations. But my sense of Charles's most recent, oh, 6-8 books is that she's been straining at the limits of genre romance for quite a while now, and I'm happy to see her try for something beyond them. I'm curious about where she goes next. I'd actually love to see more of these characters, but I don't see how Charles could get another book out of them without abandoning even the pretext of male/male romance. I guess we shall see.
And I'm watching Taskmaster S17. Not loving the cast so far, but sometimes it takes me a while to warm up to them. And S16 is going to be a hard act to follow.
