Books

20% through Schilds Ladder from Greg Egan now. It's like Gregs other works, it's good.

I finished the Classic of Tea, but am still struggling through The Legend of Darkness. As my backup brain-resting book I've now got The Thirty-Six Strategems on the side. It's an interesting new edition that has all the strategems and classic commentary examples but also adds more modern ones from around the world and from spheres other than the military. It is, as so many of my books in this vein are, trilingual: the original text and commentary are in Classical Chinese, modern vernacular Chinese, and English. The examples are bilingual vernacular Chinse and English.

I just finished Wounds by Nathan Ballingrud, a collection of short stories about hell. Holy fuck, Skullpocket is one of the best short stories I've ever read. I starts kinda silly and then... damn.

Most of the way through Tilt by Emma Patee. A story about a woman who's nine months pregnant in Portland when the Big One hits the Cascadia Subduction Zone (Massive Earthquake.) It's a fast, easy, insanely emotional read. Not a favorite, but I'm hooked.

Currently reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir.

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Read:

The Crows by C.M. Rosens (eldritch horror chick lit... yes, for real) | bingo squares: different continent, creature, LGBTQIA+ (arguably HM), jerk HM

A woman moves into an old house on the outskirts of an unfriendly coastal town, where everyone seems to want her gone. Turns out, the house is sentient, and many of the townsfolk aren't entirely human, including her nearest neighbor, a human/eldritch horror-hybrid.

This literally reads like Bridget Jones' Diary-era chick lit, just with liberal amounts of horror (Lovecraftian and otherwise) thrown in. It's actually a solid mashup, though, and doesn't dwell on awfulness the way the yard-long content warning list makes you think it would. It could use an edit for continuity (and don't think too hard about the world building), but it got me out of out of my post-Fisherman reading slump, so I recommend it as a fluff read if it sounds like your jam. Sidenote: this is marketed on one of the covers as "cosmic horror romance", but while there is a something in the story, it doesn't drive the plot, and isn't what you'd expect from the "romance" label (but nice to see!).