Wednesday reading meme

[bedlamsbard]

I'm going to do another graphic of daily reads for February, but not tonight.

What I'm currently reading

Rereads of A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin, the first Matthew Swift book, and White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India by William Dalrymple, which I read a few years ago before I finalized my academic subfield (Roman imperialism and cultural identity), so it's really interesting to read something that's the same general topic but at a two thousand year remove. (And of course a lot of the academic talk is the same; both my field and Dalrymple's studies come out of the paradigm shift in post-colonial academia.)

I've also got Barbara Hambly's The Silent Tower on a slow reread, but I'm not really in the mood for it so I keep putting it down.

What I've just finished reading

The Minority Council and The Glass God by Kate Griffin -- I did my Matthew Swift + Magicals Anonymous out of order, whoops. (I tend to do series rereads out of order for various reasons.) And, huh, looking at my spreadsheet that actually seems to be it. Weird, I thought I read more this week.

What I'm reading next

I've got a bunch of William Dalrymple books either checked out from the library (In Xanadu and Nine Lives) or that I've just bought (Return of a King and The Last Mughal), so there's a high chance it's going to be Dalrymple for non-fiction. I also want to try and read (or reread) more Star Wars this month than I did last month. (Still haven't done that A New Dawn reread I've been wanting to do for ages.)

Comments

[dhampyresa]

I'm super impressed by how much you read!

Can I ask why you do rereads out of order?

[bedlamsbard]

I don't usually set out to do full series rereads out of order; what normally happens is that I'll want to reread one specific book because it's got a scene in it I like or something, and then I'll be in the mood for more set in that universe so I'll bounce around the series some until I've read through the series.

In the case of the Kate Griffin novels this time, let me see -- I reread A Madness of Angels (Book 1) at some point last year, but wasn't in the mood for the rest of the series at the time. When The Hanging Tree (which is from a completely different series by a completely different author, but the same genre of "urban fantasy set in London") came out last month, I meant to reread Rivers of London because I don't remember what happened in that series, but I don't like those books as much as I like the Kate Griffin ones, so I picked up The Midnight Mayor (Book 2) instead, and because I was in the mood for the rest of the Swift novels, I read the next two books in that series as well. Then I skipped the first Magicals Anonymous book, Stray Souls (which you could also say is book 5 in the Swift series, it just switches focus to a different character but is set in the same 'verse and immediately follows The Minority Council) because it's the only one of those six books I don't have a digital copy of, and I do a lot of reading on my computer and I think I was on the couch or something, so I didn't want to get the physical copy off my shelf. So I read The Glass God (book 6; Magicals Anonymous 2) instead -- also because I reread Stray Souls last year, but at the time didn't want to go onto The Glass God (Stray Souls is my least favorite of the lot, though it's still a good book). And when I finished that I was still in a mood for the series so I looped back around to A Madness of Angels. The jury is still out on whether I'll pick up Stray Souls after I finish it or not.

Human brains are weird, in other words. That's about the same process I'll go through with other out of order series rereads, though it only works if I've read the series a couple of times before. (I think with the Kate Griffin novels I've read the Swift books around half a dozen times; I think this might only have been my first reread of the Magicals Anonymous duo. --I normally do rereads because I'm really wary of unfamiliar-to-me authors, since I'm so picky about things.) I'll also do the same thing with TV show rewatches, depending on the show.

[dhampyresa]

Thanks for explaining!

I read the first Rivers of London book and it was fine, but I have no desire to read more even though on paper I should. What do you like about the Kate Griffin books?

[bedlamsbard]

Mmm, I don't know exactly -- they do a lot of things that I really like, including one of my big faves, which is the creation of gods/powers/etc. through human belief over the years. Though that simplifies it down a lot.

(Sorry, I'm really bad at talking about things I like, because it's hard for me to think about them in terms of discrete specifics.)