Tea, Cats, Video Games

Pages read: 1917/1917

Books finished: 6

I started the day by finishing my backlog of reading journal spreads, and then I went to the library to return When We Were Vikings and decide what my next reads will be! I've decided that next I'll be focusing on my challenge I made based on the seven flowers from Deltarune, and since I already own books I can use for Green and Orange (and finished my book for Seth today), I checked out four books to shore up that TBR. I keep wondering what the librarian must have thought about me seeing me check out three frivolous cozy fantasy books alongside James by Percival Everett.

Probably that I am a fascinating person with broad tastes. If only all libraries could be so lucky as to serve such interesting clientele.

I finished Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous in the evening, and yeah, it's an absolutely nothing book. Two stars. I mostly skimmed the very end because I was half-watching Ghosts with my mom at the same time (and frankly I was enjoying that much more, even though I'd seen the episodes several times already and it was smack dab in the middle of the Sass virginity arc). It does make me nervous for all the cozy fantasy I have lined up to read for my Deltarune Flowers challenge, but I am nothing if not willing to give genres a second chance.

So yeah, unfortunately this challenge landed on a dud but I did it! I finished six books over the course of one vacation week, and I found it very doable and something I'd definitely be willing to try again next year. I worried it would be a slog or that it would leave me with no time to do other vacation-y things but that wasn't the case! I wouldn't expect myself to do this much reading regularly, considering I have a job and all, but I do feel like I'm on a roll and I want to keep at least some of the momentum up. I've enjoyed making these daily blog posts as well and I think I will kind of miss it!

The final ranking of all the books I read:

When We Were Vikings (5 stars)

The MASH Up (4.5 stars)

Wife Shaped Bodies (4.5 stars)

Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt (4.5 stars)

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (4 stars)

Pages read: 1794/1917

Books finished: 5

I am home from the beach! I had a great time on my vacation, but I’m happy to be back in my own space and with my kitties.

On the car ride back I continued reading Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous and. Well, I think it’s just a bad book. The writing is messy and boring, the characters are all just constantly nice to the point of being bland, and maybe most egregiously, Oaklin having amnesia was interesting at first but now I’m seeing that it’s just a convenient way for the author not to have to ruin the “cozy” mood by actually describing any of the interesting stuff villainy that the plot of the book supposedly stems from. The title misled me hard - with the words “formerly villainous” I came in expecting some sort of depth to the protagonist, but they are portrayed as utterly faultless and morally pure and it’s just boring to read about!

I’ll still finish the book. I started this week with a plan to finish six books and dammit I’m sticking to it. It’s just one final hurdle, I can do it.

After I got home I unpacked a little and took a nap. I did a lot of work in my media journal, decorating pages for all the books I finished this week. I still have to actually do all the writing and reviews tomorrow, and my July recap, and now a fifth page for Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, but it got late and I realized that I still had to read a whole other book before bed.

That book, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, I did end up finishing! I think I still have to sit with it and chew on it for a bit before I finalize my rating, but right now I’m feeling 4 stars. My issues are still pretty much the same ones I had yesterday, but I performed a mental exercise at some point where I asked myself, “Okay, but what if Dalia is the protagonist, instead of Travis? What if this isn’t about Death being distracted by this one family but about this woman who invites Death into her life?” And then it all kind of clicked for me. It doesn’t matter the logistics or logic of how Travis gets around to all those people while also spending all his time with Dalia and her family, because while death is something huge and universal, Dalia at this point has a personal relationship with death and grief and it feels to her as though Death has gotten overly familiar with her specifically. Travis never seems to go beyond England because she doesn’t either. None of this matters because the ending actually made me cry and that’s worth a lot.

Pages read: 1539/1917

Books finished: 4

First things first, no, unfortunately I did not end up buying anything from the book store. Here's the thing, about used book stores in beach towns: the books people trade in are, by and large, beach reads. The walls were head-to-toe authors like James Patterson and Nora Roberts, people who have written fifty of the same book for older people to devour in their beach chairs. And like, I'm sure you can find plenty of these writers in any used book store, but it felt extreme here. There was just very little that appealed to me in any way - there were a few possible gems hidden around, but nothing that really called to me. I'll leave those for other vacationers with similar tastes to find. (The store did also have a small section for new books but they were mostly the same popular books that are front-and-center everywhere, nothing I needed.)

Anyway. As for my reading today, I started my last two books! One of them is Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, which was my Book of the Month pick last month. It's a literary fiction novel about Death, but if he was an unremarkable British man. It's a very short book, and since I’m already nearly halfway through I might actually be finished with it tomorrow! It's really gorgeously written, and very emotional, as I'm sure you can imagine. Its use of extended metaphor and juxtaposition is inspiring, and I feel like I should keep the idea of literary devices in mind when assessing the book, because I think I might be taking it all too literally. I keep thinking, "He's Death, there's no way he would be able to take this much time with each dying person, there's no way he would be able to dick around with his neighbors so much, he has so much to do,” but I don't think it's supposed to be so literal.

My final read of the week is called Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous. It is a cozy fantasy book about a reformed cultist trying to make a new life in the countryside, and it unfortunately might be my first dud this week. The writing is everything I hate: overly explanatory and lacking in subtext, with characters who never say anything but what they really mean, and too many descriptions of things I don’t care about, like what every meal tastes like or what every character is wearing. The story is cute enough and deals with some interesting themes, like healing trauma and the lines between villain and victim, hero and oppressor. I will be continuing with it, I’m just nowhere near as blown away yet as I have been with every other read this week, which all have impressed or surprised me in one way or another. Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous still has the chance to do that, and I definitely won’t make the same mistake I made with cozy fantasy that I did with romance and write off the entire genre for one poorly written book. My TBR already says otherwise!

This is the first book I’ve ever bought with sprayed edges, and I will always treasure it for that.