January 25: Tales from Perach (reread) by Shira Glassman, because something that happened in A Harvest of Ripe Figs made something in one of the stories much clearer.
January 25: A Harvest of Ripe Figs by Shira Glassman. I bought the two Mangoverse books I didn’t have yet and don’t want to stop after The Second Mango. I like it when queens do their own detective work!
January 25: The Second Mango by Shira Glassman, as unicorn[1] chaser for Artists in Crime. It’s the first, and that shows, it doesn’t have the easy swing of the others yet, but full of nice people (and a couple of nasty people who are Dealt With). I’m reading it as a prequel but that works perfectly because it’s got large flashbacks itself.
[1] No unicorn though, only a big not-quite-a-mare that can turn into a green dragon.
January 23: Artists in Crime by Ngaio Marsh. Seems to be one of the less irritating ones. Finished it, though it was hard going. I remember now why I stopped reading Ngaio Marsh: pretty much all the characters are annoying unpleasant people. And they smoke so much! I wish I’d counted from the beginning because I don’t want to go through it again to mark every time someone lights a cigarette. Long enough since previous reading that I didn’t remember whodunnit. It’s foreshadowed rather cunningly, though (never said she was a bad writer, just that her characters are unlikeable).
January 19: Mio, min Mio by Astrid Lindgren (in translation). Childhood favourite, still gives me all the feels (but I didn’t remember the genie at the beginning!).
January 19: Het spiegelkasteel by Paul Biegel (exists in English as The Looking-Glass Castle). Somewhat more symbolic and less plotty than I remembered, a magical mystery tour rather than a magical journey.
January 19: The third Shakespeare and Smythe, Much Ado About Murder. More of the same but hard to stop. I can’t read on in #4 though: Kobo has never heard of it, only of Simon Hawke’s Star Trek novels (the one I’ve got is rather military and that’s not what I want to read right now). Shakespeare and Smythe did get ever more splainy as I read on, and retreading the earlier books, so perhaps it’s all for the best.
Leave a Reply