reading Wednesday includes a lot of rereading

I generally do a lot of reading when I visit rysmiel, because the bus trip is more than six hours not counting time at the border crossing; this time I also had a day to myself, which involved more reading as well as shopping for chocolate.

This is brief, and slightly out of temporal order.

I finished Jonathan Cabal, the Necromancer, by Jonathan L. Howard, which is weird but good. (I'd had the ebook from the library long enough that I refrained from syncing my kindle for a couple of days. ) This is something rysmiel recommended, and first in a series; I should see if the library has the next one.

Then I reread Seanan McGuire's Discount Armageddon (the first book in her InCryptid series, fast-moving weirdness) and read her Wayward Children novella "In an Absent Dream." The portal world in that one is called Goblin Market, and seems better-constructed than the all-sugar one, and I found the narrator more interesting. Later in the trip I reread Midnight Blue-Light Special, the second Incryptid novel.)

I finished the trip up with tkingfisher's collection Toad Words and Other Stories, which is very good; I particularly liked the title story. A couple of days later, I read her book Swordheart, which is (very loosely) a romance between a middle-aged widow and the warrior who inhabits the magic sword she is surprised to inherit. She discovers the magic by accident, in trying to use the sword to kill herself as the only way she can see to thwart the rapacious relatives who want the rest of her inheritance. They flee the city instead, and have adventures while each being sure the other can't possibly be interested in them. It being a Kingfisher book, the adventures include some interesting non-humans, ranging from gnoles, who are basically people, to dangerous and likely non-sentient monsters.

Then I decided to rest my eyes by reading something on paper, and picked Rex Stout's Three at Wolfe's Door off rysmiel's shelf to reread. The stories here hold up reasonably well; Archie's narrative voice is less sexist, and more respectful of the female characters, than in some of these books.

For the trip back I reread truepenny (writing as Katherine Addison)'s The Goblin Emperor, because I wanted something with that basically hopeful/comforting tone, after dipping into two different short story collections, and hitting things that were harsher than I wanted to deal with in both. (Neither book is bad, and I will probably go back to both.)