Reading In/Out June 30

I read some stuff. Let's discuss.

OUT

The King in Yellow by Robert William Chambers - For Mothers' Day, I got a new purse with pictures of the spines of classic horror novels on it. I mentioned I had never heard of this one. A couple of weeks later, my Libro.fm advanced listener copies came in and this was one of them. I downloaded it. The next time I needed an audiobook, I started it. It is a collection of short stories in which the people who read The King in Yellow go insane. The King in Yellow is a play, and some lines are quoted in the stories or as prologues to the stories. It doesn't make much sense, which is probably why its readers run mad. Anyway, I finished this yesterday.

Mercury Raine: Ghost Broker by Sarah M. Eden - I took this with me to my doctor's appointment yesterday. By the time I left, I had read about 70% of it. Yes, it was a long appointment with a lot of waiting, but it's also a very short book. The setting is 19th Century England and most people have a ghost attached to them at birth. If you were born with an attachment, you must always have a ghost, but it doesn't have to be the same one. Mercury Raine was born with 20 attachments. Unfortunately, he was raised in an orphanage because no one wanted to adopt him and his 20 ghosts, although only he knows how many he actually has. Anyway, he is a ghost broker. He can facilitate a trade for people who would like to swap out last season's trending ghosts for a more fashionable one. This year, the fashion is for judgmental and rude ghosts. A Mrs. Huddleston turns up with her daughter who has a secret that makes her most unwilling to swap ghosts, but her current ghost knows who Mercury Raine really is and tells him others know and are looking for him. This is the first in a series that currently has four books, with a 5th one scheduled for publication in September. I finished it after dinner last night.

CONTINUING

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss - I am, of course, still plodding along in this one. I'm not quite halfway through it, still. Our boy has made it to University where he is making friends and enemies in equal measure.

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo - I don't think I've told you what this is about, yet. We are following two people in 1930s Malaysia. One is a young boy about 11 years old, who is trying to fulfill the dying wish of his employer. The man lost a finger in the jungle once. He wants the boy to find it and reunite it with him in the grave, within 49 days of his death, or he will be doomed to haunt the Earth for eternity. The other is a young woman who is learning the dressmaking trade, but moonlights as a dance hall girl to pay her mother's gambling debt. One of the men she dances with had the finger in his pocket. She took it. He died a few days later. She tried to give it to his widow, but she doesn't want it. I'm 40% through this one and at this point, the boy has the finger, he just has to get it to the grave. The girl is being pursued by a man with a strange face; she assumes it's because of the finger, but he keeps turning up and following her.

IN

Everyone in this Bank Is a Thief by Benjamin Stevenson - Man, I've waited for this for a long time! It finally came in. I checked it out today. I will start it on my lunch break. This will probably be my work book until the due date looms and I'm not quite done. Then I'll take it home and finish it off. That way I don't have to lug any of my hardcovers back and forth to work.

And that's it. There was more going on this weekend than I expected.