Murchie Plus Books: April 26th to May 2nd

The premise: I love my dog. I love books. I bring the two together by posing my tiny and adorable dog beside every book I read, barring the digital comics I get through Marvel Unlimited.

The photos: go live on Instagram as I edit them and appear here in digest form every Sunday.

Not pictured: I finally finished WINTER'S HEART! Hurray! It took me nearly two weeks, despite how much I enjoyed it. That's far, far too long and I am decidedly grumpy about it.

I also hunkered down and finished Ysabeau S. Wilce's Califa collection, PROPHECIES, LIBELS, & DREAMS. It kept me occupied until late yesterday afternoon, which is why you shan't see any new prose fiction below.

On the Marvel Unlimited front, I dove into Charles Soule's INHUMAN. It was a bit of an uneven start so far as my overall engagement went, but there's some solid potential here and I'm pretty committed to the Inhumans overall, so I'm eager to see where Soule takes all this.

I also read another arc's worth of NOVA issues. I'm still having a great time with this new series, though Sam Alexander ain't Richard Rider.

Speaking of which...

I also caught up on the few comics I read whenever a new issue hits Marvel Unlimited: ALL-NEW X-MEN, UNCANNY X-MEN, and GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. The latter finally finished its Cancerverse Answers arc¹ (which is the whole reason I started reading it by issue; I had to know), and the whole way through I was like, "I'm okay. I'm fine. This won't hit me the way I want it to, but I've made peace with that. I'm completely cool."

Then I got the final Cancerverse Answer and I was not cool. Not even a little bit.

I also realized I need to write something about Nova because I love him an awful lot.

But anyways: on to Murchie-cake.

Murchie's sure getting shaggy. We're at the point where I have to push the hair out of his eyes before I have any hope of a halfway decent picture.

This annoys him, especially when he's trying to sleep. It's hard, being a tiny dog.

I'm still reading SKIP BEAT. The way things are going, I intend to be reading SKIP BEAT for a long, long time (or at least until I run out of English translations). Murchie appears here with an omnibus containing volumes 10 through 12. I ripped through it in pretty well no time because it was awesome. Volumes 11 and 12 were 4.5-star reads, and y'all know how picky I am.

With this to spur me on, I leaped right into the next omnibus, which contained volumes 13, 14, and 15. Murchie thought he could hide behind it and thus avoid having his picture taken, but he wasn't quite small enough.

I'm so in love with this series, y'all. I'm going to write about it as soon as I've burned through as many volumes as my library can give me, then I'm going to write about it. There'll be squeeing and ALL CAPSING and maybe even some gifs if I can find the energy.

Like, I've even got a ship for this series. I try my damnedest not to ship characters because it makes me giggly and irrational and inclined to accept stuff I should find Completely Unacceptable And Not At All Healthy, but sometimes the shipping compulsion sneaks up on me.

Now here we are.

The rational part of my brain is like, "I don't particularly mind who Kyoko ends up with. She's a independent character who's gotten along just fine without a romance in her life, and the most important thing is that she continues to grow as a person and as an actor."

Meanwhile, the giggly and irrational part of my brain is like, "Her and Ren are gonna get together. Right? Right? They have to. Sho's not even a possibility. IT SHOULD TOTALLY BE REN."

I mean, Kyoko and Ren are actively trying not to fall in love with one another. I have a total thing for characters who actively try not to fall in love with one another.

I'll expand on that once I sit down to write something substantive about the series. There may be TEARS OF BLOOD if Kyoko and Ren do not, in fact, end up together, or if they get together and break up. (Horrors!)

I know some of y'all have read it already, so don't tell me anything. Please.

Also? I'd very much like Reino to die a terrible death. If this were DEATH NOTE, I could count on it; but alas, SKIP BEAT doesn't so much go in for that sort of thing.

SKIP BEAT and the two prose thingies I'd already started took most of my readerly energy last week, but I managed to squeeze one more comic in yesterday morning. Murchie and I settled in outside, where he sniffed everything and I read TOMBOY, Liz Prince's memoir of growing up as a girl who performs her gender in what society consider a masculine way. It was pretty great. I may write about it in more detail at some point because Prince and I are very close in age and a lot of her experiences really resonated with me. We'll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

Next week: possibly the next volume of The Wheel of Time? I feel like I've built up some momentum there and I want to ride it as long as I can. I may also reread Ysabeau S. Wilce's FLORA SEGUNDA since her short story collection left me hungry for more Califa.

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1. NB: it's entirely possible I'm the only one who's calling this the Cancerverse Answers arc.