Murchie Plus Books: July 26th to August 1st

The premise: I love my dog. I love books. I bring the two together by photographing my dog with every book I read, barring the digital comics I read in single issue form.

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

Not pictured: Marvel Unlimited added new-to-me issues of UNCANNY X-MEN and ALL-NEW X-MEN, so I started the week with those. UNCANNY wrapped up a story arc, while ANX started something new.

I also finished SHE-HULK, which delighted me. There's this part where Jennifer Walters attempts to get a case dismissed because her client came back from the dead and his post-mortem self shouldn't be liable for his pre-mortem crimes. Given how nobody in superhero comics ever stays dead (except Uncle Ben, and probably Wolverine¹), you'd think superhuman law would've addressed this already.

LOOK AT THAT EAR. JUST LOOK AT IT.

Ahem.

THE VIRTU took me a lot longer to finish than it should've done. I don't know what's wrong with my reading speed right now, but I can't seem to read even beloved books at a decent pace. It's like the Book Gods decided my maximum daily limit was a firm and infrequent 125 pages, which sucks.

I needed a fast book to break to cycle, and luckily the library thrust C.S. Pacat's CAPTIVE PRINCE upon me at just the right time. It was fast and it was absorbing and I'm glad I had it on hand.

Several of y'all have asked me what I thought of it. In the main, I enjoyed it very much. It's a fast read and an absorbing one with plenty to hold the reader's attention, including some interesting worldbuilding. I'm always glad to see worlds with normalized queer relationships. The people of Vere take it even further: they consider bastard children such a terrible taboo that everyone sticks to homosexual sex before marriage. If you're not interested in people of your own gender, you keep your mouth shut about it until such time as you're in a heterosexual union.

The problem is, the people whose actions we're privy to (which: courtiers) don't rut with each other. They rut with slaves. It's not a BDSM thing; none of these slaves are submissives there of their own accord, meaning none of them can consent to anything that's done to them. And there's little to no indication that anyone other than the main character, who is himself enslaved, wants to change this.

And even in Damen's case, it's not that he wants to eliminate sex slaves, it's that he wants sex slavery to be more like it is in his own country, where all the slaves are basically brainwashed into loving their station.

I enjoyed the book very much, but I'd have had to turn off the anti-slavery part of my brain in order to love it. And there's no way in hell I'm ever doing that.

I'll certainly read the next one, though I hope there's markedly less in the way of, "Yeah, sex slavery isn't great here, but it's okay in other countries."

Friends have been telling me to read Franny Billingsley's CHIME for years and years. I finally listened to them, and I wish I'd done it a hell of a lot sooner because OMG.

I've outlined a review that'll probably go live around the end of the month, so I'll curb my verbosity today and just tell y'all it's made me realize The Perversion of the Self is 2015's Accidental Reading Theme.

I need to highlight Susan Duerden, too, because her narration is fabulous. I remain a total sucker for a good audio performance.

Mopey Murchie helped me read a couple more volumes of FRUITS BASKET last week, and he intends to stick close to me while I attempt to read the rest this long weekend.

The plot starts a-rollin' from volume 4 onwards, and it looks set to be a doozy. I loved so many of the revelations herein, from Momiji's relationship with his parents to Yuki's elder brother's flamboyant ways to Tohru's mother's profession. It's been killing me how I can't just wallow in the series, so I'm going to do just that today.

Unless something comes up, as things so often do.

Again, pretty well everyone I know has been raving about STATION ELEVEN since it came out, but it took me for bloody ever to get to it. (Do y'all sense a theme here? Maybe even an essential character trait?) And holy fuck, but I was desperately in love with it by chapter 7. Maybe a bit before that. It's tough to pinpoint these things when you're super-duper absorbed, you know?

I'm a little less than two thirds of the way through it as I write this, and I'm still utterly in love with the layers and theatre angle and the fact that there's a comic at the heart of the story. If the fans among you had led with the comic, I'd have read this months ago.

The narrator struck me as a tad flat at first, but either I'm getting used to her inflection or she's upped her game since the early chapters. She's still delivering more of a reading than a performance, but it's a pretty good reading.

I finished CAPTIVE PRINCE lickety split, then started THE PHILOSOPHER KINGS by Jo Walton. I really should've read it a month ago, seeing as how it was one of my most anticipated books of 2015 and I received an advance copy and it came out just in time for my birthday, but it took me so long to get to it that my slow-ass library had a paper copy through processing and in my hands by the time I could slot it in.

That's bad, y'all. I am properly ashamed of myself.

And then my reading mojo died an ignoble death, even though the book is awesome so far. It's got me thinking all sorts of thoughts about religion, which is one of my favourite things to think about even though it can also be quite a scary topic.

I hope I'll have a review for you on Tuesday. If that doesn't pan out, look for it next Tuesday.

Next week: THE MIRADOR, for real this time. (Damn my absent reading mojo.) Possibly FOOL'S QUEST, too, since the release date is fast approaching and I've been having terrible Robin Hobb cravings. Maybe some more FRUITS BASKET if the library can oblige me.

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1. It's important to fact-check these things, so I googled "is wolverine still dead" and found AN ENTIRE WEBSITE devoted to informing people whether or not Wolverine has followed the established superheroic tradition and come back from the dead.

   I laughed for five solid minutes and gave myself one hell of a coughing fit. I also hurt my hands because I was clapping so hard.