Murchie Plus Books: October 2nd to 8th

The premise: I make my patient little dog pose with every book I read, barring single-issue comics.

The photos: go live on Instagram as I edit them and appear here in digest form every Sunday, with descriptive alt tags and additional commentary.

Not pictured: less X-Men than I would've liked. It was another create-not-consume week, and I had to focus on prose fiction on account of due dates.

I had to finish THE OBELISK GATE [Amazon] by Thursday since a bunch of other people with good taste had requested it, so I busted my arse and read it in three days even though I'm still firmly in a create-not-consume mood. (Turns out, finishing those writing projects freed up brain space for visual art, not for reading.) Or three and a bit days, rather, because despite my best efforts I could not stay awake long enough to read the last forty pages on Wednesday night.

When I settled in to finish it the next morning I realized there were only fifteen pages of actual story left. The rest were appendices.

I could've read fifteen pages easy.

Anyways, I had a weird trajectory with this one. It took me a little bit to sink back into it, followed by a period where I loved it with all my soul, followed by regular strength love through to the grand finale. And since endings mean everything to me, I'm afraid I've settled into regular strength loving it. I feel like this may change when I reread it in advance of the third volume.

Three things: the contrast between Essun's feeling for Nassun and Nassun's impression of Essun hit me hard; the shifting narrative tensions strike me as distinctly and deliberately tectonic, which delights me; I was right about the narrator's identity because I'm the best at guessing.

Alas, my excitement over ANGELS' BLOOD by Nalini Singh fizzled into disinterest and frustration (as discussed further in the comments at the link). I was so grumpy over it that it took me several days to start another audiobook, even though I've been looking forward to SHATTERED for ages.

SHATTERED [Amazon | Scribd Audio], as you may recall, is the seventh Iron Druid novel and the first volume in the catch-up part of my epic reread/catch-up. I'm not as far in as I'd like, with many thanks to that long-ass break, but so far it's a ton of fun. Arla, the new wolfhound whose name I may be spelling wrong, is frickin' adorable. I'm thrilled Granuaile's got a major storyline, too, and that Hearne has decided to stick with present tense for her POV segments. (I forgot to mention the tense shifts during HUNTED. Y'all know how much tense shifts bother me.) I expect my listening time to be at a premium now autumn has set in and I can't walk as much as I usually do, but I'll try to carve out some more time with the book as this week begins.

I started to write a list of three things about SEX CRIMINALS VOLUME 3 [Amazon | comiXology]. Because this is the third volume? And Fraction and Zdarsky clearly like the whole "numbers relevant to series order" thing?

Trouble was, it quickly turned into a list of 10 things and around 400 words, with more to come.

So I'm gonna save that list for its own post, okay? Get a (sorta) proper review up for once. For now, here's the caption I wrote for the photo you see above:

Murchie wonders how he ended up living with someone cruel enough to prop a (lightweight) copy of SEX CRIMINALS VOL 3 up against his barrel so they could take his picture with it. He wishes he could identify the choice that led to this moment, then travel back in time and unmake it.

Poor little soul.

His person is too busy laughing at this awesome comic to contemplate his emotional turmoil; and so his sorrow grows.

(It really is an awesome comic. Hence the word vomit.)

I'm also gonna review HER NAUGHTY HOLIDAY by Tiffany Reisz [Amazon] in a post of its very own instead of word vomiting here, right now, this very day! For now, I'll just tell you I laughed my way through the whole thing. Tiffany Reisz has gotta be the funniest romance writer out there.

I'm about a quarter of the way into L. Penelope's ANGELBORN [Amazon| Scribd] as I write this, and I'm pretty sure I'll have finished it by the time you read this. I fell in love with Penelope's style in SONG OF BLOOD AND STONE, the first book in her secondary world series, so I didn't hesitate to spend a Scribd credit on this contemporary fantasy about a girl who sees ghosts and a half-angel boy who's escaped from the afterlife. It reminds me a little of THE SIREN by Kiera Cass, less for the content than for the tone, and I look forward to wallowing it as soon as I've crossed everything off my to-do list.

Next week: some Sabaa Tahir. Probably another contemporary romance, too, and perhaps something else from Scribd. I've gotta use two more credits by the 15th so I don't lose them.