Tag: droll-wit-humor

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Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann

Leonie Swann Three Bags Full

August was supposed to be Women in Translation month. So I turned to Leonie Swann’s Three Bags Full, a book translated from German to English (thanks to BookWyrm Knits for telling me that).

Three Bags Full is apparently one of those books where nothing bad happens to our main characters — at least that’s what the commenters said on this Tor post by Jo Walton. The book happens to be about a flock of sheep playing detective. I was easy prey because I’m all for light, breezy reads right now (still going through a reading slump!).

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Books

My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton & Jodi Meadows

My Lady Jane

My Lady Jane! A better title would have been Teens Messing with Henry VIII’s Succession Plans. Lady Jane Grey is a rather tragic figure in English history: ruled England for only 9 days before she was beheaded by her cousin Mary Tudor in the Tower of London. (And then Mary was overthrown by her half-sister Queen Elizabeth.)

The authors decided to give this an alternative history spin, with magic and humor. This is how the succession feud should have gone on. The split between the Roman Catholic Church and Church of England became the split between Eðians (people with shapeshifter abilities) and the non-Eðians.

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Books Miscellany Music & Poetry Watchlist

Monthly Wrap-Up: May 2021

May 2021 was a slow reading month for me. I blogged much more than I read, which was unusual, but all thanks to the wonderful Wyrd And Wonder challenge. The link has all the posts for that challenge, most of these being SFF rec lists, but one standout read was Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi.

Aside from that, here’s a wrap-up for the month.

Lang Leav’s The Universe of Us

A very short book, with poems of varying length. These are all love/ heartbreak poems, but I think we can view them from a non-romantic lens too. I’m sure we’ve all had friends and loved ones with whom we had a parting, Lang’s poetry would ring true for those relationships as well. Rating: B–

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Books Starred Recommendations

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold

Captain Vorpatril's Alliance

Book: Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (Series: Vorkosigan Saga)
Published: November 2012 (Baen Books)
Audiobook Narrator: Grover Gardner (Blackstone Audio)
Genre/ Trope: Space Opera, Humor, Meet the Family
Rating: 9 of 10 / Highly Recommended

A perfect feel-good read for a lazy summer afternoon! I was chortling my way through this book about Captain Ivan Vorpatril, a rather laidback bureaucrat in the intergalactic Barrayaran Empire. The good news is that the book can be read as a standalone, and is a very good gateway into science fiction.

Ivan Vorpatril is the scion of a powerful political family in Barrayar, but he isn’t very ambitious. He would just rather stick on at his comfortable government job and enjoy his bachelor’s life. His meddlesome cousin Byerly asks him for a favor to check-in on two immigrant women living under fake identities — and poor Ivan can say goodbye to his uneventful life!

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Books Memes Starred Recommendations

Ten Favorite Funny Books

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by Jana over at That Artsy Reader Girl. Every Tuesday, you pick ten books on that week’s topic. And this week, we spotlight our ten favorite funny books. In no order of priority, here they are!

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Books Starred Recommendations

Princess Floralinda & the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

Princess Floralinda & the Forty Flight Tower
Amazon

Tamsyn Muir is better known for her Gideon the Ninth, winner of the 2020 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Princess Floralinda & the Forty-Flight Tower is a novella in a very different universe, and is just absolutely wonderful.

A witch has locked up Princess Floralinda on the 40th floor of a tower. Floralinda now just has to sit there patiently till a prince comes along to rescue her. Except to do that, he has to battle out a monster on each of the 39 intervening floors, starting with the diamond-scaled dragon on Flight One. Floralinda agrees to wait.

And waits. And waits …

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Miscellany

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin

Read for the Cloak & Dagger 2021 Challenge: Book 3 & the Historical Fiction 2021 Challenge: Book 5

Humor is a subjective thing, especially when it’s of the droll, dry wit variety. The Moving Toyshop came highly recommended on the Funny + mystery lists out there – and so I picked it up with high expectations.

The Plot:

Richard Cadogan, poet, comes down to Oxford for a trip, finds a desolate toyshop with a murdered corpse, and gets bludgeoned on the head. When he wakes up, the corpse is gone, and overnight, the toyshop has turned into a grocery shop. No one will believe Richard – except Gervase Fen. And Fen only believes Richard because the murderer seems to be using Edward Lear’s poetry (of which I’m a huge fan) to kill off people. You see, Fen is a Professor of Literature at Oxford.

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Books

Behold, Here’s Poison by Georgette Heyer

Behold, Here’s Poison is a good example of how difficult it must have been to investigate back in the 1920s. There were no CCTVs, camera phones, voice recognition, or DNA analysis. Even fingerprinting really just started in 1901. All the police had: post-mortem (never as sophisticated as forensics today), witnesses (mostly unreliable), and criminal psychology (quite dodgy). There’s also a certain disdain towards police among the upper classes, which makes it difficult to make honest inquiries.

That’s why Inspector Hannasyde and his very-chatty Sergeant Hemingway are in a bit of a pickle. Old Mr. Matthews has been poisoned by nicotine overdose, and his entire remaining family is suspect. Then his sister dies, also by nicotine poisoning, and the police none the wiser. The Inspector knows that Randall, the extremely snarky dandy heir to Matthews, is hiding something. But Randall just won’t spill the beans.

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