Dorothy Marley's Journal

Ebooks:

Copper Script by K J Charles
The usual well-plotted historical romance/mystery from Charles. Set in 1924, the fantasy element is that Joel, gay and a WWI veteran who's lost his dominant hand, makes a living as a handwriting expert but his uncanny success at assessing the personality and state of mind of writers is a paranormal gift. Aaron is a closeted detective in the London force and their chance encounter and subsequent work together uncovers a serious enemy. I liked that the tension built so that everything seemed insoluble (to the more uptight Aaron) but was eventually deftly resolved by the other two less-conventional protagonists. An entertaining read.

I had less luck with the other ebooks I tried.

Angelfall (book 1 of 3) by Susan Ee
A YA series from 10 years ago that had mostly rave reviews. It's post-apocalyptic, centered on the protagonist Penrhyn, a 17 y.o. girl who, yes, is a bit of a Special Girl. No overt powers but her mother, who has paranoid schizophrenia, paid for her to have extensive martial arts training, like you do when you have a major mental disorder. I could have put up with that nonsense as Penrhyn's nicely feisty, but there were three big problems. 1. The worldbuilding was crap. The apocalypse was 2 months earlier and "the world as we know it" has been comprehensively trashed by destructive, homicidal angels. Yes, as in archangels etc., with wings and swords. There's a vague reference to "the asteroids and the fires" to account for the extreme infrastructure damage to cities and bridges, but no real attempt at making the cracky premise work. And the angels are very much extrapolated from Judeo-Christian myth (unfair to the non-Christian world) which mythology makes no sense at the best of times so good luck basing your worldbuilding on it! No explanation was given for the angelic vendetta on humanity (I gather a bit more emerges later, but I was past caring). We're told that only Gabriel knew the plan and human weapons killed him early on, so now no one knows. 2. The romance was bothersomely Twilighty with Raphael, an ancient (and beautiful and built) demigod angel thrown into travelling with Penrhyn, and clear hints of attraction developing. It felt like an adolescent girl's daddy fantasy with no depth or coherent structure. (Ee is not an adolescent.) 3. The latter part of the book suddenly switched from gritty survival in the ruins to a bizarre infiltration of the angelic HQ in a luxury San Francisco hotel filled with desperate human women slinkily dressed and made up to the nines, fawning over tuxedoed clubbing angels like a mobster's wet dream. And then it takes another sharp turn into horror, and finally into a dramatic and improbable rescue. Nope.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman
Another post-apocalyptic series but the action rapidly moves to an underground dungeon maze as in similar games. Full of typical gaming detail and you need to be at least a bit of a gamer to enjoy this. I'm not, so DNF.

Audiobooks (read by the author):

On the Hippie Trail by Rick Steves
Interesting enough, and nostalgic for me as I did the big OE and travelled from NZ to Kathmandu at about the same time as Steves ended up there in the mid 70s (although he did what we used to call "the overland", from Istanbul to Nepal, before various wars erupted and made that impossible). I found it reasonably engaging but although there were occasional attempts at deeper thinking about white privilege, the issue of beggars, travelling vs tourism, and other interesting subjects, he didn't give these much space and it was mostly a travelogue and sometimes a little casually dismissive of the local people who were struggling to get by and didn't actually owe Steves friendship or generosity. Comes with access to a pdf with lots of photos he took, which is a nice bonus.

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green
A fascinating, horrifying, and engaging deep dive into the history of TB and how it's ravaged humanity, and how it continues to do so in those parts of the world that can't afford the inflated prices of Big Pharma. There were many fascinating revelations, such as that the skinny model look Western women are supposed to aspire to partly stems from C19th TB chic when getting thin and dying became romantic (and was also hard to avoid). Green gets angrier as the book progresses about the fact that TB killed/kills many AIDS sufferers and is still a terrible disease in poorer countries while the West does very little (Trump of course cut funding recently, e.g. to the Apopo programme where rats sniff out infected samples with amazing accuracy). The rise of resistant TB is also daunting, and Green lays it all out clearly and with passion. A great read, although the issue does seem to have gripped Green in a somewhat obsessive manner.

Paper Towns by John Green
Fiction, from a run of YA novels that preceded his current focus on TB. It felt a bit similar to Looking for Alaska, which I listened to a few months back, in that it focuses on a somewhat anxious and socially sidelined young man, Quentin, at the end of high school/start of college who's obsessed with a mysterious girl. In this case his beautiful neighbour, a somewhat "manic pixie dream girl" of a young woman who's superficially one of the cool kids, but who runs away leaving clues which he frets away at for the bulk of the book. It's set in Orlando, Florida, and Quentin has an engaging friend-group although initially all male (they're not great at achieving girlfriends and in Ben's case I can see why - he calls all women honeybunnies; even his girlfriend refers to him as "a challenge"). Much of Quentin's detective fretting revolves around a dog-eared copy of Whitman's Song of Myself, and the book partly explores the barrenness of the USA suburban subculture and physical environment, set in unreal theme parks and abandoned subdivisions - the paper towns of the title, although that also refers to unreal, multi-faced people. Interesting, but a bit slow and neurotic. Green's been open about having OCD and there are hints of obsession in these YA books, and in his new TB focus.

Physical library books:

Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
I liked his first book Moon of the Crusted Snow a lot more, maybe as it was immediately post-apocalyptic so there was more change and drama. In this sequel (which has solely been available as a physical book way longer than seems usual) an exploratory party from the tribe go south to find the ancestral lands by Lake Huron the government forced them to move from. They're surviving in the colder north 12 years after the ?EMP and civilisation's collapse, but barely, and game is getting scarce. They have the expected encounter with evil white survivalist cult dudes, but most of the book is lower key travelling, and there was a lot of untranslated Anishinaabe language that I had to skim. The ending also seemed a bit too happily-ever-afterish to ring true. I got through the book, but it didn't grab me.

Once More With Feeling by Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton.
A non-fiction account of their attempt to make a porn film after they stumbled into a job reviewing porn movies in their youths and decided they could definitely do it better. I DNF'd I'm afraid - I'm just hopeless at reading physical texts these days. My eyesight is worse at night which is usually when I read, and I can't read them in bed. I was enjoying this amusing tale, and if it was an audiobook I'd have mainlined it for sure. Unfortunately, as an older text, it's not even an ebook. Recommended if you still read physical books.