Fiction: Still Life With Murder by P.B. Ryan – First in the Nell Sweeney series, it’s a historical mystery set in Gilded Age Boston. The heroine has a terrible past and so does the man accused of murder, whom it isn’t a huge spoiler to say isn’t guilty, because he turns up in all the rest of the books in the series (I checked). Also, he is Strangely Attractive, so it’s clear he’s a potential unwise romantic interest for the heroine. It was fairly entertaining.
Nonfiction: I read a whole array of journal articles on The Great Game for a World Fantasy panel I was assigned at the last minute, but I didn’t make any written notes in my log, alas.
Aspects of the Novel, a series of lectures by E.M. Forster – I think I must have gotten it from a free box somewhere, or very cheaply in a used bookstore; it’s been on my shelf for a long time, and I am hoping to give it away when I’m done reading it. It is just engaging enough for late night/early morning reading, and is in nice digestible chunks. There was a bit about the essential unknowability of other people that I liked; Forster pointed out that in novels, we can know everything important about a person, which gives a nice sense that we are somehow in control of things.
Fanfiction: United States v. Barnes, 617 F. Supp. 2d 143 (D.D.C. 2015) by fallingvoices and radialarch [MCU Captain America] is for those of you who enjoy meta-ish angst; it focuses on the Winter Soldier being on trial. I say -ish because the only meta part is that there are snippets of tweets between the court reports and articles and texts between characters, and those tweets are so very much what we the fans reading are thinking. I really like this kind of story – I’ve seen several of them for Captain America, playing off the idea that there would be decades of history and discussion about him while he was frozen in the ice. AO3 summary: The Associated Press @AP Winter Soldier set to stand trial for Washington D.C. massacre and treason apne.ws/1og6SWE.
