romance novels & monkey kings
Jan. 21st, 2020 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thanateReading some romance novels based on recommendations in the aftermath of the RWA fiasco* and I am finding that things where I already know a bunch about the setting (English Regency, turn-of-the-last-century America) don't mess with my writing brain as much. Presumably because I'm not handling worldbuilding cues from two directions? I'm not sure. Unfortunately, the next one I have looks like fun if I can get past the scene setting, but one of the reasons I read fantasy is that it's not about broke grad students despairing over crappy lives & exploitive postdocs...
What definitely was fun was The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, which I know had turned up on several people's recommendation lists, but I hadn't gotten around to it previously because nobody said it was a monkey king & fun with the Chinese pantheon book. Although I find that my brain defaults to Hanuman as *the* monkey king, who I know made it as far as Thailand since my mother has a Thai doll of him dancing with the mermaid queen, and now I want to know if there are any stories (myth or modern) with both Hanuman & Sun Wukong, and how badly they would get along.
I also quite enjoyed Molly Brooks's Sanity & Tallulah books, which I thought I was getting to read to the Megatherium, but then flew through by myself & will get them back out for her when she can handle them herself so I don't have to read small print 3-color comics out loud. Midgrade comics of 12YO besties having crazy mad science adventures on their space station & related. Fun! :)
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*For those who don't pay attention to writing associations, there was big dramatic kerfluffle in which the ethics committee got blindsided by a secret sub-committee & last I heard most of the non-creepy-racist parts of the management resigned.
What definitely was fun was The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, which I know had turned up on several people's recommendation lists, but I hadn't gotten around to it previously because nobody said it was a monkey king & fun with the Chinese pantheon book. Although I find that my brain defaults to Hanuman as *the* monkey king, who I know made it as far as Thailand since my mother has a Thai doll of him dancing with the mermaid queen, and now I want to know if there are any stories (myth or modern) with both Hanuman & Sun Wukong, and how badly they would get along.
I also quite enjoyed Molly Brooks's Sanity & Tallulah books, which I thought I was getting to read to the Megatherium, but then flew through by myself & will get them back out for her when she can handle them herself so I don't have to read small print 3-color comics out loud. Midgrade comics of 12YO besties having crazy mad science adventures on their space station & related. Fun! :)
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*For those who don't pay attention to writing associations, there was big dramatic kerfluffle in which the ethics committee got blindsided by a secret sub-committee & last I heard most of the non-creepy-racist parts of the management resigned.