It's a magical world

What I'm Reading
A.S. King, Glory O'Brien's History of the Future - Still, yes. I'm increasingly annoyed that the horrible future Glory sees is just an update of The Handmaid's Tale for the 2010s, and increasingly irritated at people who write first person narratives that are horribly undescriptive of everything in the book including the characters. John Green, who blurbed this book, is clearly a pernicious idiot.

Natsume Soseki, Kokoro - "Everyone loves Kokoro," my advisor told me. "Except maybe you." My expectations are low.

What I've Read
C.S. Pacat, Captive Prince and Prince's Gambit - These books are so good, and Pacat subverts so many tropes, I love them so much, you should read them, the end.

Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings - Someone on tumblr remarked that these books are similar to Pacat's, and I devoured three of them on my plane back from Japan, and that tumblr person was right. I'm not sure I'll be able to take it if there's never a fifth one. If you haven't read them, you should read them, but start with the first one, The Thief, and don't read the backs of any of them. They are amazing.

Fran Wilde, Updraft - All the reviews say the worldbuilding is interesting but the plot and characters are predictable and paper-thin, respectively. All the reviews are right. I don't plan to read any of Wilde's future books; I for one didn't find the worldbuilding interesting so much as frustrating. They live in bone towers! Cool! BONE TOWERS OF WHAT?? NO ONE KNOWS OR CARES. ARGH.

Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Kiss - Yes, this is the third book in a trilogy, no, I haven't read the first two. I liked Rutkoski's Cabinet of Wonders books quite a lot, and while this story seems more ambitious I'm not sure I was sold on it. On the other hand I stayed up til 2am and read it in four hours, so.

What I'll Read Next
Hopefully something I actually enjoy.

Rutkoski, Marie. The Celestial Globe. New York: Farrar Strauss & Girroux, 2010.

So I really liked the first book about Petra Kronos, The Cabinet of Wonders, and I think I actually liked this the second book even more. Thanks again to shveta_writes for recommending them to me!

Petra and Neel's accomplishments in the first book are revealed to have in fact made their families' situations far more precarious; Roma in Bohemia are being rounded up and imprisoned on the orders of Prince Rodolfo, and Petra's cousins only just manage to flee to the south of the realm before the prince's foulest servants, the Gristleki or Grey Men, come for her and her father. In the confusion of their attack Petra is separated from her father and brought to London by her erstwhile protector John Dee, while her friend Tomik stumbles onto the seacoast of Bohemia ( no, I'm not kidding )