Books

[wolffyluna]

Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish vol. 1 by Xue Shan Fei Hu

Li Yu falls asleep reading a web novel, and wakes up in the body of a carp getting prepared to be soup. He quickly finds out that he has a system that wants him to be the pet of the web novel's tyrannical protagonist and improve his personality. ...while he is a pet fish.

This took a little while to get it's legs, but once it got it's legs, it was really quite funny. It knows how to milk the humour of problem solving as a fish, conversations between two mute protagonists, the identity shenanigans you can only get with shape shifting, and locked room ~~mysteries~~ fishteries.

I am planning to read the rest of the volumes once I work through the other first volume danmei I bought.

The Powers and the Thrones by Dan Jones

A broad overview of Medieval Europe, written for a lay audience.

I have mixed feelings about this one. On the hand holding the good things about it, it is as far as I can tell accurate, and goes into detail about events that other overviews of Medieval Europe I've read don't (how exactly the Western Roman Empire fell, what the hell the German Peasant's War was.) It's quite readable too!

The problem is. [deep breath.] Jones keeps self consciously drawing analogies to modern things. And sometimes this is clunky but fine, like when he says chansons de gestes were like superhero movies (ie really common and popular.) But sometimes the analogies hurt my soul. Such as 'Martin Luther went #viral' and 'a particular failed arranged marriage was like the two state solution.' (The latter hurt me the worst, because it gave me the worst mental image.)

So. Yeah. Mixed feelings.