The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo

 This is one of my TBR recommendations. I remember when the Netflix adaptation came out, it looked interesting but I never got around to watching it. I managed to spend a week laid up with bronchitis. In that time I managed to read two books. The Ghost Bride was one of them.

The Ghost Bride is something between a work of historical fiction and a ghost story. Set in Malay in 1893, it explores a world and a culture that I almost entirely unfamiliar with. The protagonist Li Lan is the only child of a good family fallen on hard times. Her father endlessly mourns her mother who died when she was a child. As a result, he spends too much time smoking opium and not enough time attending to practical matters.

Beautiful young woman that she is, she's had almost no marriage offers and nothing is being done to remedy this when the powerful Lim family approaches her father with the idea of Li Lan being a ghost bride for their deceased son, Lim Tian Ching. Ghost brides were a real thing although always rare. The idea was that a young woman would be married to the deceased, live out her life with her in-laws as a widow, and then travel through the underworld with her husband when she dies. It was never a common practice and was generally done to placate a restless spirit so it's all more than a bit tragic. 

Li Lan, being in a tight spot without many options, considers the offer as she starts having vivid dreams of her potential husband. Ultimately, she gets pulled into the afterlife while her body lies in a coma and must unravel the mystery of Lim Tian Ching's death while helping a spirit government official, Er Liang, investigate corruption in the afterlife. It sounds pretty complicated, but it works well.

It was fun and I did get pretty wrapped up in the weird little romance going on. 

I've started watching the show on Netflix but I don't think I'll continue it. The book is just so much better!

March List

Seven books read and two books evaluated and dropped. All in all it's not a bad. Four books overall were from the random picks so it's good movement on the greater project. Five of them came off the urgent list including two of my three TBRs. I set a goal last month of knocking down my Urgent list and I did a good job making headway on that. 

 I'm reading overall less and I predicted that would happen but I don't think I realized how much less it was going to be. I spent about a week total trying to read the two dropped books. My other two Random Pick books were time sinks too. I started reading through the Settlement Cookbook in January and the David Mitchell book took well over a week too. Ryan has said (and he's right) that my impressive pacing has as much to do with what I read as it does with how much time I devote to reading. About 3/4's of the backlog is literary fiction and nonfiction of one sort or another. I can't read those at the same pace as the YA and the genre fiction. So I've reduced the total amount of time I'm spending reading and I've upped the time I'm spending on each book on average. At this rate, it's looking like my reduced goal of 100 books this year might end up being a stretch.

But that's ok. Maybe I'll get faster with the literary fiction.

For this month, I'd like to finish two books that I've been stuck in the middle of for a while: Volume 1 of Asimov's Complete Stories and the Gastro Obscura (which I actually started last year in the fall). I'm also going to start trying to make movement on some of the series by alternating series books with random books. 

Goal for March - Start knocking out the series

1. Complete Short Stories by Isaac Asimov (class prep)
1. Volume 1
2. Volume 2
2. Six of Crows Series by Leigh Bardugo
1. Six of Crows
2. Crooked Kingdom
3. Lidia's Mastering the Art of Italian Cuisine by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich (RP)
4. Flavia de Luce Series by Alan Bradley
1. I Am Half-Sick of Shadows
2. Speaking from Among the Bones
3. The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches
4. As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust
5. Thrice the Brindled Cat Hath Mew'd
6. The Grave's a Fine and Private Place
7. The Golden Tresses of the Dead
5. How to Bake Pi by Eugenia Cheng (RP)
6. The Inheritance of Orquidea Divina by Zoraida Cordova (Christmas Gift)
7. The Expanse Series by James S.A. Corey
1. Abaddon's Gate
2. Cibola Burn
3. Nemesis Games
4. Babylon's Ashes
5. Persepolis Rising
6. Tiamat's Wrath
7. Leviathan Falls
8. Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K. Dick (RP)
9. Desert Flower by Earis Dirie (RP)
10. Serge Storms Series by Tim Dorsey (RP)
1. Florida Roadkill
2. Hammerhead Ranch Motel
3. Orange Crush
4. Triggerfish Twist
5. The Stingray Shuffle
6. Cadillac Beach
7. Torpedo Juice
8. The Big Bamboo
9. Hurricane Punch
10. Atomic Lobster
11. Nuclear Jellyfish
12. Gator A-Go-Go
13. Electric Barracuda
14. When Elves Attack
15. Pineapple Grenade
16. The Riptide Ultra-Glide
17. Tiger Shrimp Tango
18. Shark Skin Suite
19. Coconut Cowboy
20. Clownfish Blues
21. The Pope of Palm Beach
22. No Sunscreen for the Dead
23. Naked Came the Florida Man
24. Tropic of Stupid
25. Mermaid Confidential
26. The Maltese Iguana
11. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (classic)
12. Symphony of Ages Series by Elizabeth Haydon (RP)
1. Rhapsody: Child of Blood
2. Prophecy: Child of Earth
3. Destiny: Child of the Sky
13. The Mindwar Trilogy by Andrew Klavan
1. Mindwar (Dropped for content reasons - it wasn't good.... yeah that's what I'm going with. Dropping the whole series)
2. Hostage Run
3. Game Over
14. Trader by Charles de Lint (RP)
15. Jason Bourne Series by Robert Ludlum (RP)
1. The Bourne Identity
2. The Bourne Supremacy
3. The Bourne Ultimatum
16. The Casket of Time by Andri Snaer Magnason (RP)
17. The Color of Water by James McBride (RP)
18. Themis Files Trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel
1. Waking Gods
2. Only Human
19. Akata Woman by Nnedi Okorafor (Finished 3/10/2023)
20. Emily the Strange Series by Rob Reger (RP)
1. The Lost Days (Finished 3/13/2023)
2. Stranger and Stranger (Finished 3/15/2023)
3. Dark Times (Finished 3/17/2023)
4. Piece of Mind (Finished 3/19/2023)
21. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin (RP)
22. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Series by Louise Penny
1. The Cruelest Month
2. A Rule Against Murder
3. The Brutal Telling
4. Bury Your Dead
5. A Trick of the Light
6. The Beautiful Mystery
7. How the Light Gets In
8. The Long Way Home
23. The Bridgerton Prequels by Julia Quinn
1. Because of Miss Bridgerton
2. The Girl With the Make-Believe Husband
3. The Other Miss Bridgerton
4. First Come Scandal
24. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins (RP)
25. The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Finished 3/23/2023)
26. Cooking Light: Mad Delicious by Keith Schroeder (RP)
27. Our Dark Duet by V.E. Schwab
28. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (RP)
29. Battle Royale: The Novel by Koushun Takami Translated by Yuji Oniki
30. A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg (RP)

The Urgent List:

1. Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie (borrowed from Dad)
2. Kill All Happies by Rachel Cohn (YA, Library)
3. Circuit of Heaven by Dennis Danvers (Ryan Pick, because he really wants me to read it)
4. The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos & Sam Taylor(Finished 3/26/2023)
5. Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer (YA, Library)
6. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (borrowed from Stephanie)
7. A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (Reread for Sci Fi)
8. Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventure's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras (NF, finishing it up)