The Saturday Morning Post (No. 191)

 

Once more to Holland yet again! Originally I was going lump these last two or three book reports from this series into one entry, but then, I had a week or two when I didn't read any book at all, which made me nervous. I like to have a cushion of book reports, and it was getting thinner...

In the book world amongst book people, this would be considered a "reading slump" or a symptom of reading burnout. At least amongst "content creators" this is a issue of some concern. If you are producing "content" about books, not reading is something to be concerned about. This concern, and my reaction to reading less than a book a week was the subtle hand of "content creating" at work. In the back of my mind, I'm not just reading, I'm producing content for this blog. Not deliberately, but still, having already written 200 of these posts, at the time I'm writing this one, producing a blog post in this spot every week is now a part of my life.

I've since found more books to read, so the crisis is averted, for now and the next ten weeks. What I'm up against is not a lack of books, but a lack of alluring books. I have narrow tastes in books, and well, I've struggled to finding books that I want to read, even when I had access to 10 million books on Kindle Unlimited. These Mercurius mysteries were a godsend, but now, I think I can move on confidently, as my usual suspects on booktube have recently come through for me. In the coming weeks I'll be offering a wider variety of books to report on, with a ten week cushion. 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

The Noose's Shadow by Graham Brack  B+

This time the wife of a farmer who has been accused of murdering his neighbor named Wolf, a man who everyone disliked, as well as his wandering pig, arrives at the University on a winter's night to ask Mercurius to save her husband from hanging for a murder he didn't do. Mercurius, has a document William gave him in a previous story as a reward for his services, one that required officials to give him any aid he desires, so he uses it to talk the mayor into letting him investigate the murder, in order to ascertain that justice is truly being served.

With lower stakes, and a fairly straightforward investigation, i.e. talking to the neighbors, there is a lot less intrigue to the mystery this time around. But, as always, it is the character of the narrator, plus the characters and locale of the setting that, for me, elevate this series beyond a mere mystery story. That said, it is still be weakest of the lot so far in terms of engagement.

There are five more books in this series, but I will wait until my next visit to Kindle Unlimited on the cheap... It's June and I haven't looked on my Amazon page under Kindle Unlimited to see what deal, if any, they're offering. However, right now I'm halving no problem finding enough books to read from the YouTube channels I'm watching, so it will be a while yet.