What Am I Reading – Chapter Thirteen

Hi Everybody!

Since the last time I posted what I was reading, I finished Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, and another volume of A Polar Bear in Love by Koromo.

Before I get started with the latest book that I’m reading right now, I want to address something that I came across in the A Polar Bear in Love manga series.

After I read the first volume, I looked at the reviews, and two common themes emerged: how creepy the polar bear was in trying to get the seal to love him back and how the former didn’t understand how terrified the latter was. The whole series is about a polar bear falling in love with a seal – the usual prey for that animal, so understandably, the seal is terrified.

I’m going to be honest and say that I really didn’t pick up on the problematic elements of the plot when reading the first volume because I was so infatuated with its cuteness. Knowing this now, yes, I can see where people are coming from. During the first volume, the seal struggles to voice his concerns against the polar bear. Luckily, during the second one, seal speaks up more, the polar bear gets the hints more as they encounter rivals to each other’s affections. I’m on the third volume now, and there’s one more in the manga, so I’ll have my full thoughts once I finished with the series altogether.

Now, let’s look at a book unrelated to anything else that I’ve read.

Legends of the Fall by Jim Harrison is three stories in one. The titular novella is about three brothers and their lives of passion, madness, exploration and danger at the beginning of the Great War. The other two are Revenge, which shows how love causes a man’s life to be altered in drastic ways, and The Man Who Gave up his Name, which deals with another man who’s unable to give up his obsessions with women, dancing, and food.

I started this “novel” not too long ago, and it’s off to a slow start. Nothing wrong with that now, but I hope it picks up. I’m in the middle of Revenge, and I like reading the part that details what led up to the man being beaten and tossed at the side of the road. We’ll see how I feel about the other novellas.

We now have come to the end of the thirteenth chapter of “What Am I Reading?”

Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates. Also feel free to email me here for any review suggestions, ideas, or new titles!