And to double-post - I finally managed to finish
How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It's not got quite the zing of Sixteen Ways, but Notker is arguably a more heroic character. Very curious now about whether there'll be a third in this little series, and if so, how, who, where and what!
I am moving on to a book called
To The Sky Kingdom by Tang Qi, translated from the original Chinese by Poppy Toland. I first put this on my to-read list back in 2016, from a list of "Asian authors writing fantasy". Adding it on GoodReads today, I discovered that since then, there's been an explosion regarding this book having been somewhat/substantially (there's argument) plagiarised from another, "boy-love" (i.e. homosexual) fantasy romance story.
It's a bit of a conundrum. Ideally, I'd like to read the original, possibly as well as this one, and make up my own mind, but the original hasn't been translated or achieved Western-market publication (as far as I can tell). Part of that is probably
because it's gay, and this one has been turned into a heterosexual romance. There are some big problematic things at work here, but my personal ability to influence any of those is limited, especially because I haven't bought this book, just borrowed it from my library's existing collection.
I'm also wondering now if it's going to be too histrionic and stylised for my personal tastes, because that's something I usually find in that sort of Chinese romance-fiction.
