Things have been Problematic and Upsetting on the real-life employment front, which has sapped my ability to do many things for the past month or so while I've both been very busy and also constantly feeling like I'm not doing the right thing with my time. But I have been reading! Let's just skip over all those books and get back to the current reads, shall we?

Currently Reading: Running Close to the Wind by Alexandra Rowland
This is a bit of an exhausting book, because the main character is very exhausting.  He talks constantly, is just a hyperactive weasel of a person who is both selfish and also incredibly funny.  For me, that takes some doing, as I usually do not find such characters endearing at all.  But this book manages!  Right now, he has managed to steal something and is making that Everyone Else's Problem because his Everyone Else is a bunch of pirate buddies who likewise find him exhausting but weirdly endearing and who desperately want to sell the something he stole.  So there is seafaring and sea serpents and old lovers who'd like to toss him overboard and his own witchy good luck to contend with.  I have to read this in small doses, but am enjoying it.

Just Finished:  A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
Second in a series about a very interesting world where instead of mechanical technology, the world's leaned hard into engineered organics, mutated plants and animals, and reagents pulled from the massive leviathans that annually crawl out of the sea.  Within this the main characters are investigators sent to figure out a murder of an Imperial officer, and find as they unravel the mystery that it of course reaches much further than one guy in a locked room.  I wouldn't suggest reading this before the first book, but it's a great continuation of the series and gives more worldbuilding and characterization of both the main investigator characters.  Highly recommend!

Up Next:  I think I need to read something self-helpy, just to help my brain stop this worry-train it's on.  I've pulled Living with the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil by Stephen Batchelor back off my shelf and think that's up next - IIRC, it was a good book about digging into bad states of mind.  Also, I've become a fan of Kimberly Lemming's light-hearted but well-constructed fantasy romances, and I've got That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human on my shelf in Libby.