I've been doing a lot of reading lately.
First, I read a short story that was supposed to be a horror slasher. It fell way short of the mark. Way short. It was terrible written - a lot of very awkward wording, inconsistency, and overuse of some phrases. It also had a magical negro, which if that sounds offensive GOOD. It is a terrible trope from early Americana and for the life of me I don't know why this author thought it would be appropriate to bring it back. It was a free book on kindle, so I don't want to harp too much I guess. I don't understand how it got 4 stars though, with over 300 ratings, unless the guy was paying people to rate it.
After that, I read a much longer story (but still easy to finish in two nights) about a man who travels across the country a year after the death of his wife. While you'd think this would be very depressing, it was a pretty good read, gave you the warm fuzzies. I felt some of the end dialogue was forced, and I felt like the first chapter (and some areas later on) definitely could've been cut down or used some more polish, but overall I enjoyed it.
Next I read a "political thriller"/gay erotica short novella. Really the author should have abandoned the political part altogether, because it was clear she didn't understand a thing about politics. The premise is that a prince is forced into exile after he kills his grandfather who killed his father. Okay, actually what put him into exile is the first thing he does when he gains command is defunds a
clearly corrupt army, and causes a fucking junta. This is set in 1979 but you wouldn't notice it. They are met with a little bit of firepower leaving the castle but there no checkpoints while they ride in a Bentley down one of the busiest streets in their kingdom. They consider such locales as Germany, which any quick google search would tell you
is not a fucking proper answer for a god damn leader, because at that point the country was split into East and West, and they had some pretty different ideologies. Anyways, I guess the sex scenes were okay, but not my cup of tea. As far as relationship development goes it was actually pretty good, and the characters while a little cliche developed in a way that is pretty impressive for erotica. but there never should've been that first plot. I'm not even sure why there was. Halfway through the second part, we kinda stop focusing on the political stuff altogether. So I guess the leader left his country to die (which he was all mopey about when they left the country in the first place) so that he could go have a lot of sex. Ugh.
Finally, I read a series of cautionary tales based on Indian superstitions, and thank God I ended the night on that because they were fantastic. They were written by a guy from India so the cultural descriptions had a very real feel to them. I bought another one of his books I was so impressed, also set in India (I think this one is in Mumbai).
So that, or the first book of the Dresden Files, is next on my list.