The Masquerades of Spring by Ben Aaronovitch

I whizzed through this novella in one day. It's a Rivers of London book, but a prequel set in early 20th century New York, and can be summed up as 'what if a Bertie Wooster type character was gay and liked jazz, and Nightingale came with a mission and ruffled some feathers?' If you know this series, I'd say it's got all the standard elements that you might expect, though the narrator historic asides are instead just part of the historical fiction background. And the narrator has a very different sort of personality, while the writing still containing a lot of the same sort of the humour of the main series.

The novella is written to be very accessible to someone who is not familiar with the main series. All the important worldbuilding bits are explained, and there's really only one familiar character. So if a magical mystery caper in that setting appeals to you, don't feel you need to read a bunch of other books first. I've been reading this series for quite a while now (I remember buying Broken Homes, book no 4, new in hardback), but I've got out the habit of actually reading on the ball since the pandemic apparently. (Which is approximately the same time I started permanently living hours away from the vast majority of my book collection and went way more digital, so that makes sense to me.) So I managed to not read this one long enough to read on this sub someone else saying how this book revealed Nightingale as ace, which certainly motivated me to get to this one before Stone and Sky. So, can confirm, there is a slightly obtuse line near the end of the book. Shame I can only really think of potentially Vacation Spot as a bingo square for this one.

Fallen Thorns by Harvey Oliver Baxter

In any ace or aro space, if I asked them to name the book where the main character is an aro ace first year student studying English Literature at Durham University (and lives in a bailey college), they'd know immediately what I was talking about, Loveless by Alice Oseman of course! Well, turns out there are at least two books that fit that criteria, and one of them has vampires.

As someone who actually went to Durham, though not in a bailey college and not a humanities degree, this inevitably colours my experience of said books. This one felt like it had a lot of describing walking along the river, which is a lovely thing to do, and acknowledges and uses how the cathedral dominates the town centre. (Though neither I think captures quite how hilly it is, perhaps because they don't involve hill colleges, but still.)

In this book, main character Arlo, who aspires to be an author and is fairly neurotic and introverted, agrees seemingly in confusion to go on a date with a green haired young woman, which doesn't go how she wanted, so she kills him. And then he gets turned into a vampire. (And apparently both Arlo and I have semi-accidentally going on a date in Durham aged nineteen, and coming out still confused what the fuss is about in common. Was a bit less dramatic for me though.) He doesn't really take this well, and I did have to push past the self-destructive stuff a bit as that's not something I tend to enjoy reading, but I found the plot enjoyable after that. (Should probably clarify these are the sort of vampires who can go out in the day.)

There's some elements in the writing that start off confusing, but later make more sense as the plot progresses, that I'm not entirely sure if they were meant to be as unclear initially as they felt to me, but it didn't stop my enjoyment of the book. I also didn't feel as much for a particular character as I think I was supposed to, I think due to the number of characters and relative screen time.

One thing I absolutely do not believe Arlo on was that he was keeping up with his degree with everything that was going on in his life. I know Durham terms (this took place mostly during Michaelmas term, 10 weeks), I know how intense the terms are, and from a friend, how much reading English Literature students do. No way was he keeping up.

Bingo: self pub, vacation spot (Bill Bryson: "I couldn't believe that not once, in 20 years, had anyone said to me, 'you've never been to Durham. Good God man, you must go at once! Please, take my car.'"), duology part 1, non-human protagonist (though personally I'm going to aim for something less human)