A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

oyceter and I are going to Taipei, Xian, and Hong Kong this December! I'm so excited! It will be my first visit to Hong Kong and also to mainland China!

I need three sets of book recs. NO HARDCOVERS, and please check my tags to be sure I haven't already read it.

1. Just anything you think I would enjoy. I am especially looking for fun (ie, not about the Holocaust) fiction with Jewish, LGBT, and/or people of color as protagonists.

2. Does anyone have a recommendation for readable histories of China? Preferably by Chinese authors. I am starting from a position of near-total ignorance. Each book does not have to cover everything.

3. Sooooo, my last long plane trip I read a horrendous yet vastly entertaining awesomely bad book, Daughter of the Blood, which gave rise to the tag you see below. I think this is an excellent tradition which I ought to continue. Please rec horrendous yet entertaining novels which you would enjoy seeing me react to. I am thinking of Flowers in the Attic. That's about incestuous vampire twins locked in an attic, right?

Stephanie kindly gave me this to read on the plane, explaining, "You said that if I gave you the magic cock ring book you would read it."

How do I even describe this...? I abandoned it on the plane, so I shall merely share the fragments I recall, which now have the air of a very bad trip.

There are magic cock rings. They are controlled by witches to enslave the wearers, who often magically zap them with pain. This makes many of the male characters perform actions like, "Moaning and clutching his groin, he staggered up the stairs," or "Carefully holding his crotch, he pursued her."

On page two, someone gets his balls eaten by rats. He has a tragic death scene, in which he says tragically, "The rats ate my balls!"

There is a character named Saetan. (Pronounced, perhaps, like the vegan meat substiitute?) He is the lord of Hell. There is also a kingdom called Hayll. I found this rather confusing.

There is another castration somewhere later in the book. I think Anne Bishop has some issues.

One guy has membraneous bat wings, which Bishop forgets exist for chapters on end, but which come into play when he:s particularly Byronic and crotch-clutchy.

The hero is impotent because he can only get it up for his Twoo Wuv. She is the world"s biggest Mary Sue-- golden ringlets, frequently compared to a cat, called names like "hoyden" and "snippet," and ten times more powerful than anyone ever. She has a Destiny and Very Special Magic Rocks. There is a whole system of color-coded magic rocks-- Mary Sue has the best set of anyone ever.

When the hero meets her, she is twelve, and he feels a strange pull toward her, but freaks out because she]s a kid and he:d be a perv if he got a hard-on from a kid. So he rushes upstairs and puts his hands down his pants to see if he got one or not. Um, I:m not a guy, but you don"t actually have to touch it to tell, right?