Review – Impossible Paradise

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Impossible Paradise

by Chen Yuhong

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 152
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
One of Taiwan’s most celebrated poets, Chen Yuhong draws on both Western and Asian literary traditions, inflected by her work as a translator of contemporary English-language women poets (Glück, Oswald, Duffy). This selection makes her art widely available in English for the first time.

Her award-winning translators, George O’Connell and Diana Shi, carry across the richly metaphorical lexicon of her poems and their uncanny inhabitation of places both real and imagined, conjuring mood, angles of thought or light, animal presence, and the tides of the seasons.

In a world where much that seemed united has frayed, Chen Yuhong’s finely balanced poems bring us news of other imagined worlds, and acknowledge the unexpected, its capacity to terrify or astonish.

I decided recently to try a bit more poetry in translation, and this collection of Chen Yuhong’s poetry, Impossible Paradise, is one of the picks that came out of that urge. The translations are collaborations between Diana Shi and George O’Connell, and there’s a translators’ note about the poems they picked and their methods of going about translation, which is pretty interesting.

There are also some brief notes on individual poems, but they’re presented after all the poems, which is kind of unhelpful. Luckily I didn’t find them too necessary to understand the poems.

I enjoyed Chen Yuhong’s work, all in all; I connected better with some poems than others, but I didn’t get impatient or immediately mentally disengage from any of them (which I always find myself wanting to do with certain poetic styles, e.g. poems full of apparent non-sequiturs, chained together like nonsense). There were a few I liked a lot, or sections of longer poems I liked — this one, for example:

You imagine
a seagull poetics,
each breaking wave
its turbulent poem,
a seagull theology
Solomon’s wisdom,
ceaseless Song of Songs.

I think the poem ‘Pharaoh’ was a favourite, pretty unsurprisingly from me.

So overall a good experience, I’d say!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chen Yuhong, poetry

Book Blogger Hop: The Influence of Reviews

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in General / 3 Comments

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about online reviews:

How much do online reviews shape what you pick up next?

I mostly find new books in two ways: other bloggers talking about them, and random browsing in a bookshop.

When it comes to other bloggers talking about books, sometimes that’s just seeing people mention upcoming books they’re interested in, and sometimes it’s based on their reviews — a book I semi-recently picked up that I might not have if it weren’t for reviews was Jarod K. Anderson’s Strange Animals (which was reviewed by Mogsy and Tammy), for instance. If people pick out details that intrigue me, or if certain bloggers whose taste I know well are enthusiastic, that’s usually a good sign.

Sometimes when I’m trying to decide whether to get a book, I look at reviews on StoryGraph, and then I don’t just count on the reviews of people I know; I tend to seek out both very high and very low rated reviews, to get a sense of what people who feel passionately about it (one way or the other) are saying. It’s a pretty good way to quickly root out when a book is actually super racist or something, which helps.

That said, when it comes to books I find by randomly browsing in a bookshop, often I don’t look up anything at all, and just go based on the back cover and a random flip through the pages. I’ve found some real gems that way, and it’s fun sometimes to just throw aside caution and try something solely because it looked interesting and new. It’s also sometimes a terrible idea, of course, but I don’t mind taking that risk, especially since I know the fact that I do also post neutral and negative reviews sometimes helps people find books more to their taste than mine, or avoid books that they wouldn’t like either.

So the answer’s ultimately another “it depends”, I suppose!

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

Review – City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish

Posted September 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: The Lives of the Greeks in Roman Egypt

by Peter Parsons

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 258
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging in a sand-covered mound 100 miles south of Cairo. When they finished ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri from the ruins of the city of Oxyrhynchus. The work of deciphering these fragments is still ongoing.

Peter Parsons’ City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish paints a vivid picture of the Greek-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, using as evidence a wealth of papyri found by digging in the rubbish heaps of the ancient city. His introduction paints a vivid picture of the sheer amount of material, explaining that the first finds were made in 1896 by Grenfell and Hunt — and have yet to be fully published, and not for want of work on it!

That said, most of the book focuses not on the papyri themselves, but the kind of details they offer us, and this wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, I must admit. I’d have loved to hear more about the process of piecing together the papyri for this kind of information, and a bit about the specific work to identify and preserve the papyri.

It’s not that the history of Oxyrhynchus is boring, though! It’s surprising how personal it can all feel, even when the scraps are equally often the remnants of literature, simple lists, court summons, etc. There’s a letter from the mother (?) of a child who is dying, urging the father (?) to come and see the child, because if it dies before the letter’s recipient arrives, “I swear you’ll find me hanging.” The desperation is so real, compared to the stiff formulaic letters I think even those with an interest know better.

Ultimately the sheer amount of detail makes it a slow read and sometimes a bit overwhelming, but a lot of it is fascinating — and to add to the credibility, there’s a bibliography, numbered footnotes, and an index, so often lacking from popular history books.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Peter Parsons

Let’s Talk Bookish: Decluttering

Posted September 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

Let’s Talk Bookish is a monthly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s recently moved to this lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here. I’m posting a day early since I have a Book Blogger Hop post and a review for tomorrow!

September’s prompt is about decluttering ebooks and physical books:

How do you manage your digital library (Kindle, Kobo, etc.)—do you delete books you won’t read, or do you let them pile up? Do you feel less guilty about owning too many digital books versus physical ones? Which is harder to let go of: a well-loved physical book or a purchased e-book?

My physical library is reasonably well-curated. I have a backlog from years prior to 2025, but in 2025 I came up with a method that kept me reading the majority of the books I’d bought, and I’ve always got rid of books I knew I wouldn’t read again (sometimes by donating them to the local library, sometimes by donating them to charity shops, sometimes by selling them via programs like World of Books). People regularly think of me as a weird hoarder of books and it’s the silliest accusation, because boxes of books depart the household pretty much monthly. I only keep books I expect I’ll want to reread.

When it comes to my digital books, though, I do pretty much no curation at all. I just trust to the storage space on my Kobo that I have plenty, and never delete books. When ereaders had smaller amounts of memory, I had to shuffle things a lot more (though my approach tended to be “expand the memory if possible”, which used to be possible with Kobo Minis: I had a special set of tiny screwdrivers to get in, and copied the original SD card onto bigger SD cards for several of my friends, ahaha).

I know when I first had an ereader, a Sony, I organised things obsessively into folders, in part to help with browsing since it was a bit of a weird system with a lot of different buttons and no touch screen (I was an early adopter!)… but again, nope, now I just tend to use the search to pull up the book I want, or filter by “Kobo Plus” to see the books I’ve added from my Kobo Plus subscription to pick something from there. Sometimes the randomness of the sort is what sparks the urge to read a particular book, even!

I feel maybe a little guilty about books that I totally forget about in the depths of my Kobo, but I don’t feel guilty about having plenty of books at all, neither physical nor digital. It’s a joy! I’m very privileged to have such access to books and ability to keep a lot of books around me, and sometimes I’ll feel bad about not getting to a specific book I planned to read sooner or something like that, but in general, nah, no guilt or shame about books.

So yeah… in summary, I think this might be surprising to people who know how generally organised I like to be, but… I’m a gremlin when it comes to my digital library. Oops!

Tags: books, discussion, Let's Talk Bookish

Review – Ode to the Half-Broken

Posted September 10, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Ode to the Half-Broken

by Suzanne Palmer

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 406
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Forty years ago, the world nearly ended.

Be is an old robot who was there, and doesn’t want to think about what happened, or what role they played in that conflict. They have settled into a life of isolation in the abandoned ruins of an old mill in the former New York Botanical Gardens, disinterested in what has happened in the outside world since they stepped away from the war. Someone out there, though, has not forgotten about them, and when they are attacked, their person vandalized, and one of their leg stolen, they set out to find the thief accompanied by a cyborg dog and a human mechanic.

The world has changed, but the recovery from the war is uneven and faltering, and Be begins to suspect a malicious hand trying to rekindle the old conflict and finish what was started. In order to stop them, Be needs to come to terms with both their own past and who they have become, and how everything and everyone else they knew has changed in their absence. Being left alone is no longer an option, and peace may be impossible.

This is a story about coming to terms with your past, with who you’ve become and who you still want to be: a tale of resilence and hope, an ode to those struggling to become whole in a world half-broken.

I really really liked Suzanne Palmer’s Ode to the Half-Broken; it was very close to being a five-star read for me, but something just holds me back — I think it’s the fact that it feels like it could’ve been juuuust a little tighter, and would’ve felt stronger for it. I really liked the way it’s set post-apocalypse and people are still trying to survive, that people and mecha are trying to be good to each other despite everything, and that maybe even the holdouts could eventually be persuaded of that. For something set in a pretty post-apocalyptic landscape, it’s surprisingly hopeful.

It starts with a nameless protagonist, an old war mecha who redefined their own purpose and withdrew to live in their own quiet way. Dragged back out into the world by the theft of their leg, they end up teaming up with a surprisingly diverse crew of sentients, and travelling all over the place to try to understand exactly what happened and what’s going wrong with the increasing number of weirdly, uncharacteristically belligerent mecha.

There are quite a few twists and turns, and I’ll admit I saw most of them coming from varying distances: I almost immediately clocked why the protagonist’s leg was stolen, and figured out something relating to the protagonist’s sibling-mecha before they did. That said, the fact that they don’t see it coming makes sense: they don’t know they’re in a story, and aren’t suspiciously watching for twists!

I loved our nameless protagonist, the meditations about personhood and culpability, and the ragtag band of friends and allies they build up. The bits of worldbuilding — railmechs! drone society! the “ecology” of mecha and humans that they briefly travel with! — are all a lot of fun.

So yeah… I think I could wish it had just been a little tighter, here and there, but I did really really enjoy it. Comparisons to Murderbot and the Monk & Robot stories are fairly apt, I’d say, though there’s also more to it (of course).

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F, Suzanne Palmer

WWW Wednesday

Posted September 9, 2026 by Nicky in General / 5 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I haven’t finished anything in a couple of days, but the last thing I finished would’ve been J.J. Connington’s Murder in the Maze. I didn’t like it as much as the other book by him I’ve read (The Ha-Ha Case), in part because it fell back on the ol’ exotic poisons thing (curare in this case), and also I just don’t think it was well structured as a mystery.

Before that was also a classic mystery, Annie Haynes’ The Abbey Court Murder — a bit melodramatic, but satisfying enough.

What are you currently reading?

I haven’t been reading a lot in the last couple of days due to getting busy, so I’m still working on Michelle P. Brown’s Illumino, which should really admit that it wants to talk about far more than just twelve manuscripts and far more of the historical context, and the second volume of The Villain’s White Halo, which has taken a fascinating turn in a couple of respects (Duan Chongxian’s adventures, and the truth[?] of Luo Mingchuan’s whole thing).

I have also started another classic mystery, Robert van Gulik’s The Chinese Maze Murders. It’s apparently based on classic Chinese detective stories, and was originally written in English but first published in Japanese and Chinese. I’m not far into it, and I don’t know a lot about van Gulik’s background and how respectful it’s likely to be, but it’s definitely going to be an interesting product of that period of detective fiction in English from my perspective!

What will you be reading next?

No idea, honestly. I might pick out some shorter reads while I’m so busy, or continue on the classic crime binge — there are a couple more writers I noted to look into, or I could read more of the authors I’ve tried recently, since there are some more of those on Kobo Plus.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – The Wife Comes First, vol 2

Posted September 8, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Wife Comes First

by Lv Ye Qian He

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 323
Series: The Wife Comes First #2
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
On the brink of death, Prince Cheng is stunned to find the one person still by his side: his long-neglected princely consort, Mu Hanzhang. While Prince Cheng pursued power and countless lovers, Mu Hanzhang never wavered in his dedication as his wife, despite the future he lost. Prince Cheng knows he never deserved such loyalty.

But fate isn’t finished with him yet. When he awakens in the past—on the morning after their disastrous wedding night, with all his memories intact—Prince Cheng seizes the chance to set things right. This time, he’ll treasure Mu Hanzhang. This time, the wife will come first, the state second, and the husband last.

Yet winning Mu Hanzhang’s trust is only the first battle. Court conspiracies still run deep, and if they’re not careful, history may repeat itself…starting with a knife in the back.

Volume two of Lv Ye Qian He’s The Wife Comes First picks up directly from the previous volume, and mostly concerns Jing Shao and Mu Hanzhang going to war. Junqing spends a chunk of the story pretending to be just a ‘strategist’, since it usually isn’t permitted for generals to take their wives with them to war, but Jing Shao (great big puppy that he is) wheedles and begs his way into Junqing’s tent, and soon eveeeryone knows who he must be.

There are some really sweet moments between the two of them as they really solidify their relationship and speak honestly to one another about their feelings. I loved it; it’d be easy to introduce drama and a third act breakup, and I think in “Western” fiction that’d happen — but instead we just get to watch the two of them being ridiculously devoted to each other and an absolute power couple.

Also, Junqing gets a baby tiger cub.

There’s a fair bit of politicking and so on, so the plot also advances, hopefully carrying Jing Shao and Junqing past the difficulties that plagued Jing Shao’s past life. I’m kinda eh on the white lie about the previous attempt being a dream that Jing Shao had, but at least he’s found a way to explain some of his foreknowledge to Junqing, instead of leaving him out.

The problematic elements of consent and the treatment of women mostly aren’t carried through in this book, in part because I think only two named female characters show up in the whole thing (Ge Ruoyi and Hao Dadao’s wife). As mentioned, it’s really not the best-written, and I think that can also add to the problem, making the characterisation of a lot of characters flat. I’m here for Jing Shao and Mu Hanzhang (and their tiger cub), so your mileage may vary on how much it bothers you. My rating is definitely reflecting personal enjoyment and the way I raced through the book, not a considered critical response! Possibly if I went with my gut now, I’d lower it to 3/5… but I really had fun while reading it.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, danmei, light novels, romance, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday: Indie Bookshops

Posted September 8, 2026 by Nicky in General / 25 Comments

This week’s prompt from Top Ten Tuesday is an indie freebie, but I already talked about mostly indie bookshops in a recent post! So I’m going to talk about ten reasons to support indie bookshops.

Indie bookshops can be a huge part of their community.
They rarely just sell books, but often have events, provide a space for meetings, provide local advertising space, etc.
The selection isn’t mandated by corporate.
An independent bookshop can’t be told they “have to” stock gender critical nonsense or stacks upon stacks of the latest bestseller; they can exercise their own judgement.
The selection can be as weird and wonderful as the curator wants.
Not only do they not have to stock things they don’t want to, they can choose to stock only books they personally champion, lesser-known gems, etc. At the end of the day they do need to sell books… but they can afford to have some on the shelves that fit more niche interests.
It helps the fight against monopolies.
Amazon is so powerful because people feel like they can’t get what they need anywhere else. A thriving indie bookshop can be part of a local economy that says no to that.
They can specialise.
Think of some of the bookshops I mentioned like Criminally Good Books (a crime and mystery shop) and Portal Bookshop (LGBT and diverse SF/F). Waterstones is never going to set aside an entire store for a single genre, and while they can get a decent breadth of popular fiction in each genre stocked, the quality of the stock will depend on the booksellers’ knowledge. If you’ve never noticed this, try going to different Waterstones shops: they have similar selections, but not the same. There was one I went to where they clearly had a classic crime aficionado on staff, because I found some real gems. But this is the default at a specialist indie!
Indie bookshops can order rare stock.
Sometimes they have sources that a chain doesn’t or won’t use, like self-publishing platforms.
You probably don’t actually need next day delivery.
This goes to the same point as #4. We don’t actually need instant gratification when it comes to most books. Sure, sometimes you might need a textbook or reference work really quick… but most of the time it’s not necessary, and indie bookshops can often acquire stock pretty fast if you ask them to order.
Indie bookshops can stock books from other countries.
Sometimes when a book has only been released in the US, an indie can import it to the UK, and vice versa! Even if they don’t have a lot of imported books on the shelves (or you don’t know how to tell), it can be worth asking if it’s something they do.
Browsing a physical bookstore can be a lot of fun.
And enlightening! This is true of physical chains as well, of course, but see my earlier points about indie bookshop curation. Browsing a well-curated indie can bring a lot of surprises.
More bookshops and more booksellers is always a good thing.
Even if you also use chains sometimes (I do!) or rely on libraries for most of your reading (they deserve support too!), then it’s great to support the diversity of bookshops and bookselling out there.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here… but sometimes that’s fun!

I will finish by adding that since that aforementioned post recommending specific indies (only two weeks ago, and in fact on the very day I’d posted it), I learned about a new-to-me indie bookshop in Cardiff called Love Stories. You can find it in Castle Arcade, opposite Troutmark Books, the second-hand bookshop I previously recommended. Love Stories is small but has a pretty good selection, and I had a nice chat while I was there too. So consider that one recommended too!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (manhwa), vol 1

Posted September 8, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

by Sleepy-C, Umi, singNsong

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 248
Series: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (manhwa) #1
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
AT THAT MOMENT, MY LIFE TOOK ON A DIFFERENT GENRE.

As a struggling office worker, Dokja Kim's sole joy in life is an online novel so obscure that he's its only reader. Then one day the story comes to an end…and so does the world. People all around the globe suddenly find themselves being massacred by horrific monsters or pitted against each other in sadistic scenarios straight out of the novel. However, only Dokja is aware that this is merely the first chapter of what is to come. Knowing that devastating plot twists are on the horizon, he can no longer afford to sit back as a reader—it's time for Dokja to step up and write his own destiny!

Having read the first two volumes of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint light novel, there’s nothing new in this first volume (adapted by UMI with art by Sleepy-C). It’s really fun though to get a look at the characters: some of them are exactly how I imagined them, to the extent that I do any kind of visual imagining (basically, I found them instantly recognisable), while others I had to warm up to a bit, but now I can’t imagine them looking any other way.

If you’re new to ORV, then this volume is very introductory, covering only the first hours in the new world that Dokja Kim enters when his favourite novel becomes “paid content” and starts becoming true. There’s only really a glimpse here of how things work, but it’s probably enough to figure out if ORV is totally not your thing from the get-go and whether you’re curious enough to want more (of either format, though I think I’d go with the novel for a better intro to how things work).

There are a couple of slightly different translation things, compared to the light novel, but it’s all pretty intercompatible.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, manga, SF/F, singNsong, Sleepy-C, Umi

Fantasy with Friends: Prologues

Posted September 7, 2026 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

Aaaaand it’s Monday again with a fresh start. As ever, it’s time for a Fantasy with Friends post; all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on the discourse about prologues:

There has been ongoing discussion on social media about whether readers actually read or enjoy prologues. Do you think prologues add value to a story, or do you wish the story just started with chapter one? Are there good and bad ways for an author to utilize a prologue in a fantasy novel?

There are good and bad ways to do just about anything when it comes to writing a book. Good ways might include setting the scene, providing some ancient history that proves important to the story, introducing characters who become important later, etc. It can be a good way to tantalise the reader, but it can also feel like a bait-and-switch if you swap straight to other characters right after the prologue and it isn’t clear at all how things will connect (or whether they ever will).

I definitely do read prologues, because they should be there for a good reason and be part of the story. If they aren’t, that’s definitely a problem! But usually they are, and skipping them seems like shooting yourself in the foot by omitting part of the information the author intended for readers to have — I don’t really understand the decision to skip them, honestly, and I especially feel like rolling my eyes when people who skip the prologue then complain things don’t make sense.

There are definitely times when it feels like it could’ve just been a part of chapter one, or that it’s unnecessary… but that’s an individual book being not that great, not a sign that prologues in general are pointless.

Tags: books, discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F