Category: General

Fantasy with Friends: Magical Libraries

Posted June 22, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Monday again! And a new Fantasy with Friends post: the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about libraries in fantasy:

Fantasy books often feature magical libraries that have anything from floating platforms to books with characters that come to life. What are a few of your favorite fantastic libraries?

I’m quite a fan of the library in Genevieve Cogman’s series that starts with the book The Invisible Library. It’s less about the magic itself being magical, though, and the sheer variety it offers: books from all kinds of worlds, both high magic and high sci-fi, including variants of the same stories unique to some of the worlds.

I never actually managed to finish it (got distracted, even though I was enjoying it, so it ended up back on my TBR), but I’m also a fan of the idea of The Library of the Unwritten, where books unfinished by their authors end up in a library after their death.

I don’t remember a lot about the library in Garth Nix’s Lirael, but it was one of the reasons I really enjoyed the start of that book, as Lirael learned to take care of the library!

More generally, I think my favourite magical libraries are not so much full of magical conveniences, but crammed full of books on all kinds of topics, with fascinating and mysterious titles. A big space to explore, full of books of all kinds, some of which may be magical, but mostly just numerous. Several times in my life I’ve picked a local library clean of the books that interest me, so huge libraries that seem practically unlimited call to me.

Tags: discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 20, 2026 by Nicky in General / 32 Comments

Happy weekend! I’ve been in a reading mood for the last couple of days, so I’m very much looking forward to a lazy day.

Books acquired this week

This week’s been a busy one! My wife and I went to Manchester last weekend to go to the art gallery (to see their WORN: the life within clothes exhibition) and, let’s be real, get some books. I was hoping I’d pick some up at Queer Lit, but I confess to having found the (lack of) organisation of the shelves a bit too annoying, so I didn’t manage to get anything at an indie, despite Independent Bookshop Week.

Still, I did find myself some books, and absolutely no one is surprised by that.

So first up, the fiction! I’m also including one book I got via this week’s Top Ten Tuesday wishlist sharing, kindly sent me by Emma from Words and Peace, which made me smile.

I love both Ilona Andrews and Cat Sebastian, so I’d been looking out for those, and I’ve been meaning to try the graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea for a while, so that was a nice find too.

I also picked up a little more poetry, since I’ve enjoyed Mary Oliver’s work recently:

I’ve read both of them already — not my favourites among her collections, but there’s always something lovely about her work.

Finally, I got some non-fiction, some of which I’d been anticipating for a while:

Overall a nice little haul, and I’ve started most of them already! Impulse buys turning into impulse reads has turned out to be a very good thing for my reading mood at the moment.

Posts from this week

Right! As ever, I’ve done a fair few posts this week, so let’s do a bit of a roundup. Reviews first:

Fantasy: Solo Leveling light novel vol 7, by Chugong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Crime short stories: Puzzles of the Parish, ed. Martin Edwards (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
History: Queer Georgians, by Anthony Delaney (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: In the Hollow of the Wave, by Nina Mingya Powles (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Manga: Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 5, by Itaru Kinoshita (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

As ever, most of those aren’t very recent reads, because even with my slower reading lately, I’ve got a huge backlog of reviews written but not yet posted… I’ll talk about what I’ve been reading this week below!

And now the other posts!

I’m getting off to a good start with 20 Books of Summer, too, with two of my chosen books finished!

What I’m reading

I’ve been reading a lot more this week, which is a relief! I’ve been reading a few books in tandem, as usual, but very actively, so I expect I’ll finish a bunch of them this week. Thinking about it, that’s how I used to read all the time — reading a chapter of one book and then swapping to another! All this focus on finishing books, whether for ARCs or just because I feel like I “ought” to for my stats or whatever, has maybe not been serving me super well at the moment. I think the variety is helping my attention span.

Anyway, first let’s talk about the books I did finish this week:

As you can see, it’s a bit more like my usual reading! I completely mainlined The Wife Comes First vol 1, and my wife is probably going to venture out and snag me volume 2 today, since it grabbed me.

The four books I’m currently rotating through most actively are Harry Tanner’s The Queer Thing about Sin, Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World and Jean-Yves Mollier’s A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop, and I’m kinda hoping I’ll finish all four of those this weekend. When I finish one of the non-fiction books, I’ll probably slot Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile into the rotation, while I think Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade in Blood might be next up in fiction…

I do also want to read a couple of poetry collections so the library can have them back, so I might fit them in somewhere, too. But it’ll depend on my whim in the moment: I’ve only just got back my urge to read after a few weeks of very little reading, I’m not going to spoil it now!

I hope everyone else has a lovely/restful/enjoyable weekend planned. ♡

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, and It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at The Book Date.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 17, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I finished was Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters, which was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I found the world-building a bit goofy: these people literally eat books, like… chew and swallow them. And that transmits the information into their brains somehow? But someone within the story refuses to call that magic, and other stuff frames it as biological? Yeah… no. That’s not how any of that works. If it’d just called it magic, I’d have got along with it a lot better — but then other stuff wouldn’t have worked so well.

On the other hand, the discussion of monstrousness and motherly love and family, all of that was pretty powerful and well done.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve started even more books at once, because it sparked joy in the moment, so I’ll mostly highlight those! I started two queer books and one about booksellers, and the three of them are additive in interesting ways: A.K. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World, Jean-Yves Mollier’s A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop, and Harry Tanner’s The Queer Thing About Sin. The latter has a premise I’m very curious about, that acceptance of queer relationships is stronger when there’s higher levels of economic and political equality; I hope Tanner carries it through the book and reflects on it more, because I’d like to see more evidence than just ancient Greek city-states.

I also started on volume one of Lv Ye Qian He’s The Wife Comes First, which is leaning into court intrigue type stuff that I’m very curious about. Jing Shao definitely didn’t deserve Mu Hanzhang’s loyalty in his past life, and I’m wondering whether it’ll ever show us why Mu Hanzhang was so loyal. Either way, I’m enjoying Jing Shao’s eagerness to please Mu Hanzhang now that he understands how amazing he is.

What will you read next?

I got a couple of poetry collections by Mary Oliver at the weekend, and Fred Fordham’s graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea, so those are high on my list! I also need to get round to some of my library books, like Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, because the library wants them back.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Wishes

Posted June 16, 2026 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

Every so often, the Top Ten Tuesday theme is all about the books you’re hankering for right now, and sharing your wishlist so that people can get them for you if they feel so moved! So let’s see.

Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works, by Helen Pearson.
This was reviewed recently in New Scientist, and it sounds like an intriguing look at how evidence-based science works!
If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, by Daniel Hahn.
I saw someone mention this (I think Keira?) and it sounds fascinating. Translation is such a knotty problem, and Shakespeare is extra difficult because there’s a double-barrier of time as well as language.
A Widow’s Charm, by Caitlyn Paxson.
I’ve seen some good reviews of this, and it sounds like fun!
Murder at the Black Cat Cafe, by Seishi Yokomizo.
It’s always interesting to broaden my experience of crime/mystery stories and read in translation, so I’m curious about this one.
Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes, by Eleanor Houghton.
Clothes tell us so much about the period they came from, the person who wore them, and the kind of life they lived. I’m very curious.
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now, by Ruby Tandoh.
I’ve been curious about this one for a while, as food history is another thing that I enjoy dipping into.
The English House: A History in Eight Buildings, by Dan Cruickshank.
I’m a sucker for histories that are a history of X in Y things… and while I’m not super into architecture, it’s still a field where buildings of the past tell us an awful lot, and I’m capable of being interested!
The Apothecary’s Wife: The Hidden History of Medicine and How it Became a Commodity, by Karen Bloom Gevirtz.
I haven’t heard much about this, but the topic is fascinating!
Ode to the Half-Broken, by Suzanne Palmer.
This doesn’t seem to be out yet in the UK, but Amazon has it, and I’ve been reading some very positive reviews! It sounds right up my street.
The Nightmare before Kissmas, by Sara Raasch.
I’m not sure that Raasch’s books are 100% my thing, but I’m happy to try outside my comfort zone, especially since I’ve been seeing glowing reviews from people I trust! So I’d like to give this one a shot — though I’d have been interested in The Entanglement of Rival Wizards instead if it’d been out in paperback in the UK, so I wouldn’t mind an ebook copy of that if it fell into my ereader, ahaha.

My Amazon wishlist is here, and I’m also game for ebook copies if you’d rather buy a book voucher for me to get an ebook with, in which case I suggest a National Book Token or Kobo voucher, since I prefer not to use Kindle anymore. My email address is bibliophibianbreathesbooks [at] gmail [dot] com.

(Buying me Kindle books and sending them to that email address does work as well, since I do have a Boox ereader and can still access the Kindle app, it’s just not my preference. Kobo deserves more love!)

Excited to peek at other people’s lists and spread a bit of bookish love today!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Merch

Posted June 15, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Another new week, and thus a new Fantasy with Friends post: the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about the merch you’d like to see:

If you could design merch based on any fantasy books, what items would you want?

I don’t buy a lot of merch because I don’t have a lot of room for it — or rather, there’s room, but I tend to find it feels cluttery and I don’t know of many items that have uses that I’d want to be fantasy-themed. Except the biggie: bookmarks. I collect free bookmarks, of all stripes: my favourites are ones that advertise bookshops, especially indies, but I have a soft spot for ones that display books I’ve actually read, too. I got into the habit because of the free bookmarks the Book Depository used to do, and now… well, I have far more than I can use, even though I tend to use multiple bookmarks at a time (marking out stuff like where the chapter ends or other convenient stopping-points).

And even though I have more than I can sensibly use, I’d still love more. I’d love some danmei-themed ones: I think I have a couple based on Heaven Official’s Blessing, if I remember rightly, but I’d love them for other danmei as well, because the illustrations are often gorgeous. These covers in particular, for example:

But really I could go for bookmarks of anything I’ve read, even if the cover isn’t particularly pretty! There was a fun set somewhere with stats from a book/series, maybe Game of Thrones? With like a body count and other stats like number of battles… that kind of thing could be neat.

Some stuff like that is out there, but it’d be kinda nice if every book came with it — my British Library Crime Classics books do, for instance, due to my subscription!

Other than that, I do enjoy bookish t-shirts: I have some for Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s books, like a t-shirt with “OOC OOC OOC” on it (from The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System) and one with cute bunnies representing Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian (from Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation). I’m always game for that kind of thing. Maaaaybe a tote bag here or there? And I’ve had a few necklaces with pendants that looked like specific books, or earrings like that. I have some Hua Cheng-inspired earrings, too; I don’t wear earrings a lot, but I do like to be able to be nerdy when I do.

Anyway… “mostly bookmarks” is probably a fairly boring choice, but it’s honest, haha.

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

20 Books of Summer: Getting Started

Posted June 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 14 Comments

NB: I made my own banner for this as the official one used generative AI. I used a stock photo from Pexels.com, and added some text. It’s not the most beautiful, but please feel free to use it if you would like to.

I’m a little late to the party, and I don’t think I’ve ever participated before… but better late than never, right? The challenge is a simple one: read 5, 10, 15 or 20 books over the summer, between 1st June and 31st August. You can sign up over at AnnaBookBel’s blog and join the monthly link-ups there.

I usually read a lot more than 20 books over the course of the summer, so I’m going to narrow things down a bit and use it to try to read specific books — but if that starts feeling unpleasant or annoying in any way, I’ll stop or swap in other books: the below are just a preliminary list of ideas, though I’ll try to stick to the categories I’ve set up here.

So let’s see…

Five non-fic:

I love non-fiction, especially when I’ve been stressed and struggling to read, so let’s start with some of those! (Not that I’m planning to read these in any order, but I’m hyping myself up here, shush.) I’m not going for any particular theme here, just picking some that I feel enthusiastic about in this moment.

And yet a bit of a theme emerged anyway, ahaha. Technically I’ve started the first three, but I’m not far into them. Which reminds me of my next section…

Five in-progress:

I started a lot of books at once and ended up feeling a bit guilty about not getting back to them, and truthfully, a bit overwhelmed at having so much on the go. So let’s lock in and agree that I’ll try to finish these five.

I haven’t even got far into the latter two, but the whim changed after I’d read a couple of chapters, and I drifted away.

With the other three, I’m solidly in the midst of ’em. I won’t say they’ll be easy wins, because The Book Eaters and The Water Outlaws haven’t quite been gelling for me, and Queen James is dense.

Five ARCs:

I’ve been well in control of my ARCs for the last year or so… until I got a bit overwhelmed again, and pulled back on reading. I’ve got some catching up to do! So let’s get these read, if possible!

Five danmei:

I got a lot of new danmei at once, and ended up a bit overwhelmed/wondering if I should read one series at a time, or wait for more to come out (so I can get the next book right away if I’m really into it), etc. But I wouldn’t normally do that, and at least since they just need translating, we know new volumes are coming soon! So I think I’ll just jump in.

I’ve been looking forward to several of these for a while, after all! So should be some good light reading over the summer.

Five wildcards:

I know, this brings us to 25 in total, but I wanted to give myself the easiest possible out if I’m struggling with any of the above books. Without a specific backup plan, I might just feel like I’m cheating (I know, I know, the rules are very flexible, but my brain isn’t). So here’s a wildcard for each of the above in order, and a spare!

And you never know… maybe I can make it the 25 specific books of summer, and really flout the rules, ahaha.

So here we go, for at least as long as this sparks joy!

Tags: 20 Books of Summer, books

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 13, 2026 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

Happy weekend, folks! I have plans for the day, so I’m looking forward to that… but I’m hoping for a quiet Sunday to go with it. For now, let’s look at my week in books, though it’s been a pretty quiet one.

Books acquired this week

I thought I hadn’t got anything, but actually I was wrong! I got offered the first one to review, and I’ve been curious about this author for a while and enjoying other pre-release reviews. Plus, my British Library Crime Classic for this month arrived!

I’ve already tucked into Puzzles of the Parish, since short stories sounded exactly my speed this week. What a contrast in those covers, ahaha.

Posts from this week

First up as always, the reviews:

Fashion history: Japanese Dress in Detail, by Josephine Rout (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: A Dress of Locusts, by Safa Khatib (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
Romance manga: The Stranger in the Hoarding House, by Joe Aruku (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Manga: Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 4, by Itaru Kinoshita (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy short stories: Seasons of Glass & Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

None of these were read this week, since I have a long backlog of reviews ready to post and try to mix it up and keep a range ready to post!

What I’m reading

This week, the line-up of books I’ve finished is very small, because I’ve been busy with a new work thing and also just letting my brain rest and do whatever in my downtime. I did finish one book, though — a random pick from Kobo Plus!

I’m not sure how much reading I’ll get done today, since I’ll be out for most of it, but I hope to finish Puzzles of the Parish. Other than that, I’d like to finish up volume two of Mistakenly Saving the Villain, but we’ll see! I’m still trying to let myself settle down and just read whatever’s fun to me in the moment.

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, and It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? at The Book Date.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Let’s Talk Bookish: Pride Month Reading

Posted June 12, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly bookish meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s just moved to a lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here.

June’s prompt is as follows:

Happy Pride! ️‍ What are your favorite books with LGBTQIA+ representation? Are there authors or series you always recommend? What books are on your Pride Month TBR? What do you think makes representation feel genuine?

I have to say that I don’t really think of what I read in terms of representing minority groups at the moment: not that it doesn’t, because I am interested in books that are by and about and for groups that are marginalised in society on all kinds of different axes. It’s mostly because I pulled back on the number of obsessive stats about books I was keeping for my mental health, and also because I got somewhat uncomfortable about some of the associated baggage like “own voices”, which became an intense pressure on people to come out and share personal details. I’m thinking about e.g. the situation where Becky Albertalli was pressured to come out because of Leah on the Offbeat.

Given my swing to reading more non-fiction as well, I kind of naturally fell out of the habit of thinking about books this way, so despite the fact that I read plenty of queer fiction, I didn’t have an immediate answer here, but let’s see if I can do better!

At the moment, a lot of the queer stuff I’m reading is danmei, which I wouldn’t necessarily refer to as being good LGBTQIA+ representation in general. I think it does things which are radical, particularly in context, where queerness is common and people are accepting… but there are also a lot of issues baked in, like gong and shou dynamics, and the fact that the shou sometimes ends up with a rather feminised role (sometimes down to being referred to as “wife”), authors insist that the dynamic is immutable, etc. Still, I don’t think ruling danmei out entirely as queer fiction is fair, and I’ve been deeply enjoying Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s work, Priest’s Guardian, Xue Shan Fei Hu’s The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, and currently Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain.

Most of the other queer books I read are sci-fi or fantasy, where I really enjoy hopepunk takes like Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and sequels, where homophobia just isn’t a thing, or Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice et al, which play with gender and relationships — everyone in the Radch is referred to as “she”, no matter what. Malka Older’s murder mysteries set on Jupiter are a lot of fun too, with a gender-swapped Sherlock and Watson duo who are, yes, in a romantic relationship as well…

There’s so much I’m missing here: I love K.A. Doore‘s roundups of each year’s queer SFF for this, which often help me find books I’d somehow never come across at all that sound amazing. I highly recommend keeping an eye out for these.

When it comes to romance, of course there’s plenty out there: favourites of mine include Jordan L. Hawk (usually his work has SF/F and horror crossover), KJ Charles (sometimes has fantasy elements too) and Cat Sebastian.

In my non-fiction reading, fear not, there have been some queer books there too! Most recently Anthony Delaney’s Queer Georgians, which uncovers various stories of queer people in the Georgian period in the UK. I have Will Tosh’s Straight Acting on the go, which is about Shakespeare’s sexuality and all the debate there is around that, and I’m quite looking forward to picking up a copy of A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World when I can, especially after reading Jane Cholmeley’s A Bookshop of One’s Own.

As you may have guessed from the preamble above, I don’t have a Pride-specific reading list. I’m queer all year round, and so is my reading.

I’d say that’s also the key to what makes representation feel genuine: you can’t just be checking a box. The queerness has to be lived in, baked into your story (even if that’s in small ways) in the way it’s baked into the world. If you can cut it out by simply swapping the pronouns of your side character’s partner and omitting to mention the pride flag in the coffee shop window… well.

Tags: books, discussion, Let's Talk Bookish

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

Here we are again! As usual lately, trying linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What have you recently finished reading?

I haven’t finished anything in a few days; I’m trying not to stress about that and just let my brain do a bit of a reset, because I have been reading… just not necessarily focusing on finishing books. Looks like the last thing I finished was How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside, by Brian Bilston: it’s ostensibly a guide to writing and enjoying poetry, but it largely felt like a platform for Brian Bilston to show off his poetry and humour. That might work better for others, but I didn’t enjoy it a lot.

What are you currently reading?

A bunch of books at once, as ever, but with a decent amount of enthusiasm now, which is a relief. I most recently started John Darnell and Colleen Darnell’s Egypt’s Golden Couple; so far I’m raising an eyebrow slightly at their stated decision to take “the small liberty of providing the royal couple with personal quirks”. I’m giving it some time, especially as the bibliographical essays in the back do show sources, but I do hope the speculative/invented stuff is clearly flagged up.

I’ve also got started on volume two of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, and I’m eager to see how the relationship develops now that some time has passed and Yue Wuhuan has gained more power and confidence.

I diiiid also start on Moorea Corrigan’s Thistlemarsh, but haven’t got far with that, and am knee-deep in Hal Rubenstein’s 100 Unforgettable Dresses, too many of which I find kinda forgettable. Mostly I think it’s not as focused on fashion history and what fashion tells us as I’m interested in, and more on “dresses make women beautiful”, with a dip in the last few entries I read into beliefs that all women want to look beautiful (implied: in a dress), so, yeah, not entirely my thing.

What will you read next?

I just got this month’s British Library Crime Classic via my subscription, and this month’s is a short story collection: Puzzles of the Parish, focusing on stories around churches and clergy (I expect at least one appearance of Father Brown). I often end up gobbling up the short story collections, and they’re a nice range of different authors/periods/styles, so I might well pick this up next.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Handwriting on Covers

Posted June 9, 2026 by Nicky in General / 21 Comments

This week’s prompt from Top Ten Tuesday is another cover-based one, about covers featuring handwriting/fonts that look like handwriting. I don’t actually know what I’ll find, but let’s see!

Aaand the end results are a bit of a mix: mostly I kept finding the same sort of “handwriting-ish” fonts being used, the “I’m based ultimately on handwriting/calligraphy, but everyone’s used to this as a font” ones. But here are some that caught my eye, narrowed down from about twenty…

I didn’t love all these books (and I haven’t finished The Book Eaters yet), but I confess that handwriting fonts do seem to grab my attention, and I definitely like them a lot when I’m making graphics (on the rare occasions that I do). Amsterdam Three, how I love thee.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday