Greetings, folks, from the end of a busy week! I can’t promise I’ll be under less stress going forward, but my work life will be a little simpler, which is something! How’re you all doing?

Books acquired:

Early birthday presents from Portal Bookshop! 💙 I have actually read Witchmark before and liked but didn’t love it, but something’s been itching at me lately and I’d like to try it again — and read the rest of the series. So this was lovely.

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2/5 stars)
• Index, a History of the, by Dennis Duncan (4/5 stars)
• What it Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, by Lesley Nneka Arimah (3/5 stars)
• Magic Strikes, by Ilona Andrews (4/5 stars)
• The Cheltenham Square Murder, by John Bude (3/5 stars)
• Calamity in Kent, by John Rowland (3/5 stars)
• Sea People, by Christina Thompson (3/5 stars)

Giveaways:

• Worldwide Book Giveaway: I’ll be choosing one random person who replies to this tweet to receive one book of their choice. I’ll do the draw on the 21st.
• UK Book Giveaway: I’m choosing three random people who respond to this tweet to receive a book of their choice via Portal Bookshop. Plus, some other folks are signing up to buy a random person a book, so I think so far there are five chances to win. Also drawn on the 21st!
• Buy Someone A Book: If you’re interested in joining in with buying a book for a random Twitter user, you can sign up to join in by replying to this tweet. When the time comes, I’ll pick a random winner for you, and get you two connected so you can sort out the purchase. I’ll let you know who you’re buying for on the 21st, with the help of my trusty RNG.

And that’s everything!

So, any good books joined your TBR this week? Thrown any books against the wall in anger? How’s reading going in general?

Welp, busy week here. I keep hoping that “next week” will be less bumpy, but it never seems to be true. Ah well!

Received to review:

I had this on my wishlist, and then spotted that I was auto-approved by the publisher on Netgalley, so… here we go!

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• Somebody’s at the Door, by Raymond Postgate (3/5 stars)
• Snowball in a Blizzard, by Steven Hatch (4/5 stars)
• A Fatal Waltz, by Tasha Alexander (3/5 stars)
• Seashaken Houses, by Tom Nancollas (4/5 stars)
• The Library of the Dead, by T.L. Huchu (3/5 stars)
• Elephants on Acid, by Alex Boese (2/5 stars)
• Ouch! The New Science of Pain, by Linda Rodrigues McRobbie & Margee Kerr (4/5 stars)

Aaaand that’s all for this week! How’s everyone doing?

Gooood evening! I had a busy day of, um, questing on FFXIV… so I’m only just setting up this post now. Not that I have much to report! No new books, and only a couple of books read.

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao (4/5 stars)
• Walls: A History of Civilization, by David Frye (3/5 stars)
• A Poisoned Season, by Tasha Alexander (4/5 stars)
• The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine, by Thomas Morris (2/5 stars)
• Necropolis, by Jordan L. Hawk (4/5 stars)
• Comfort Me With Apples, by Catherynne M. Valente (3/5 stars)
• The Fabric of Civilization, by Virginia Postrel (4/5 stars)

Aaand that’s it for me, for this week. How’s everyone doing?

Good evening, folks! How’s everyone been? It’s been too warm here, but it’s fortunately a lot cooler today. Not much reading this week, alas… too cranky from the heat.

Received to review:

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• Pandora’s Jar, by Natalie Haynes (5/5 stars)
• Phoenix Extravagant, by Yoon Ha Lee (3/5 stars)
• Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England, by Michael Livingston (5/5 stars)
• The Gentle Art of Fortune-Hunting, by K.J. Charles (4/5 stars)
• Two-Way Murder, by E.C.R. Lorac (4/5 stars)
• Magic Burns, by Ilona Andrews (4/5 stars)
• The Wychford Poisoning Case, by Anthony Berkeley (1/5 stars)

Aaand that’s it from me. Any good books for you this week?

Wow, it’s warm out! And in. Actually, it’s just warm. And today there’s a Lions game and a Wales game, and tomorrow I’m attending a Ceremony of Eternal Bonding on FFXIV, so it’s a busy weekend. 🤣

Anyway, I have no new books this week, so it’s straight onto the recap.

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• Plain Bad Heroines, by emily m. danforth (2/5 stars)
• Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, by Lisa Randall (3/5 stars)
• Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko (3/5 stars)
• Ancestors: The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials, by Alice Roberts (4/5 stars)
• Checkmate to Murder, by E.C.R. Lorac (4/5 stars)
• Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (2/5 stars)

…And that’s everything! How’s everyone doing?

Happy Saturday! I’m in the middle of watching the Wales v Argentina rugby game, with a British and Irish Lions game to follow later. So much rugby. <3 And books! It’s my day off, so it’s a good day for reading — and I haven’t been doing much of that this week!

New books:

I’ve had my eye on this one for a while. It’s actually releasing in hardback in the UK… but Bookshop.org have some paperback editions from a different press, and I snapped one up when I saw it was less than £10!

Received to review:

I was pretty fascinating by a book about working on dictionaries recently (by Kory Stamper), so a book about indices is more exciting to me than it sounds. And The Bone Wars sounds like a lot of fun.

Read this week:

Not much reading this week, as I said… alas.

Reviewed this week:

• The Map of Knowledge, by Violet Moller (4/5 stars)
• Hollywood Homicide, by Kellye Garrett (1/5 stars)
• After the Dragons, by Cynthia Zhang (5/5 stars)
• Magic Bites, by Ilona Andrews (4/5 stars)
• Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes and the Fight for Real Cheese, by Bronwen and Francis Percival (3/5 stars)

So that’s everything from me this week! How’re your shelves looking, folks?

Good afternoon! I ran out of pre-scheduled posts this week, and promptly ran headfirst into a busy time… but the backlog of reviews will be back soon, promise. In the meantime, I did get some new books!

Received to review

Thanks as ever to the publishers for these! I feel like Dead Silence is more my wife’s thing than mine, but we share a Kindle account so there won’t be any jealousy…

New books

Yesss, Subtle Blood is out — now I can start this trilogy! Have faithfully bought each book on release day, and the paperbacks as soon as possible… but until the HEA was assured, I couldn’t tuck in.

I’m also keen to read Honeycomb; I actually had an eARC through the Secret Readers programme, except then they decided to withdraw that month’s books early without explanation when I was 20% of the way through. It was infuriating.

Read this week

And that’s all for this week! How’s everyone doing? Got anything good this week?

Saturday again! It comes round so quickly. No real news from me this week, so straight into the book haul that I accidentally acquired…

Received to review

I always enjoy Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ideas — only one of her books has seriously clicked with me, but I enjoy them anyway.

Stacking the Shelves

A real mix, as usual! I’m excited about Black Water Sister and The Jasmine Throne, in particular; I’ve been wanting to get my hands on those for a while now, since I first heard about them. Likewise The Fabric of Civilization, actually — ever since I was going on a tear of reading books about sewing and textiles, at the start of the year.

The most impulsive purchase was Seashaken Houses, which would not usually be my thing. Something about the idea of a book about lonely lighthouses built onto rocky reefs got under my skin, apparently. I’ve gone with the whim and started reading it right away!

Books read this week

Not a big reading week — or a big finishing week, at least: I’m halfway through seven books at once!

Reviews posted this week

• And Only To Deceive, by Tasha Alexander (4/5 stars) [mystery/romance]
• The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, by John Steinbeck (3/5 stars) [arthuriana]
• White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (5/5 stars) [history]
• The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey (5/5 stars) [speculative fiction]
• The Secret Life of Books, by Tom Mole (3/5 stars) [history]

And that’s all from me this week! How’ve you all been doing? Have you got any great new books this week, or been reading anything that knocked your socks off?

Good afternoon, folks!

General update

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve been queuing up some of my backlog of reviews — mostly written during the Final Fantasy XIV dungeon “The Praetorium”, since you get good items from it at the moment… but it has looooong unskippable cutscenes!

What have I been up to? Mostly playing Final Fantasy XIV, along with the Mass Effect remaster. If any of you play FFXIV, say hi sometime, we can run a dungeon or something! I’m on Cerberus server, and I can let you know my avatar’s name…

I have been reading a bit, though; I’ve gone back to reading a whole bunch of books at once, and I’m using Beeminder to help track them and keep me from putting them down and forgetting about them for ages. Here’s how I’m doing with Maryn McKenna’s Beating Back the Devil, for example!

Stacking the Shelves

This week I don’t have too many new books in — last week’s splurge was actually kind of out of character for me lately. However, I did pick up Tasha Alexander’s A Fatal Waltz in paperback, since it came back into stock, and I’ve just got a new book to review because I remembered one of you guys talking about it recently, and it has a pretty cover.

Books read this week

I’ve actually finished a few books this week, which isn’t so common lately!

Reviews posted this week

• Death in Fancy Dress, by Anthony Gilbert (3/5 stars) – A classic mystery
• Word by Word, by Kory Stamper (4/5 stars) – Non-fiction about writing a dictionary
• A Murderous Relation, by Deanna Raybourn (4/5 stars) – historical mystery and romance
• The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison (5/5 stars) – Sherlock Holmes pastiche with a fantasy twist
• Long Live Latin, by Nicola Gardini (1/5 stars) – Non-fiction designed to get you reading Latin

So that’s it! What have you guys been stacking up, devouring, or flinging across the room in despair?