Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 27, 2026 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

Happy weekend! Here’s hoping the forecast spoke true and we’ll be getting some cooler weather here, because the heat is incredible. It is definitely too bloody hot (a song which is stuck in my cranium something fierce).

Books acquired this week

I wasn’t intending to get any books this week, but I definitely wasn’t going to say no when my wife had the opportunity to grab me volume two of The Wife Comes First, and I’d been looking for volume three of Guardian for a long time and panicking about the fact that almost nowhere had it…

I really want to get round to the next volume of The Wife Comes First sooner or later… and honestly I should start on Guardian before long, before I forget all the details of the world! The mythology is pretty complex, after all.

Posts from this week

As ever, there have been a lot of posts this week, so I’ll do a bit of a round-up. First, the reviews!

Graphic novel: Lady-Bird, by Fabrice Sapolsky and Dawn J. Starr (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
Fantasy: Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 8, by Chugong (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Sci-fi/fantasy/romance: Clean Sweep, by Ilona Andrews (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Non-fiction: 20th Century Fashion in Detail, by Claire Wilcox and Valerie D. Mendes (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Poetry: Parallax, by Sinéad Morrissey (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Crime: The Last Escape, by E.C.R. Lorac (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As ever, those don’t necessarily reflect this week’s reading, since I hold back reviews to try to get a diverse range over time.

Before we get into what I’ve been reading this week, here are the other posts I’ve made this week:

It’s been a lot for such a horribly hot week weather-wise! Unusually for people in the UK, my wife and I have a couple of portable A/C units, which have been lifesavers for us and the rabbits.

What I’m reading

I think last week I’d already fallen into my old habit of swapping between books after reading only a chapter or two, and rotating through that way. I’ve mostly kept that up this week, and I still think it’s working well for the way I’m feeling lately and is maybe a bit more natural to me than focusing on finishing a given book — unless the mood takes me, which it did a couple of times this week.

So without further ado, here are the books I finished reading this week:

I’m honestly impressed I finished everything, given general busyness and the heat — but my reading time was quite high this week, actually! Helped by one late night with a toothache after dental work (which fortunately settled down and was just because it was new, this time) where I couldn’t resist starting a new-to-me E.C.R. Lorac…

Anyway, this weekend I’m reading volume three of Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, have returned to Rachel Reid’s Game Changer, am knee-deep in Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile, and have started on Sophia Smith Galer’s How to Kill a Language. I’ll probably stick to those, though I have earmarked some library books that I really need to get round to, so it’s possible I’ll start on one of those.

Hope everyone has a good weekend — and to those in areas where it’s been really astoundingly hot, hope you’re doing alright and that the hot weather has ended or will end soon. Hang in there!

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

Review – The Last Escape

Posted June 26, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Last Escape

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 152
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
In this final detective novel to feature Superintendent Robert MacDonald, we find the police officer setting up his retirement plans on a hill farm to the south of Lunesdale. Not quite ready to retire, he buys the farm and installs a young couple to oversee his property while he's away detecting. Meanwhile, one foggy morning Rory Macshane who has just finished his first year of a 10-year prison sentence at Dartmoor sees his plans for escape come to fruition. He has hidden away bits and pieces of this and that over the past year and when the fog begins to thicken while he out on a work-gang he takes advantage of it and disappears into the mist with enough gear to help him truly escape.

About a month after the prison break, MacDonald accompanies the farmer who has been renting the adjoining land on an tour of the abandoned farm house. There they find that someone is lying dead in the house. Is it murder or an accident?

The Last Escape is actually E.C.R. Lorac’s last Macdonald novel, featuring him in Lunesdale visiting the farm he’s purchased ready for his retirement. He’s recruited by a local farmer to be an unimpeachable witness to something that might be construed as dodgy, and of course, in the process they discover the corpse of a man and the local farmer is attacked.

It’s not much of a puzzle, mystery-wise. Macdonald quickly figures out how the man entered the locked farmhouse, and the motives are pretty clear, as well as the fact that it’s tangled up with the escape of a prisoner that we see at the start of the book. As often with Lorac, what matters is the landscape and the characters, with Macdonald showcasing his usual humanity.

There’s a bit of an odd final chapter in which Macdonald talks about some regret/reservation about the prison system, declaring that he’s not a reformer but confiding his doubts about how prisoners are treated by warders etc. His opinions will come as no surprise to those used to his character, at least those who are attentive and have read a few of the Macdonald books (given that the detective’s opinions may not matter much to those just casually reading a classic mystery), but it feels a bit tacked on.

It doesn’t quite feel like it should be the last: Macdonald’s thinking of retiring, and definitely looking back at his career a little, but he’s not there yet. But this is where we’re left… All in all, not one of the best, but I enjoyed myself anyway.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, E.C.R. Lorac, mystery

Review – Parallax

Posted June 25, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Parallax

by Sinéad Morrissey

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 69
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Capturing David Niven on a magical marble escalator to heaven in 1946, recording L. S. Lowry’s studio after his death, and peering into the illicit worlds of the Victorian Mutoscope, these poems document what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs are arrested in time by photography. Assured and unsettling, Sinéad Morrissey’s poems explore the paradoxes in what is seen, read, and misread in the surfaces of the presented world.

Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry 2013

I thought that Sinéad Morrissey’s Parallax was technically good — several moments of “ah, I see what you did there” or “that’s interesting”, but it didn’t really sink in for me somehow? I didn’t feel any hook in the gut or particular connection with the poems, even the ones that felt quite personal (though some of these were not autobiographical, to be clear: Morrissey tries on a few different voices, but that sort of thing can still feel personal!).

It was all… fine… but I didn’t pick out anything I particularly wanted to quote or save. I guess Sinéad Morrissey’s poetry isn’t quite for me, even though I found it technically good and accessible enough to read.

I’d maybe try something else by Morrissey in future, but I wouldn’t go out of my way.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, poetry, Sinéad Morrissey

Review – 20th-Century Fashion in Detail

Posted June 24, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

20th Century Fashion in Detail

by Claire Wilcox, Valerie D. Mendes

Genres: Fashion, History, Non-fiction
Pages: 224
Series: Fashion in Detail
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
20th-Century Fashion in Detail reveals the elaborate embroidery, intricate pleats, and daring cuts that make up some of the most beautiful garments in the twentieth- century fashion collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, one of the world's top fashion and design museums. Authors Claire Wilcox and Valerie D. Mendes, leading fashion experts from the V&A, have written a book that will be an invaluable resource for students, collectors, and designers.

Including exquisite haute-couture pieces, from sequined Chanel ensembles to embellished Dior evening gowns, this revised and expanded edition features more than 30 new garments. Each piece is accompanied by detail photography and line drawings showing its complete construction. An extraordinary exploration of the techniques used by couturiers, 20th-Century Fashion in Detail will delight all followers of fashion.

Claire Wilcox and Valerie D. Mendes’ 20th-Century Fashion in Detail is a pretty good volume, with lots of detail. It’s not a period I’m super interested in for fashion, though I do like the designs of e.g. Madeleine Vionnet (felt surprised/sad there was only one of her items in here and definitely not a favourite of mine), but the volume’s a good one all the same, going through various types of detailing and cut in themed chapters.

As ever, I quibble about the fact that there’s no full-length picture for a lot of the garments. I know the point is to see the details, but sometimes it’s hard to understand what you’re seeing without the full image, even with the line-drawings that are included. It’s especially difficult if you’re non-visual like me, but I think it would be helpful for any reader, honestly.

Lovely photographs and some astounding details, good explanations thereof, and the line drawings are helpful — it’s a good volume, as usual for this series.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, fashion, history, non-fiction

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 24, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Linking up with Taking on a World of Words again!

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Jean-Yves Mollier’s A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop, which was quite focused on the history of French bookselling — not something I really know a lot about, and though the trends are different to those in the UK that I’m (slightly) more familiar with, there was a lot of new information. A bit dry, but overall interesting!

What are you currently reading?

I’m rotating through several books at once, which is working really well for me. Most prominent in my mind at the moment are A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World, singNsong’s Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 3, and E.C.R. Lorac’s The Last Escape. I’m enjoying all three. The chapter on Gay’s the Word discussing the police raids, and the following chapter on the vital role queer bookshops played in giving people information about AIDs really choked me up.

As for Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, I’m not far into the volume, but it’s fun to remember that it’s narrated by Dokja and does give a bit more of an insight into what he’s thinking than the manhwa.

Finally, I started The Last Escape on a bit of a whim. It’s actually chronologically the last book about Inspector Macdonald, but so far it doesn’t feel like it (even if he’s planning for his retirement). It’s very much of a piece with the other books set in Lunesdale, though.

What will you be reading next?

Probably The Wife Comes First vol 2, because my wife kindly grabbed that for me the very day after I finished the first volume, and I’m definitely enjoying it.

Other than that, I’m not sure: probably something from my 20 Books of Summer list, and/or a return to something I’ve had started for a while.

But, as ever… it depends on my whim.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Summer TBR

Posted June 23, 2026 by Nicky in General / 18 Comments

I am late to post today because I had a dentist appointment today (big sadness, but at least I should have a clean bill of dental health again), so I’ll make this quick! I recently posted my 20 Books of Summer list, but there are some others I’d love to get to…

The first five are non-fiction, and the second lot fiction!

It’s a bit of a random selection, but there’s a bunch of library books and recent purchases here, so I really ought to make time!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Clean Sweep

Posted June 23, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 8 Comments

Clean Sweep

by Ilona Andrews

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction
Pages: 228
Series: Innkeeper Chronicles #1
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
On the outside, Dina Demille is the epitome of normal. She runs a quaint Victorian Bed and Breakfast in a small Texas town, owns a Shih Tzu named Beast, and is a perfect neighbor, whose biggest problem should be what to serve her guests for breakfast. But Dina is...different: Her broom is a deadly weapon; her Inn is magic and thinks for itself. Meant to be a lodging for otherworldly visitors, the only permanent guest is a retired Galactic aristocrat who can’t leave the grounds because she’s responsible for the deaths of millions and someone might shoot her on sight. Under the circumstances, "normal" is a bit of a stretch for Dina.

And now, something with wicked claws and deepwater teeth has begun to hunt at night...Feeling responsible for her neighbors, Dina decides to get involved. Before long, she has to juggle dealing with the annoyingly attractive, ex-military, new neighbor, Sean Evans—an alpha-strain werewolf—and the equally arresting cosmic vampire soldier, Arland, while trying to keep her inn and its guests safe. But the enemy she’s facing is unlike anything she’s ever encountered before. It’s smart, vicious, and lethal, and putting herself between this creature and her neighbors might just cost her everything.

I read Ilona Andrews’ Clean Sweep previously at some point, but honestly I could barely remember the plot… though I’d meant to follow up and read the others in the series. It’s not my favourite of Andrews’ work, but then, I didn’t know how much I’d love the Kate Daniels series just from the first book, so I want to read the ones I already own, at least, and see if it properly gets its hooks in.

For now, I’m kinda… irritated, more than anything, by the male posturing by both potential love interests, and the fact that there’s a love triangle. Neither of the potential male leads have particularly impressed me at this point, with the way they both behave to Dina (though she could stand to be a touch less reckless if she’s really planning to protect her inn alone and without allies).

That said, the innkeepers are a fun concept, and a few interesting potential plot threads and/or backgrounds for world-building are introduced. It’s a bit of a kitchen sink sort of world with apparent magic alongside sci-fi elements, and some of the stuff that Dina alludes to could definitely use some expansion to flesh things out — which I’m assuming happens in later books.

Enjoyable, overall, but I’m not 100% on board yet.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Ilona Andrews, SF/F

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: discussions, Fantasy With Friends, SF/F

Review – Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 8

Posted June 21, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Solo Leveling

by Chugong

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels
Pages: 272
Series: Solo Leveling (light novel) #8
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
"MAY YOUR COURAGE SAVE YOUR WORLD." The Monarch of Destruction and the armies of Chaos have descended upon Earth, leaving nothing but death and carnage in their wake. The fate of humanity lies in the hands of the newly crowned Shadow Monarch, Jinwoo Sung. Who will be the final victor when the dust settles on this timeless feud?

And more importantly, will there be anything left of the world to save?

The eighth and final volume of Chugong’s Solo Leveling is a bit of a mix. It contains the last few chapters of the main story, then a bunch of more or less inconsequential side stories (with just a few that seem really important, and some that are just comic, or filling in some gaps), then finally an epilogue that does feel significant.

It leads to the volume feeling very piecemeal and disorganised. Perhaps the side stories should’ve been after the epilogue, which would’ve helped… or split into a separate volume, and previous volumes each been expanded by a chapter or so to fit all the main story into seven volumes. It feels a bit sad to end with such a meh volume, because the main story itself isn’t bad at all, it’s just overshadowed by what feels like filler.

Some of the side stories are fun (like ones that show the POV of Jinwoo’s minions), and the ending is epic and a little sad. I think I’m over it now and don’t need to read more; I kinda wish it’d been self-contained and not been obvious setup for another series. It was fun while it lasted, though!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chugong, light novels, SF/F

Review – Lady-Bird

Posted June 21, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Lady-Bird

by Fabrice Sapolsky, Dawn J. Starr

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 120
Rating:

Synopsis:
Two young women, Vega and Mina, living 100 years apart share the same strange abilities. They hold the genetic key to saving the world from all known viruses and diseases, but they've been captured and taken advantage of by people more interested by power and money than anything else. In 1909, Vega is trapped. Forced to be a warrior when all she wants is love. In the present, Mina has escaped. Helped by Tamara, a former astronaut and her scientist friend Marques, she has a chance to use her amazing abilities and spread her wings to learn the truth about her origins.

I didn’t really get into Fabrice Sapolsky and Dawn J. Starr’s Lady-Bird. I don’t know the original story that it is partly based on, partly a homage too, which doesn’t help (though I don’t think it’s a commonly known one either), and I didn’t really like the art very much.

The story jerks around a bit, and it just… isn’t very clear how things come together, or what people’s motivations are. It doesn’t help that it does appear to be a volume one, rather than a full story, which… wasn’t clear from the cover/listing on Comics Plus. It doesn’t get very far, which isn’t so surprising in light of that, but is pretty unsatisfying.

Not one for me, overall. It did make me kinda curious about the original it’s based on/referencing, though.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Dawn J. Starr, Fabrice Sapolsky, graphic novels, SF/F