Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted September 19, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Happy weekend! Despite my recent book sprees, this weekend I’m off to a book shop (or four) after a long week, while Lisa’s going to a spinning skill-share session in honour of Worldwide Spin in Public Day. After all, I have some book vouchers I could spend! So, um, maybe I will have even more goodies next time we meet here.

For now, let’s get to this week’s roundup…

Books I’ve acquired this week

I haven’t bought anything since my birthday spree (see the last three StS posts, which cover all that), but I did get two books for review this week, and one book via my British Library Crime Classics subscription.

Cover of Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm Cover of The Double Dorothy by Olivia Waite Cover of Eat, Drink and Be Murdered, ed. Martin Edwards

I’m saving Our Cut of Salt for October, since it fits beautifully into the spooky theme of the Haunted Shelf readathon — but I’ve already dug into The Double Dorothy and Eat, Drink and Be Murdered, and indeed polished them off.

(If you’re curious about Haunted Shelf, it’s running this year on Litsy and Discord, and all the details are at the link above.)

Posts from this week

As ever, I’ve been posting aplenty, so here’s the usual roundup! Reviews first:

As ever, don’t forget that even 2/5 stars is a book that I found “okay”, and when I say 3/5 stars means “liked it”, I’m not joking! And as per usual, these aren’t books I’ve necessarily read recently, since I have a huge backlog of pre-written reviews that I post slowly to avoid spamming everyone.

With that, let’s move on to the other posts:

Comments on any of my posts are always welcome, of course, even if they’re older!

What I’m reading

I’ve been focusing on just reading according to my whim, and that’s been paying off this week with a bit of a pick-up in the number of books I finished. There have been some disappointing moments (Illumino, sadly), but mostly I’ve had a fun week, enjoying all of my other reads. Here are the books I’ve finished this week:

Cover of The Villain's White Halo vol 2 by Hao Da Yi Juan Wei Sheng Zhi Cover of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age by Eleanor Barraclough Cover of Let Him Lie by Ianthe Jerrold Cover of Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho Yeeun

Cover of Illumino by Michelle P. Brown Cover of The Double Dorothy by Olivia Waite Cover of Eat, Drink and Be Murdered, ed. Martin Edwards

This weekend, I’m not actually sure what I might read; I only have one book on the go at the moment, the third volume of The Villain’s White Halo. I’ll probably spend some time with that, and otherwise… who knows? As ever, I’ll stick with my whims.

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

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.

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Review – Love Sonnets and Elegies

Posted September 19, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Love Sonnets and Elegies

Love Sonnets & Elegies

by Louise Labé

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 121
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Louise Labé is commonly regarded as the most original woman poet of the French Renaissance. The daughter of an illiterate rope maker in Lyon, known to her contemporaries for her unusual learning as well as her skills as a singer and lutanist, Labé was in her thirties when she published her complete Works in 1555 and then disappeared from the scene, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth century. Her love poetry, made famous by Rilke’s German versions, is published here with the originals en face and newly rendered into English by award-winning translator Richard Sieburth, who also includes a biographical chronology of the poet, notes, and an informative afterword to this edition. These Love Sonnets and Elegies confirm Labé’s reputation as the first modern Sappho.


I know very little about Louise Labé, but I was digging around in the National Poetry Library’s offerings for translated poetry, and dug up Love Sonnets & Elegies, a selection of… well, it’s in the title. The introduction gives a little bit of context about who Labé was (albeit I also went off and read Wikipedia and a few other pages to try to puzzle together a bit more).

The edition is bilingual, and in the ebook it’s all just continuous rather than a facing translation, which I found a bit annoying — it was harder to glance back and forth between the two, and since I can read French quite well, I did want to, while not being so good at French that I felt confident about reading French poetry easily…

I enjoyed Labé’s work quite a bit, in any case, especially when she slipped in references to Catullus. This stanza struck me from one of the poems:

How cruel a thing is fate, how inhumane!
Here I am, recovering from a scorpion’s bite,
Asking its venom to make me well again.

I found myself thinking for some reason, reading Labé’s poetry here, that she’d have done a wonderful voice for Vergil’s Dido.

All in all, a pretty good read. And I’d love a full-length biography of Labé, I think.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Book Blogger Hop: Overlooked Book

Posted September 18, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

A banner for a "Book Blogger Hop", with a photo of a bunny wearing glasses and its paws on a book

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 bigging up a book you love and think doesn’t get enough attention:

If you could recommend one overlooked book, what would it be and why?

This sounds quite like the prompt from the week before last, but I’ll pick something else to talk about this time! And I’ll go with a different genre, too: let’s talk about the work of E.C.R. Lorac, a classic crime writer who turned out some excellent mysteries with human characters and vivid settings, but rarely gets spoken about now (and is certainly not considered one of the Queens of Crime).

But the prompt says “one overlooked book”, so I need to pick a specific book — and that’s harder, because my favourite book by E.C.R. Lorac isn’t in the series that I love best overall. So, let’s go with Accident by Design. It’s one of her Inspector Macdonald books which hasn’t yet been republished by the British Library Crime Classics series (yet?), and features her usual ability to evoke characters and settings… and the culprit surprised me because it was someone I really didn’t want it to be.

I generally enjoy all her books, though, and it’s hard to say where to start exactly: I don’t think I’ve even read the first Inspector Macdonald book! There’s a certain amount of continuity between the books, but not so much that you’ll be missing anything if you start in the middle.

Oh, and you wanted to know my actual favourite? That would be Death of an Author, the only one I’ve given five stars, which has been republished by the British Library Crime Classics series.

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Review – Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (manhwa), vol 2

Posted September 17, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (manhwa), vol 2

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

by Sleepy-C, singNsong, Umi

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 240
Series: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (manhwa) #2
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Three Ways to Survive the Apocalypse is Dokja's favorite novel. Or it was...until it became reality. He barely survived the chaotic first moments of the new world thanks to his knowledge of the story, but the cruel Scenarios give him no time for rest. Isolated from his group and surrounded by horrific creatures, things look grim for Dokja...until an extraordinary presence approaches. It's time for the only reader of TWSA to meet its protagonist-the Regressor Junghyeok Yu!

The second volume of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhwa (adapted from singNsong’s novel by UMI and illustrated by Sleepy-C) introduces us to a bit more of the world, with Dokja meeting Junghyeok, making a deal with the goblin Bihyeong and meeting the next party member, Huiwon. It’s still very introductory steps into the world of ORV, but I’d say by the end of this volume, you’d definitely have a strong grasp on the shape of the story and background of the world.

I really enjoy the way Dokja remembers what he’s read and comes up with (or remembers) creative ways around the difficulties. I feel like this was a bit less well-explained in the manhwa here, but on the other hand, some of the other background stuff has seemed clearer (maybe because it’s a bit simplified/differently translated).

Love the art, looking forward to more, especially while awaiting more of the light novel! Not that the story in vol 2 has caught up to the end of vol 2 of the light novel, so I’ve got quite a bit more of the manhwa to go before I get onto new-to-me stories.

[NB: this post is going up long after I read more of the manhwa and indeed more of the light novel. I just have a long backlog of pre-written reviews that I space out so’s not to spam people.]

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – Twelve Caesars

Posted September 17, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Twelve Caesars

Twelve Caesars

by Mary Beard

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 384
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns.

Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority.

From Beard’s reconstruction of Titian’s extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII’s famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created.

Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars is not really about the Caesars per se, neither Suetonius’ canonical Twelve or the wider run of Roman emperors. Instead, it’s about images of the Caesars: the ways we’ve interpreted and reinterpreted ancient and apparently ancient sculptures and images, even the heads on coins, trying to figure out which (if any) give us a real idea of what the Caesars looked like, and the replications we’ve made of those images and what they say.

It’s fascinating to realise how contested some of even the most famous images are, and the mix-ups that has led to even with non-ancient art. It’d be massive egg-on-the-face for a lot of museums, scholars and collectors… if it was more widely known and if even experts don’t make the same errors.

My copy has in-line illustrations in colour, which is a trend in the last few years of non-fiction which I heartily approve of. It means Beard can refer to all kinds of artwork and readers can actually look at them and follow the argument better, though some of the images are quite small and it’s still easier to look them up in a version you can zoom in on.

Beard’s a good writer, clear and compelling, and I really enjoyed this one all round.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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WWW Wednesday

Posted September 16, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Cover of Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho YeeunWhat have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Cho Yeeun’s Teddy Bears Never Die, which I ultimately liked quite a bit, though the genre is a bit hard to pin down — at times it just feels like a gritty thriller, and then oops! Misshapen vengeful ghosts, a possessed teddy bear, and the classic disturbed remains of a mass graveyard (where people were buried alive).

Before that it was Ianthe Jerrold’s Let Him Die; another new-to-me Golden Age author, thanks to Kobo Plus!

Cover of Illumino by Michelle P. BrownWhat are you currently reading?

I’m still working on Michelle P. Brown’s Illumino, and I still think it wants to be a more general history rather than a history of X in Y things. Which is fine, but I picked it up for the history of X in Y things, so it’s a little irritating — though at least it’s a gorgeous volume.

I’m also now reading the latest British Library Crime Classic, which is a short story collection: Eat, Drink and Be Murdered. I’m having fun with that, as usual, and I think it’s funny that so far there’s been more than one story where a knowledge of wine points to the culprit.

I also started the third and final volume of The Villain’s White Halo, which is certainly going places.

What will you be reading next?

Not a clue! I am trying to be particularly capricious and follow my whims entirely for a bit to help get over having maybe planned a bit too firmly in August, since I’ll be taking part in Haunted Shelf in October, and I do have a loose TBR for that.

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Review – Suicide Excepted

Posted September 15, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Suicide Excepted

Suicide Excepted

by Cyril Hare

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 220
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Inspector Mallett's stay at the country house hotel of Pendlebury Old Hall has been a letdown, room, food and service, and he longs for it to end. His last trial is to listen when a boorish old man, whose family once owned the house, joins his table. The next day the man is dead and Mallett finds himself investigating the suspicious 'suicide'.

I can’t remember where exactly Cyril Hare’s Suicide Excepted popped up that led me to add it via Kobo Plus — maybe it was just recommended by Kobo! I hadn’t come across Hare before, at any rate, but he was writing during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, and therefore falls into my interests pretty neatly, and picking up Suicide Excepted proved to be a good decision.

The story is a bit unusual in that it opens following a police detective who gets caught up in a mystery: someone speaks to him the night before they’re found dead in portentous tones that seem to render a verdict of suicide the most likely and sensible outcome. The book then switches to the perspective of Anne and Stephen, the man’s children, as they try to figure out a way to overturn that verdict in order to gain the man’s life insurance money.

I had two theories in mind throughout, and considered one more likely than the other just because of the structure of the book… but in the end it was my second theory which turned out to be correct, which was a nice surprise — I thought the mystery aspect was really well handled. I feel really sorry for Anne, given the way her brother and fiancé were behaving, and given how things turned out. I don’t quite understand exactly what she figured out, but she was pretty badly treated by both men all round, and I do wish we’d seen a glimpse of her moving on.

In any case, I enjoyed how it worked out and had a good time with this one; I’ll read more of Cyril Hare’s work in future.

Rating: 4/5 (“really like it”)

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Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Met

Posted September 15, 2026 by Nicky in General / 26 Comments

This week’s prompt is about authors I’ve met, and let’s see… there’s been quite a few, since I’ve been to cons, but let’s stick to the ones that felt important at the time or have really stuck in my head!

  1. Robin Hobb.
    She did a reading in the local Waterstones when I was a teenager, and me and my mother were reading her books at the time. Of course we went, and asked questions after the reading.
  2. Alastair Reynolds.
    I got my sister back into reading by letting her try Century Rain, sitting on the floor in my room next to the shelves. She whipped right through it and has read it many a time since! So when I saw he was doing a signing in Cardiff, and my sister was around, of course I dragged her there — and though she was very shy, did manage to help her go up and talk to him.
  3. Jo Walton.
    Back in the days of Livejournal, we followed each other, and she was very kind and encouraging, and we’ve hung out on a few occasions when she was in Wales (when I still lived there) or at a convention I was attending.
  4. Ada Palmer.
    I met her through Jo Walton, and have heard her sing stuff from Sundown. Needless to say I then enthusiastically supported the Kickstarter, and it is not uncommon to hear me somehow attempting to sing both parts of “My Brother, My Enemy” while doing chores (it doesn’t work very well, but I have fun). I have also read (some of) her work, though!
  5. Marie Brennan.
    This was at a con and I haaaad to get my books signed. She had actually read my reviews, I was stunned!
  6. Tanya Huff.
    I got books signed for both me and my sister, since we both loved (different!) books of Huff’s quite a bit; my sister had been going through some stuff, and Tanya Huff wrote a very kind and encouraging note to her.
  7. Scott Lynch.
    My wife is a big fan, and we had a whoooole odyssey trying to get to his signing due to two pairs of my jeans falling apart while at the con. We ventured out, found me new jeans, and made it back in time for the signing. Whew.
  8. Martha Wells.
    I didn’t have anything to sign, and it is in the queue for the signing bewailing that fact that Lali of Portal Bookshop came to my aid! I don’t honestly remember if I even said anything coherent to Martha Wells. Worldcon is quite overwhelming, and I think I might’ve been fairly done, ahaha.
  9. Rainbow Rowell.
    I went to this signing with another blogger I’d met at Angry Robot’s “Robot for a Day” one-day working-at-a-publisher experience. I don’t think I’d read much of Rowell’s work yet, but she was kind and friendly, and made me reaaally want to read more of her work.
  10. Sarah Pinsker.
    Okay, this is actually cheating a bit because we haven’t met in-person (nor spoken for a very long time), but we used to be part of the same invite-only discussion group on Goodreads, The Alternative World. It’s unbelievable how much influence those folks had on my reading!

I’m surprised how difficult I found this to put together, but I guess it’s partly that I’m not super into readings and signings, so I go to them less than some other readers. They stand out to me most when they’re just a little bit meaningful on both sides, like Marie Brennan having known about my book reviews… even though of course it’s all in a day’s work for authors who are signing at bookshops and conventions.

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Review – Brimstone Slipstream

Posted September 14, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Brimstone Slipstream

Brimstone Slipstream

by Matt Weber

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 65
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

It's the eve of the biggest dragon race in the city of Yemareir. Zaya Shearwater and her wife, Kiriki, have spent the year shooting up the rankings, and now they're favored to win. But how did a team of women from Yemareir's roughest precincts become the favorites in a sport where most winners buy their victories?

Doctor of Journalism Shenireen Agama wants to know. Through interviews with Zaya, Kiriki, and the ground crew that's become their family, she begins to weave a story. Its threads are love, desperation, biology, and magic – all bound together with the early history of Yemareir, where Zaya and Kiriki's ancestors fled centuries ago to escape the pogroms of a mad king, and where the colonists resettling the ruins of an ancient city have just discovered that it is home to dragons…

Matt Weber’s Brimstone Slipstream is a short story which sets the scene for a full length novel (or possibly a series), but offers in itself quite a lot of world and character building, giving us a picture of one family of racers in a world of semi-illegal underground dragon racing that’s rife with racism and people who try to pay to win.

The format is basically that of a magazine article by a journalist digging into the scene and following a pair of upstart riders who are working together to use a trait normally considered intrinsic to their people, “empathy” (which is sort of… telepathy-ish communication with animals) to give them an advantage at dragon racing. We get the journalist’s-eye view of the subjects of the article, with all their evasions, prickly edges, and the things they won’t say.

I wouldn’t say no to reading more in this world, but it’s also a fairly satisfying story just for its own sake, despite the relatively low page count, with quite a bit of world-building and a good sense of a wider world around the story. You can kinda sense the ending coming (the note “after publication” of the article), because the foreboding is wound through it: they’re doing a dangerous job.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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Fantasy with Friends: Fantasy and Tech

Posted September 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Fantasy With Friends: A Disccusion Meme hosted by Pages Unbound

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about technology in fantasy:

What role do you think technology should play in fantasy? Some authors try to avoid it (ex. worlds set in an imagined past before modernization or worlds where wizards simply do not use telephones or television even though they have been invented). Yet other authors try to imagine what a world with both technology and magic would look like (ex. The Legend of Korra, Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series). Can magic and technology work well together? What questions does an author have to address to make it work?

In the end, it very much depends on the world and whether things feel like they fit. There are definitely worlds where the two can sit side by side, or where magic and technology are in conflict or synergy in an interesting way — saying that makes me think of Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books, for instance, which features the world flipping between magic and technology regularly. It can be a very fertile way to add depth to the world, introduce obstacles to the plot, and give neat ways to mix the two up together.

Sometimes the two can just co-exist because it’s a fantasy world of the author’s own creation rather than historical fantasy or something. The problem is that it can be tricky to get that to “feel right” to the reader: it’s a regular complaint in Final Fantasy XIV, to talk about a gaming example for a moment. Even though Allagan and magitek technology has always sat alongside magic in that world, sometimes the whiplash is really strong to players, even though I don’t think it’s actually badly done. The expectation that a fantasy world won’t have certain types of technology is strong, and aside from pure plausibility about how elements fit together, authors have to think about whether reader expectations will trip them up.

As with other stuff people feel strongly about like anachronisms, I’m pretty loosey-goosey myself. Put together something that feels coherent, and I’m fine with it!

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