WWW Wednesday

Posted November 20, 2024 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

Wednesday again! Here we go.

Cover of The Loki Variations by Karl JohnsonWhat have you recently finished reading?

The Loki Variations, by Karl Johnson, which is a bit of a discussion of the various different portrayals of the Norse god Loki in popular culture (including, but not limited to, the MCU). I quite liked it: Johnson’s enthusiasm for Loki stories and the dissection of Marvel’s influence, treating the whole subject as serious and worthy of discussion (which it is), etc.

Loki stories aren’t entirely my thing, but Johnson makes me want to seek out a couple more just for fun.

Cover of The River has Roots by Amal El-MohtarWhat are you currently reading?

Nothing very actively; I have a few books on the go, but all of them have waited at least a few days since I last interacted with them, except for my current Serial Reader choice, The Secret Adversary. It’s Christie’s first Tommy and Tuppence novel. It’s… okay? I’m really not as much of a Christie fan as some.

Other than that, I’m partway through my e-ARC of Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots, which I’m enjoying, but needed to charge my ereader to continue with. I’ve actually done that now, so I’ll get back to that soon.

Cover of The Spellshop by Sarah Beth DurstWhat will you be reading next?

I’m just starting The Spellshop, because it’s a book of the month on the Bookly Discord. For the same reason I’m about to start The Pumpkin Spice Café, about which I see fairly mixed reviews. The theme was “cosy fantasy”, and as far as I can tell The Pumpkin Spice Café is a romance (and not romantasy, either), but I enjoy romance in general so I’m giving it a shot anyway.

I’m also likely to read some more of 404 Ink’s Inklings series, which are satisfyingly random in topic. Not sure which one, though.

How about you?

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Top Ten Tuesday: Oldest Books on my TBR

Posted November 19, 2024 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

This week’s theme from That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday prompts is about the oldest books on your TBR: not the ones you’ve had the longest, but the ones which were published longest ago.

Mine’s not going to be 100% reflective of the oldest books I’m likely to read, because I only put books on my TBR on StoryGraph if I own them, and I’m likely to read old books through Serial Reader/Project Gutenberg and the library, on a whim, rather than add them to my backlog. A few years ago there’d have been a lot of works from, like, the 1500s or something, but that’s not really my field now and I read all the texts I was interested in back then. Sooo given my predilection for classic mysteries, my guess is that this entire list is going to be taken up with those…

Here we go; let’s see if I’m right!

Cover of Mr Pottermack's Oversight by R. Austin Freeman Cover of The Floating Admiral by the Detection Club Cover of Death at Breakfast by John Rhode Cover of Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells

  1. Mr Pottermack’s Oversight, by R. Austin Freeman (1931). This is a classic mystery, reissued recently by the British Library Crime Classics series. I want to get around to it soon, because I rather liked Freeman’s The Eye of Osiris.
  2. The Floating Admiral, by the Detection Club (1931). Also a classic mystery, this one written collaboratively by fourteen members of the famous Detection Club, a group of classic crime writers (which still exists today). The group includes Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, so I’m definitely curious to read this one. It’s a bit gimmicky, though, so it’s not at the top of my list. I suspect it’ll be a bit of a mix in terms of quality/style.
  3. Malice Aforethought, by Francis Iles (1931). I have a couple of others books by Iles/Anthony Berkeley hanging out among the oldest on my TBR, including Before the Fact (1932) and Jumping Jenny (1933). His books are huge classics of the genre and very influential, and I’ve really enjoyed some of them. That said, Iles/Berkeley could be rather misogynistic, and I haven’t felt like risking it yet with the ones that remain. It requires a certain mood and willingness to put up with it.
  4. Death at Breakfast, by John Rhode (1935). John Rhode’s mysteries are always solid, workmanlike and enjoyable. They don’t generally have characters with huge personalities (even his series detective, Priestley, doesn’t really stand out in the way that, say, Christie’s Poirot does), and you basically know what you’re getting into, making them excellent comfort reading. I’ve been holding onto Death at Breakfast for the right moment for a while.
  5. Murder in the Bookshop, by Carolyn Wells (1936). I really should get to this one, because I do love murder mysteries set in and around bookshops, libraries, museums, etc. I know very little about it or the author, as I don’t think I’ve read any of her other works.
  6. Antidote to Venom, by Freeman Wills Crofts (1938). Crofts was really prolific, but I find his work kind of… unmemorable? And a little slow. Still, this one is in the British Library Crime Classics series, and I do want to get round to it.
  7. Rocket to the Morgue, by Anthony Boucher (1942). This stands out from the group by being an American classic, and thus out of my usual wheelhouse. I spotted it in a local indie bookshop recently, though, and was curious about the title/cover. Once I read that it was based on Boucher’s experience of being a pulp sci-fi writer, the collision of genres I love made it seem like an excellent choice!
  8. Death Knows No Calendar, by John Bude (1942). Bude is another of those classic mystery writers who will generally always write something solid and entertaining, without flair. You know what you’re getting into, and therein lies the pleasure.
  9. The Sunday Pigeon Murders, by Craig Rice (1942). About this author and book I know virtually nothing; I got it as part of an “advent calendar” of classic mysteries, and haven’t got round to it yet.
  10. Dramatic Murder, by Elizabeth Anthony (1948). This one’s a Christmas mystery, so I’m saving it for December — I actually only just got it last month, from my British Library Crime Classics subscription. As far as I know, the author is new to me, so I’m quite curious.

Cover of Antidote to Venom by Freeman Wills Crofts Cover of Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher Cover of Death in White Pakamas & Death Knows No Calendar by John Bude Cover of The Sunday Pigeon Murders by Craig Rice Cover of Dramatic Murder by Elizabeth Anthony

Aaand as predicted, it’s classic crime all the way down! I hadn’t realised I had so many hanging around unread, I’ll be honest. I tend to hoard them away from myself “for when I need them”, and then forget I have ’em stashed waiting for their moment.

Now might well be their moment, given my reading slump — where’s that copy of Death at Breakfast? When we move, I swear I’m designing the room layouts to include at least two entire floor-to-ceiling bookshelves for my classic crime collection, so I can keep them all in the same place…

Very curious to see everyone else’s lists!

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Review – The Lost Words

Posted November 18, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Lost Words

The Lost Words

by Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 112
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary -- widely used in schools around the world -- was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around forty common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. The list of these "lost words" included acorn, adder, bluebell, dandelion, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter, and willow. Among the words taking their place were attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, cut-and-paste, and voice-mail. The news of these substitutions -- the outdoor and natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual -- became seen by many as a powerful sign of the growing gulf between childhood and the natural world.

Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a "spell book" that will conjure back twenty of these lost words, and the beings they name, from acorn to wren. By the magic of word and paint, they sought to summon these words again into the voices, stories, and dreams of children and adults alike, and to celebrate the wonder and importance of everyday nature. The Lost Words is that book -- a work that has already cast its extraordinary spell on hundreds of thousands of people and begun a grass-roots movement to re-wild childhood across Britain, Europe, and North America.

Like The Lost Spells, The Lost Words is a collection of poetry by Robert Macfarlane, illustrated by Jackie Morris. This one is specifically aimed at children, and tries to bring a little magic back to how we relate to wild creatures, and save some of the words children don’t seem to care about any more (like “conker”).

Both books feel like the poet was having fun; though I didn’t universally love the poems (sometimes a rhyme is too obvious, or a particular word just stuck out as wrong), it was a fun read. And the illustrations are, of course, gorgeous — maybe I even prefer the ones in this book a tiny bit more than the other, though the scale in the library book I borrowed helped to let me study the detail (it was huge!).

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The Mountain in the Sea

Posted November 17, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 456
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

There are creatures in the water of Con Dao.
To the locals, they’re monsters.
To the corporate owners of the island, an opportunity.
To the team of three sent to study them, a revelation.

Their minds are unlike ours.
Their bodies are malleable, transformable, shifting.
They can communicate.
And they want us to leave.

When pioneering marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen is offered the chance to travel to the remote Con Dao Archipelago to investigate a highly intelligent, dangerous octopus species, she doesn’t pause long enough to look at the fine print. DIANIMA- a transnational tech corporation best known for its groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence – has purchased the islands, evacuated their population and sealed the archipelago off from the world so that Nguyen can focus on her research.

But the stakes are high: the octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence and there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of their advancements. And no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.

Lately, I’ve had a lot of trouble getting immersed in books like I (think I) used to. I’ll read 50 pages and feel like it’s been forever; read 10 pages and get distracted by wondering if that email I’m waiting for has come in; a 500 page book is just daunting because it seems like it’ll take forever. And I know, I know, it’s all the fragmentation caused by mobile phones, etc, etc — but while I was reading Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, I wasn’t paying any mind to that. My brain was quiet and I was totally focused on the story; I say this by way of introduction because I think it bears saying when a book cuts across that fidgeting and demands attention.

There are essentially three threads to the story, which twine together but never quite meet: there’s Ha Nguyen, a scientist, who is brought to a remote island owned by a company called DIANIMA in order to study octopus behaviour that appears potentially much more intelligent than baseline; there’s Rustem, a hacker with a unique way of thinking, who is given a fascinating task to hack into an extremely complex artificial intelligence in order to use it as a weapon; and there’s Eiko, a captive aboard an AI-controlled fishing ship, forced to clean and sort the catch with no sign of escape.

Of the three stories, Dr Ha’s is the most fascinating, and I admit it could be a little annoying to switch to Eiko or Rustem. Ultimately, I’m not sure their stories were entirely necessary: I admire the overall effect, the details that the other two stories lent to Dr Ha’s, and the satisfying click as things came together, but Eiko’s story didn’t lend a lot to it (and his mind palace is overdescribed for something so ultimately useless to the plot — though I think in terms of themes, it does add to the overall inquiry into how thought works).

Despite how much I liked the reading experience, I think there are still things the book could’ve dug into deeper. Evrim’s cognition is important to this question of intelligence, and yet it’s rather brushed under the rug by Ha, who readily declares them to be human all of a sudden, based on the fact that they can interact with humans on human terms. I’m not sure I agree with that definition, or the simplification of it all. There were tantalising bits of inquiry here about artificial intelligence as well as alien (octopus) intelligence, but it feels like it didn’t quite go deep enough; perhaps Eiko’s thread should’ve been reduced in order to give more space for that.

The same goes for the octopus cognition, really: sometimes Ha comes to conclusions rapidly based on fairly little evidence. Is something built of human skulls necessarily an altar? Does it necessarily mean that they’re worshipping humans or trying to appease them? Are you sure it’s not a war trophy?

That makes the book sound unsatisfying, and I don’t think it is: personally, I found it fascinating and riveting. There’s just so much space to expand, as well.

Rating: 4/5

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted November 16, 2024 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

Oh boy, it’s not been a week for reading. I did carve out some catchup time for my classes, though, and I trust I’m on the way back to an even keel.

Books acquired this week

First off, the books I snagged at the library this week:

Cover of Starling House by Alix E. Harrow Cover of Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan Cover of Where the Dead Brides Gather by Nuzo Onoh

I didn’t adore Alix E. Harrow’s work that I’ve read so far, but I did enjoy it well enough, so I thought I’d give Starling House a shot. I’ve been curious about Fathomfolk a while, and I had the idea at the back of my mind that I’d seen someone say good things about Where the Dead Brides Gather, so… another one to give a shot.

I did also get a new book from my wife this week, as well. There’s a couple more coming, but for now it’s just this one:

Cover of All the Violet Tiaras, by Jean Menzies

Looks like a quick read, and I’ve been curious about this series of short books for a while.

Posts from this week

As usual, here’s a roundup of what I’ve been posting this week:

Other posts:

What I’m reading

I’ve really been struggling to read this week, so I only have one book lined up ready for me to review here at some point soon:

Cover of Bitter Waters by Vivian Shaw

Not sure what exactly I’ll read this weekend, but I’ve made a start on All the Violet Tiaras, and I’m partway through Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots. So those are good guesses for where I’ll start. I’ll probably also try to get back to The Other Olympians, which is a fascinating lookback at the development of sex verification as a concept in sport (and of course all the transphobia that goes with it). I hope to find a bit more time for it this week!

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, as usual!

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Review – The Secret Life of the Owl

Posted November 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Secret Life of the Owl

The Secret Life of the Owl

by John Lewis-Stempel

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 88
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

‘Dusk is filling the valley. It is the time of the gloaming, the owl-light.
Out in the wood, the resident tawny has started calling, Hoo-hoo-hoo-h-o-o-o.’

There is something about owls. They feature in every major culture from the Stone Age onwards. They are creatures of the night, and thus of magic. They are the birds of ill-tidings, the avian messengers from the Other Side. But owls – with the sapient flatness of their faces, their big, round eyes, their paternal expressions – are also reassuringly familiar. We see them as wise, like Athena’s owl, and loyal, like Harry Potter's Hedwig. Human-like, in other words. No other species has so captivated us.

In The Secret Life of the Owl, John Lewis-Stempel explores the legends and history of the owl. And in vivid, lyrical prose, he celebrates all the realities of this magnificent creature, whose natural powers are as fantastic as any myth.

John Lewis-Stempel’s The Secret Life of the Owl is a bit of a miscellany covering all things owl, mostly focused on owls in the UK. It’s a quick read, less than 90 pages, and includes profiles of the owls that live in or visit the UK, and a bit of an examination of how owls fit into our landscape — both how we react to them, and how other British birds react to them. As such, there are a few poems quoted throughout, in and amongst the facts and figures, and a couple of black-and-white illustrations.

It did feel a little disorganised to me, like Lewis-Stempel was just pouring out anything he could think of about owls. The enthusiasm is endearing, as is the description of his personal fascination with owls, and his interactions with them. Even though it felt a bit badly organised, it was in the way that information can be disorganised when someone is passionately telling you about a pet topic, which I didn’t really mind.

I don’t feel like I knew a lot about owls before reading, other than some vague bits that filter through popular culture, plus a lifetime of living with intelligent people who watch and discuss documentaries and read this kind of book. I learned a few new things from this book, though I don’t know how much I’ll retain — either way, it was fun.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Rope’s End, Rogue’s End

Posted November 14, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Rope’s End, Rogue’s End

Rope's End, Rogue's End

by E.C.R. Lorac

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 249
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Wulfstane Manor, a rambling old country house with many unused rooms, winding staircases, and a maze of cellars, had been bequeathed to Veronica Mallowood and her brother Martin. The last time the large family of Mallowoods had all foregathered under the ancestral roof was on the occasion of their father's funeral, and there had been one of those unholy rows which not infrequently follow the reading of a will. That was some years ago, and as Veronica found it increasingly difficult to go on paying for the upkeep of Wulfstane, she summoned another family conference -- a conference in which Death took a hand.

Rope's End, Rogue's End is, of course, an Inspector MacDonald case, in which that popular detective plays a brilliant part.

Rope’s End, Rogue’s End isn’t one of my favourite E.C.R. Lorac books so far, though when I say that you always need to take into account that I think she was a really great writer. A three-star rating for an E.C.R. Lorac book is always relative (for me) to what I know her best books can be. In this case, she didn’t really exercise her talent for likeable characters, with everyone in the Mallowood family being difficult and argumentative, their relationships always rocky.

What I did think about a lot is that E.C.R. Lorac was careful not to pigeon-hole herself. She doesn’t have a particular character “type” that always turns out to be the villain. There are similarities between the situation in this book and that in Accident by Design — but the similarities are fairly superficial, and not a guide as to whodunnit in this particular story.

As usual, Lorac’s ability to evoke a sense of place does shine through in the portrayal of Wulfstane Manor, though again, it’s not a copy/paste by any means: while several of the characters adore the house, and Macdonald is certainly impressed by it, it doesn’t feel like a happy house, and the sense of wear and dilapidation is what comes through most strongly.

The mystery itself, I worked out the basics of fairly quickly, but figuring out exactly how everything was done was something else.

The main thing marring the experience here is that the Kindle edition is very badly edited. My guess is that OCR was used, but the system didn’t recognise various bits of punctuation (colons and dashes), meaning that sentences don’t always make a whole lot of sense.

Rating: 3/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted November 13, 2024 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

Hello again, Wednesday.

Cover of Bitter Waters by Vivian ShawWhat have you recently finished reading?​

Not much, alas. I haven’t been in the mood to read at all. The last thing I finished was Vivian Shaw’s Bitter Waters, a novella in the world of her Greta Helsing series. It feels like a bit of a coda to the trilogy, with more exploration of the vampires and their culture, background, etc. I liked it, though I don’t think it’d stand alone.

Cover of Agatha Christie, by Lucy WorsleyWhat are you currently reading?

Nominally, Lucy Worsley’s biography of Agatha Christie. It’s fascinating to get a bit more insight on the person behind the stories, and on her troubles, and the things that inspired some of her fiction.

I’ve also made a start on The Other Olympians, by Michael Waters, which digs into the early Olympic games and why sex verification became a thing. I’m not very far into it, but so far I appreciate Waters’ care to do his best in referring to people how they wanted to be referred to, even before their transitions.

Cover of The Spellshop by Sarah Beth DurstWhat will you be reading next?

I really don’t know. I’m feeling less than great still, honestly, so I might turn to something familiar and comforting — or I might start a bunch of different books and just see what sticks. I’d like to read Alexis Hall’s Mortal Follies and Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop, but I’m not sure if I want to start those now.

What are you reading?

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Review – Arch-Conspirator

Posted November 13, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Arch-Conspirator

Arch-Conspirator

by Veronica Roth

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 137
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Outside the last city on Earth, the planet is a wasteland. Without the genes of the fallen, humanity will end.

Antigone's parents have been murdered, leaving her father's throne vacant. Passing into the Archive should be cause for celebration, but with her militant uncle Kreon rising to claim her father's vacant throne, all Antigone feels is rage. When he welcomes her and her siblings into his mansion, Antigone sees it for what it really is: a gilded cage, where she is a captive as well as a guest.

But her uncle will soon learn that no cage is unbreakable. And neither is he.

Veronica Roth’s Arch-Conspirator is a sci-fi dystopian take on Sophocles’ Antigone, which follows the steps of the plot fairly closely (inasfar as it can given the different setting). The basics are there: the two sisters, the two brothers, the tainted birth (though for a different reason here), the betrothal to Haemon, and the struggle of wills with Kreon.

However, a lot of the background is missing: Oedipus didn’t commit any great sin here (he seems to have been a democratic leader), and it isn’t really about the themes of Greek tragedy. Tiresias is entirely missing, and the concept of offending the gods likewise, so all in all it’s not quite a retelling of Antigone, but something which uses the basic shape of the story to say something else.

I enjoyed reading it and puzzling over how it was adapting the original story, and I don’t necessarily think it needs to engage with the same themes as the original in order to be interesting. Still, in some ways I think it’d have benefitted by departing further from the source material, to explore what it was really going for.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Overleaf

Posted November 12, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Overleaf

Overleaf: An Album of British Trees

by Susan Ogilvy, Richard Ogilvy

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 176
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Leaves live a thankless life. They go unnoticed while providing shade and cleaning the air, and are often the subject of our groans and grumbles in the fall while being raked away. Outside of brief odes to colorful autumn foliage, their quiet, everyday beauty is usually unsung.

Overleaf is an extraordinary celebration of that most obvious and overlooked part of a tree. It features over seventy brilliantly rendered studies of the leaves of thirty-seven tree species found across North America and Europe. Susan Ogilvy's paintings are lovely and uncluttered, resembling real-life pressings captured between the pages. The artwork is accompanied by Richard Ogilvy's thought-provoking text, which provides a vignette for each tree that explores its particular relationship with the environment, its style of growth, the history and mythology surrounding it, and the uses that birds, insects, and humans make of it. He reflects on the detailed complexity of our woodlands and forests and thoughtfully explores our place among them. Just as individual leaves create a cohesive shade, the range of these portraits provides a compelling vision of our relationship with trees. Overleaf is a thoughtful collection that will have readers taking a second look at the world above.

Overleaf is a fascinating collaboration between Susan Ogilvy, a botanical painter, and her brother-in-law, a forester. Each tree is illustrated by its leaf, showing the top side of the leaf on one page and then on the reverse side, the back of the leaf. They seem to be roughly to scale, and beautifully detailed; they aren’t the platonic ideal of each leaf, either, but a realistic one, probably based on a specific leaf, showing details of blight, galls and insect companions.

Richard’s contribution is the text, which for each tree is a handful of paragraphs talking about where the trees are found, their functions in the landscape, and some of the uses we’ve made of them and stories we’ve built around them. He explains some of the features in the images, pointing out the galls and associated other creatures, which ties the images and text together.

It’s a fascinating endeavour; it can’t really be used to identify the trees, since it contains only their leaves, but it’s an interesting compendium of detail and folklore.

Rating: 4/5

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