August Reading Wrap-Up

Posted September 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

A picture of a line of cupcakes with teal icing and sprinkles

August was my birthday month and featured a little holiday getaway to see family and chill in a hotel room, so it’s a month well-worth lingering on! Let’s dig in.

August in general:

The first half of August was pretty busy; I was making sure to work ahead and square things up so the deck was clear, so I’d have an easy time jumping back in. But the start of my holiday came soon enough, and we had a couple days at home before setting off — meaning on my actual birthday my wife baked me Welsh cakes, and before we left we had dinner with my parents as well from our favourite Chinese takeout.

After that, it was off down to Bristol, where we had a lovely stay; the room was huge, and the food options nearby were pretty great. We didn’t even have to order room service or takeout to the hotel, because there were appealing options really close by every night. I had a great time visiting bookshops and venturing into Wales to see my old haunts and catch up with my aunt, and we went to St Fagans, which is a great open-air museum.

We planned the trip with a lot of reading time, but it took a few days for me to realise that I wasn’t getting anywhere much because I wasn’t feeling inspired by the lists/challenges I was still trying to complete. Once I let go of that and just picked a couple of random classic crime books, I got my mojo back somewhat… though not before deciding to relax my various reading goals and catch a bit of chill.

I didn’t take my crochet with me, but nonetheless I’ve made a good amount of progress, including doing a tricky panel with some unorthodox stitches (top middle shelf, the ikebana). I quite like how it came out!

Photo of my mosaic overlay crochet blanket. It looks like a bookshelf, with four shelves so far. On the lowest shelf is a cat sat on a book, while most of the other shelves are covered in books. There's an ikebana on the top shelf.

Credit where it’s due, the original charts are from this pattern, though I’ve been adapting them and going ‘freestyle’ for a lot of it.

As far as gaming goes, it was a somewhat quiet month since I stayed off the PC more while we were away, but my raid group in FFXIV came tantalisingly close to beating the second part of M12S (the last fight of the current set), and I did play a few small/relaxing games. I’m deep into Whisper of the House, which is a cute Unpacking-type game, and Leaf It Alone, a game which involves collecting leaves to tidy up a garden… and I raced through the hidden object games Nippets, Find My Frogs and Find My Frogs: Branches. I also zoomed through two new-to-me incremental games, Snap the Cat (super cute, your objective is to take good pictures of cats until the whole world has seen them!) and Lyca (which involves a magical wolf restoring a barren wasteland).

I’ve also got a new productivity “game”, On-Together, which is really cute — and of course, I snagged the Magical Library DLC for Spirit City.

Reading stats:

StoryGraph reading stats for August 2026: 21 books, 6,162 pages, average rating of 3.05. My top rated reads included The Poet Empress, After The Disabled God of War Became My Concubine (vol 3) and Cryptic. The number of pages I read per day was pretty variable, with big peaks here and there (usually weekends) and more consistent reading at the end of the month during my holiday. More reading stats for August 2026: I read 67% fiction, 33% non-fiction, and 48% of my books were under 300 pages long, with 52% between 300 and 500 pages. I read 81% in print and 19% in digital editions, and my top genres were fantasy (8), romance (7), LGBTQIA+ (7), crime (4) and history (4).

Total books read: 21
Total pages read: 6,162
Rereads: 0
ARCs: 2
Series finished/up to date: 3
Books owned pre-2026: 0
Books owned from 2026: 15
Borrowed books: 6

Fiction: 13
Non-fiction: 6
Poetry: 2
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 3

I read less than I’d hoped, even with my holiday, but I’m okay with that. I know I was having a bit of a struggle settling down and enjoying reading, and with crochet and gaming as well to keep me occupied, sometimes my time is more limited at the moment — especially while my group continue to try to beat the raid in FFXIV.

The name of the game in the next month or so will be trying to focus on just reading whatever takes my fancy and having fun.

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 216/300 (15 books ahead)
Overall pages read: 51,634/75,000 (1,497 pages ahead)
Books read from backlog: 32/50 (1 book behind)
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 40/40 (temporary increase allowed)

20 Books of Summer: 12/20 (2/5 bonus)

As I mentioned above, during my holiday I realised that my challenges and lists were actively hindering reading, because I didn’t want to read my “assigned” books. Once I got my head out of that space, I read more and enjoyed it more, which is a sign to take it easy on lists and challenges for a while!

That means I gave up on finishing my 20 Books of Summer (though I definitely read more than 20 books over the course of the summer!). That said, that doesn’t mean I won’t join in any other lists and challenges in future. Sometimes it’s motivating and fun for me and sometimes it isn’t, and right now it isn’t — and that’s okay, but I know it’s a temporary state. I know for others it’s a more permanent burnout, but for me I know I get a lot out of a little structure sometimes.

I also relaxed my yearly reading goals, lowering the books/pages goals and cutting the backlog books goal in half. I allowed myself a temporary increase to 40 books owned and not yet read, as well, in order to allow for my birthday book spree. I’m hoping to whittle that back down, but we’ll see — in general, these goals haven’t been working as well for me this year as last, and that might require some adjustment, or maybe just a fresh start next year.

Blogging stats:

Screenshot of my blog stats showing consistent high visitor counts, with a dip between 20th and 27th August.

Views: 14.3k (down)
Visitors: 13.2k (down)
Likes: 468 (up)
Comments: 521 (up)
Reviews: 30
Other posts: 24

It’s been a bit of a weird month for stats; I can see a dip on my graph while my wife and I were away, even though I kept on posting and kept up a reasonable level of engagement! But then the number of likes and comments being up suggests I had good quality engagement in August, even if the hits were lower… so that’s really nice.

Honestly, I think maybe my time off just coincided with some lower bot activity which exaggerated the effect, though I’ve got no way of distinguishing bot traffic from real people.

Most viewed posts:

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

As ever, it was tricky to narrow down my favourite posts by other people, especially since I’ve steadily been following more and more sites of interest via my RSS reader! So many wonderful bloggers and writers. ♥

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Review – The Weather Wheel

Posted September 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – The Weather Wheel

The Weather Wheel

by Mimi Khalvati

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 80
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In these new poems, each of them written in couplets and contained within the space of 16 lines, Mimi Khalvati takes the weather, the seasons, and the passage of night and day as the ground on which she draws her emblems of human life and love. An extended elegy for her mother, the book is also a series of meditations on the small details of animals' lives and on the vulnerable animal within the human being.

I didn’t enjoy The Weather Wheel as much as I enjoyed the other collection I’ve read by Mimi Khalvati, though there were a few images and poems that struck me and will probably stick with me, mostly surrounding her grief for her mother, like this couplet:

I measured distances by her. My mother my compass,
my almanac and sundial, drawing me arcs in space.

Overall, not a favourite collection, but all the same, my feeling when I finished it was fairly positive, if that makes sense! Something I’m glad to have read, more for the overall impression than for individual poems.

I liked the Afterwardness collection quite a bit more, though.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

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WWW Wednesday

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

Cover of The Rasp by Philip MacDonaldWhat have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Sanah Ahsan’s poetry collection, I Cannot Be Good Unless You Say It, which I was not a big fan of — sadly, just not a style of poetry I gel with, I think.

Before that, I was reading Philip MacDonald’s The Rasp. I found his name on a list of Golden Age crime authors, while I was trying to find something to jog me out of a reading funk. I quite liked The Rasp, though I think his detective (Gethryn) is a bit annoying at times, with a tendency to quotation that rivals Peter Wimsey. I need to properly write up my thoughts, though; I’m a bit delayed in writing my review.

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

I cleared my “on deck” considerably of late, but with the new books I got for my birthday, I do have a few going at once again. For more classic crime goodness, I’m reading Henry Wade’s The Duke of York’s Steps, which is beginning to hot up now at around 40%. Definitely a slow burner, which I don’t necessarily mind.

Other than that, I started on Michelle P. Brown’s Illumino, which is a history of Great Britain through manuscripts. It’s alright, and beautifully illustrated, though I found the first chapter a little rushed and lacking in focus.

And for something quite different, I’ve got stuck into volume two of Hao Da Yi Juan Wei Sheng Zhi’s The Villain’s White Halo, which I’m enjoying so far.

What will you be reading next?

Probably more classic crime, honestly. A lot of them are available for free on Kobo Plus, or pretty cheap, and if that’s what’s grabbing my attention at the moment, that’s what I’ll read!

That said, I have a lot of fascinating new books as well, and it’s not impossible I’ll pick up one of those, or return to something that I paused for a while. I really am trying to go by whatever’s actually caught my interest at the moment, rather than constraining myself too much.

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Review – Mistakenly Saving the Villain, vol 3

Posted September 1, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Mistakenly Saving the Villain, vol 3

Mistakenly Saving the Villain

by Feng Yu Nie

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 308
Series: Mistakenly Saving the Villain #3
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

SOME MISTAKES ARE DESTINY

After a dramatic confrontation with An Long, Song Qingshi and Yue Wuhuan finally begin to speak openly about their feelings. Their relationship deepens—an oasis of tenderness in a world that has offered them little peace.

But shadows remain. Even with treatment, Yue Wuhuan’s illness still festers, and Song Qingshi faces his own sickness: the slow collapse of his cultivation. Worse yet, the system—the mysterious voice that first bound him to this story—is far from satisfied with his failure to save the “right” person.

As the truth behind Song Qingshi’s biggest mistake unravels, so does reality itself. Perhaps he and Yue Wuhuan are nothing more than puppets of fate, destined to be twisted and broken by the heavens. Is anything in the world strong enough to break that cycle?

Volume three of Mistakenly Saving the Villain opens on that horrible cliffhanger, and predictably the two of them solve it in the most stupid possible way, by not talking about it properly and just sort of sliding into a relationship anyway. I say this as someone who basically did that in my own relationship with my now-wife, to be clear: I am affectionately talking about it as the most stupid possible thing.

I love that Song Qingshi is not actually as ignorant of what Yue Wuhuan is thinking and feeling as he sometimes seems, and that he works out what Yue Wuhuan is doing, coaxes him to act on his feelings, and starts helping him distinguish between what is real and what is his trauma/illness. So far it hasn’t much stopped Yue Wuhuan getting worse, because Song Qingshi doesn’t do a good job of boundaries, but… Yue Wuhuan’s unhinged devotion to Qingshi is what we’re here for, right?!

This volume then… goes places. It’s quite the ride, and I have no idea how this is all going to wrap up: the system has reasserted itself (sort of), and we get a glimpse of the bigger picture, a whole bigger tangle that Yue Wuhuan (or whatever he’d like to be called now) and Song Qingshi are part of, which I assume will round things off.

I’m trying not to say too much because a) I’m not sure I’m fully following everything yet and b) I don’t want to spoiler the wild ride for anyone else. But I’m enjoying it a lot and very eager for the last volume in October.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Top Ten Tuesday: Welsh Books

Posted September 1, 2026 by Nicky in General / 24 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is technically about books with nationalities in the title, but I didn’t have enough on my shelves and prefer to stick to books I know… so instead, you get ten Welsh books and books about Wales!

Cover of Afonydd, ed. Sian Northey and Ness Owen Cover of Howl's Moving Castle (audiobook) by Diana Wynne Jones, narrated by Kristin Atherton Cover of Welsh Food Stories by Carwyn Jones Cover of Vanished Wales by Carwyn Jones

  1. Afonydd, ed. Sian Northey and Ness Owen.
    This is a bilingual poetry collection in which poets contributed a poem in English or Welsh, and the editors arranged translation into the other language. I found it a lovely experience, a respectful one that acknowledges that many Welsh people only speak English thanks to centuries of suppression by the English. The editors also have another collection, A450, which is similarly put together but not a favourite for me. Something about Afonydd resonated just a bit more.
  2. Howl’s Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones.
    Didn’t expect that, did you? But if you’ve read the book (rather than watching the Studio Ghibli adaptation), you’ll know that Howl (Howell) is Welsh, and his Welshness is played on multiple times in the story, from his rugby jersey to the “nonsense” song sung by Calcifer (which is of course “Sospan fach“). I love highlighting the Welshness of this book to people who somehow missed it (it isn’t subtle) or only saw the Studio Ghibli version.
  3. Welsh Food Stories, by Carwyn Graves.
    I didn’t know much about typically Welsh food other than the best-known standbys: Welsh rarebit, bara brith, Welshcakes, cawl. I enjoyed this book, and laughed a bit at how stereotypically Welsh some of my tastes (like my love of cheese and of sweet, fruity cider) apparently are.
  4. Vanished Wales, by Carwyn Jones.
    Has some unexpected gaps, making no mention whatsoever of Capel Celyn (a Welsh village which was forcibly cleared of people to create a reservoir to serve a city in England)… but nonetheless, a fascinating survey of places in Wales that are now gone, some of which I knew about even though I was born after their destruction, because they remain that present to people.
  5. Castles of the Welsh Princes, by Paul R. Davis. 
    If you have a fascination with castles, welp, look no further! Note that this one does not discuss the Norman castles built in Wales, so some of the best known Welsh castles aren’t here.
  6. The Grey King, by Susan Cooper.
    As a teen, the fact that this book is set in Wales and heavily influenced by the Welsh landscape and Welsh mythology meant a lot. And it’s a lovely story, though I don’t suggest reading it in isolation — start with Over Sea, Under Stone, or if that doesn’t quite work for you to hook you into the world (it’s aimed at a younger audience), skip to The Dark is Rising and then go back to Over Sea, Under Stone if you’re interested in reading more (just read it before Greenwitch).
  7. The Owl Service, by Alan Garner.
    This is a retelling of the story of Blodeuwedd that scared the pants off me as a kid. It is genuinely creepy and powerful, and remains really good.
  8. Country Dance, by Margiad Evans.
    I read a lot of Welsh fiction in English when I was at university, both because I studied the topic and because the university library had it in copious amounts, but it’s been a long time and many of them are blurry in my mind, so I’ll choose just a couple of books to stand in for all of them — this one because it was the first book I’d read by a Welsh writer while intending to do so. The introduction (by Caitrin Collier) mentioned the way Welsh literature wasn’t valued, the fact that writers like Margiad Evans are barely mentioned outside Wales (and for her, weren’t even mentioned in Wales when she was looking for Welsh writing)… and yep, I’m familiar.
  9. Feet in Chains, by Kate Roberts.
    The current translation available is by Katie Gramich, who taught the module on Welsh fiction in English that I took. I don’t think I’ve actually read this translation, but I loved the class, and this book was a revelation. The fact that Welsh soldiers’ families were notified of their deaths in English, a language that none of them spoke and which no one around them spoke, is a fact that clings to my mind ever since.
  10. Postcolonialism Revisited, by Kirsti Bohata.
    The book which made me understand that Wales, too, was colonised — and the effects of that on my own life. It is a somewhat technical read, but one which I wish a few more people would attend to, because the utter incomprehension of the effects of colonisation on Wales and the Welsh language online is a regular irritant.

Cover of Castles of the Welsh Princes by Paul R. Davis Cover of The Grey King by Susan Cooper Cover of Feet in Chains by Kate Roberts

I’ve run out of space to add more, like Glyn Jones’ The Dragon Has Two Tongues, which contains a quotation I’ve said many times: “To me, anyone can be a Welshman who chooses to be so and is prepared to take the consequences.”

But you get the drift!

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Review – Lost Voices of the Nile

Posted August 31, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Lost Voices of the Nile

Lost Voices of the Nile: Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt

by Charlotte Booth

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 288
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

When we think of ancient Egypt, we think of the gods, the pharaohs and the pyramids. However, life for the average Egyptian was very different from this glorious perception and was not so unrecognisable from the lives we live today. This book tells the history of the ordinary population of ancient Egypt, using the stories of real people - often strange, at times amusing and ultimately very recognisable. Booth introduces us to a number of fascinating people, including Taimhotep, who married a man twice her age and turned to the god Imhotep to help her to conceive a son; Naunakhte, who disinherited her children for neglecting her in her old age; Kenhirkhopshef, a man seemingly obsessed with making lists; and Paneb, the 'bad boy' of Deir el-Medina. History is made up of people and personalities, and each of these characters has a story to tell.

Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile is a pretty thorough discussion of, as the subtitle says, day to day life in ancient Egypt. It does touch on the lives of the rich (especially as we have plentiful evidence for that), but digs through all kinds of sources, not just the tombs of the rich, to figure out what life was like for people of various different social strata in ancient Egypt.

The problem of course is that’s a huge scope: we refer lightly to “ancient Egypt”, but that covers an immense stretch of time. Booth’s pretty good at indicating when the sources she uses come from as well as where and what they are, which helps, but it all adds up to a lot of dense and sometimes dry information… and sometimes there are still inevitable gaps where we’re guessing.

As someone who’s read quite a bit about ancient Egypt, because I never grew out of that phase, I enjoyed a lot and learned a few things — including about the tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, plausibly identified as potentially representing a romantic relationship between the two (though other interpretations are discussed for what they’re worth).

Overall, yeah, a good one, with numbered footnotes (which I always prefer as it makes it much easier to check on sources), but maybe a little dry if you’re not super interested in the topic.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Fantasy with Friends: Historical Fantasy

Posted August 31, 2026 by Nicky in General / 3 Comments

Fantasy With Friends: A Disccusion Meme hosted by Pages Unbound

Monday again, and I’m back to work after my break, and looking forward to a return to routine! And of course Fantasy with Friends is a part of that routine: all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is historical fantasy:

What are your thoughts on historical fantasy? Do you enjoy authors adding magic to real events/people or do you think they should stick to using the time setting in general as inspiration? Does historical accuracy matter to you, or are you up for anything if the plot is interesting?

I enjoy historical fantasy — for example, I loved Guy Gavriel Kay’s work in my teens/twenties (I haven’t actually read any recently), and that’s thinly veiled historical fantasy in most cases! And there’s stuff like Marie Brennan’s Onyx Court series, which I didn’t get far with but still want to read, which adds Fae to the politics of the English court. It depends on how well it’s done, of course, like anything, but I like the idea of historical fantasy.

In general, I’m fine with adding magic to the Elizabethan court or vampires to the French Revolution, but I probably draw the line somewhat at events and people in living memory — it just feels weird. Magic in WWII in general, yeah, fine, but I think there are a lot of ways to go really wrong and be really disrespectful with that. The period also isn’t my thing anyway; I prefer my history to be a bit more historical.

More generally, I think one has to be really careful to avoid leaning into othering and stereotypes when dealing with minorities in the past… while also avoiding their erasure. You probably shouldn’t make a foreign-born king into an evil werewolf or a notably queer king into an evil seductive vampire who preys on the young men of his court (for reasons that should be apparent– though such things can also be fertile metaphors for exploring belonging, so I’m not saying it can’t be done well.

I’m not enormously worried about historical accuracy in fantasy: since a lot of the premises are being changed, then a lot of the results would also inevitably change. It helps to create a solid grounding if you have mostly the same monarchs or placenames or whatever, but beyond including enough constants to properly place us in the period you want to evoke… go nuts!

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Review – Fence, vol 7

Posted August 30, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Fence, vol 7

Fence: Challengers

by C.S. Pacat, Johanna the Mad, Joanna LaFuente

Genres: Graphic Novels, Romance
Pages: 112
Series: Fence #7
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

EN GARDE!

The beloved sports romance returns from acclaimed writer C.S. Pacat and iconic artist Johanna the Mad, pushing the saga to new competitive heights!

Kings Row are heading into the State Championships as underdog champions, and now have to contend with the best of the best in fencing–including potentially facing Exton themselves. Before they can get there though, they’ll have to get through some of the other top teams, including some old rivals…

I had no idea there was a new volume of C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad’s Fence, but here we are: volume 7, Challengers, which sees Nicholas and Seiji and the rest of Kings’ Row going up against other teams at last. The stakes are high for Nicholas, who wants to be seen by his father at last, and for Seiji, who needs to beat Jesse…

There are a few adorable references to Nicholas and Seiji’s date, sorry, I mean “appointment”, and we also get to watch the whole team grow. It’s cursedly short, is my only complaint! And I could use the slow burn between Nicholas and Seiji ramping up a bit sometime soon, honestly.

“Appointment.” Pft.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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Review – The Party at No. 5

Posted August 30, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Party at No. 5

The Party at No. 5

by Shelley Smith

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 189
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

Sharing your home with an unwanted guest can be murder.

Elderly Mrs. Rampage lives alone in a large London house full of the antiques and heirlooms she’s collected over the years. But she’s struggling to cope, and as her only daughter lives thousands of miles away, she is persuaded to advertise for a housekeeper and companion. Reluctantly, she accepts the courteous and capable Mrs. Roach into No 5 to help her.

With few possessions of her own, Mrs. Roach is in desperate need of a place to stay, but she soon has her own ideas about how things should be run in the house. And as Mrs. Rampage grows increasingly protective of her knick-knacks, and pushes at the boundaries of her new companion’s personal privacy, the pair’s initially amicable relationship soon turns sour. Before long, both women are thoroughly miserable, but stuck in unhappy coexistence with nowhere else to go. When Mrs. Roach digs in and makes it her duty to stay, the lives of both women become entangled in catastrophic circumstances.

Oof, this one’s a bit tough to rate and review. The Party at No. 5 is the first book I’ve read by Shelley Smith, I think, and I can see that it’s well done: well structured, well planned, with characters that are psychologically realistic (if sometimes a bit exaggerated).

It’s also very difficult to enjoy for me personally, since I just don’t enjoy the Payment Deferred style “someone commits a crime and then tries to conceal it” shenanigans, and I don’t particularly enjoy reading about unpleasant people either. There is a certain satisfaction in watching Mrs Rampage and Mrs Roach unravel, especially the latter, revealing her self-serving thoughts and plans.

It’s also unfortunate that what’s clearly a lesbian relationship between Eleanor and Norah is treated as rather grotesque, and Eleanor’s devotion to Norah is treated as being strange. It isn’t used to justify what happens, at least, but there’s a sense that it’s part of the slow revelation of what Mrs Roach is really like to the reader, and I found it unpleasant.

I ended the book feeling vaguely begrimed and anxious, honestly; I think overall I’m going to have to go with rating based on how much I liked it, as usual, which is “not at all”. That said, for someone more interested in reading for the craft of it, it is well done in its way.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted August 29, 2026 by Nicky in General / 44 Comments

Hello everyone! Back at home, and I have plenty of books to show for my journey! It was lovely to have a break and get away from the usual routine, but it’s also nice to be home.

Books acquired this week

Now the birthday book haul really begins, ahaha. Here are the books my parents got me for my birthday, both non-fiction books I’ve been very interested in reading:

Cover of Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works, by Helen Pearson Cover of An Expert Witness by Sue Black

In the case of Beyond Belief, I’d been intrigued since I read New Scientist‘s review, while I’ve generally loved Sue Black’s other books. I’ve finished Beyond Belief already!

As for the book spree, I’m going to break that up into a couple of different posts, mostly by bookshop, because I visited several indies and that gives me a good chance to talk about them. First up, though, the books I got in Forbidden Planet on our first day in Bristol. It’s not as big a shop as in London and there definitely wasn’t as much danmei as I’d hoped, but I still got some new treasures! This spree was a gift from my wife for my birthday, and I took full advantage of the offer, ahaha.

Cover of Teddy Bears Never Die by Cho Yeeun Cover of The Feywild Job by C.L. Polk Cover of The Library of Amorlin by Kalyn Josephson

Cover of There's Something Wrong with the Chief vol 1 by Yang Su Cover of Little Mushroom vol 1 by Yi Shi Si Zhou Cover of Golden Terrace vol 1 by Cang Wu Bin Bai Cover of Heaven Official's Blessing manhua vol 2 by STARember

Tammy and Mogsy made me curious about Teddy Bears Never Die, while The Feywild Job has been on my list for a while since it’s by C.L. Polk, so I was glad to pick that up. The Library of Amorlin was a random choice: I’ve heard nothing about it, but it had lovely sprayed edges and the word “library” in the title, so it caught my eye. One of the joys of bookshopping in person is getting to pick up random books you’ve never heard of and just give them a shot.

As for the danmei, I’ve been meaning to try all three of these for a while, and of course I had to pick up the next volume of the Heaven Official’s Blessing manhua.

Not bad for a first day, right? But the next day of the holiday was intended as the real spree over in Bath, and we started at Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. The staff are always good for a chat about books, though I would warn that the shop is definitely not accessible for anyone in a wheelchair (very narrow with steps), and the neurospicy might not enjoy the fact that all fiction novels are shelved together regardless of genre.

Anyway, I found myself a few new friends in Mr B’s, as expected! My wife covered these as well, because I’m super spoiled.

Cover of 31 Inventions that Built Our World by Jonn Elledge Cover of The English House by Dan Cruickshank Cover of This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter Cover of Everybody's Perfect by Jo Walton

The first three are non-fiction; I’d wanted The English House and This Golden Fleece for a while… while of course Everybody’s Perfect is Jo’s latest, and there’s no way I could resist.

I’ll call a halt there, and tell you next week about Topping & Company (also in Bath) and the new-to-me Love Stories (in Cardiff).

Posts from this week

Despite being away all week, I had plenty of posts queued up ready for me to just hit “post”, so there’s lots to round up as usual! Starting with reviews:

And of course, the discussion posts/linkups/etc:

Oof, that was a lot!

What I’m reading

Despite the travel, I have managed to fit in some reading time, because we planned our days with lots of downtime for reading. I did struggle to settle down to the book choices I’d brought with me, and ended up abandoning both my BookSpinBingo list and my 20 Books of Summer, and just letting myself read whatever, which helped me get unstuck.

Here’s a quick peek at the books I finished this week:

Cover of Egypt's Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti were Gods on Earth by John Darnell and Colleen Darnell Cover of Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works, by Helen Pearson Cover of Servus by Emma Southon

Cover of Suicide Excepted by Cyril Hare Cover of The Villain's White Halo vol 1 by Hao Da Yi Juan Wei Sheng Zhi Cover of Tenant for Death by Cyril Hare

You can click the thumbnails to get a view of the full covers!

As for this weekend ahead, I’m a bit tired from the travel and because I wasn’t well on Thursday night (just a flare-up of complications from my long-ago gallbladder removal, I’m okay now!), but we’ll see… I’m in the mood for more classic crime, and have added a couple more by authors I haven’t tried yet on Kobo Plus. And then, of course, there’s all the new books!

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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