November Reading Plans

Posted November 5, 2026 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

I’m not sure if this will be a regular monthly feature, but this month happens to have a bunch of fun things going on, and I’d have liked to share more about the Haunted Shelf Shenanigans last month… so let’s have a chat about my reading plans for the month!

First up, there’s a readathon on Dreamwidth’s readingtogether community designed to focus on unread and half-read books in November. I have a plethora of those, so here are my targets:

Finish five books from my “paused” pile on StoryGraph
Finish five books from my backlog (that aren’t already in my paused pile), i.e. books bought before 2026 began
Finish five books bought in 2026 (that aren’t already in my currently reading/paused pile)

I figure that’s very doable (at least at my current reading pace), without constraining me too much on what to read. It should be able to feed into most of my other reading challenges this month!

Speaking of which…

Learn more here!

If you’ve hung around here much, you’ll know that I’m a fairly big non-fiction reader, and I hope to join in with the posts about this and do some non-fiction reading this month — especially since I didn’t fit in a lot of it last month. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll read, but here are some possibilities:

With My Own Hand (Ashley Douglas)
The Castle: A History (John Goodall)
A Lab of One’s Own (Patricia Fara)
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (Sam Leith)
X Marks the Spot: The Story of Archaeology in Eight Extraordinary Discoveries (Michael Scott)

But I’ll lean into my whim here, as ever. There are lots of books in my non-fiction bookcase that I haven’t read yet!

Review – Embers of the Hands [Emma Barraclough]

Posted November 5, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

by Eleanor Barraclough

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

Synopsis:
A new and original history of the Viking Age, told through the objects that defined the lives of its people - from powerful leaders to naughty teenagers

Imagine a Viking, and a certain image springs to mind: a nameless, faceless warrior, leaping ashore from a longboat, and ready to terrorise the hapless local population of a northern European country.

Yet while such characters define the Viking Age today, they were in the minority. This is the history of all the other people - children, enslaved people, seers, artisans, travellers, writers - who inhabited the medieval Nordic world. Encompassing not just Norway, Denmark and Sweden, but also Iceland, Greenland, parts of the British Isles, Continental Europe and Russia, this is a history of a Viking Age filled with real people of different ages, genders and ethnicities, as told through the traces that they left behind, from hairstyles to place names, love-notes to gravestones.

For the first time, you can immerse yourself in the day-to-day lives of extraordinary culture which spanned centuries and spread from the edge of the North American continent to the Russian steppes, from the Arctic wastelands to the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate.

I’m not quite sure why it took me ages to read Emma Barraclough’s Embers of the Hands, because once I got into it, I really enjoyed it. The premise is to get close to real people of the Viking era through mostly material remains, like the outline of a teenager’s foot scratched into the timbers of a boat, or the slightly asymmetrical and well-worn heavy woollen dress preserved in icy conditions.

This mostly works pretty well: Barraclough does have to spend time just giving straight-up context, of course, so it isn’t all artifacts all the time — but there are enough fascinating finds and inferences drawn that it felt relatively fresh. Many of them I knew little about, which was also nice: she does discuss the Lewis chessmen, which I’ve read quite a bit about, but otherwise most of the finds were new to me.

Her style is pretty easy to read without becoming so breezy it felt like she was leaving out information or getting too flippant (though flippant can still be fun and informational when it’s well done!). I think it’d have benefitted from the recent trend toward in-line colour images alongside the finds she’s talking about, but there is a section of colour plates which is well worth perusing (it’s right at the end in the ebook version).

There are plenty of notes, as well, and in comparison with the fact that I do actually know something about this period from a mostly-literary perspective, I feel pretty confident in recommending it.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Eleanor Barraclough, history, non-fiction

WWW Wednesday

Posted November 4, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

It’s been comics and poetry collections mostly for the last couple of days, perhaps because I was reading so intensely at the weekend! I think the last thing I finished was Kim Moore’s The Art of Falling, which is a poetry collection by a British poet from Leicester. I enjoyed it quite a bit, overall, though I’m still letting it settle before I actually write my review.

What are you currently reading?

I only have two books actively “in flight”: Any More Questions for the Corpse? by J.J. Unthank, and John Goodall’s The Castle: A History — the latter of which I haven’t touched in a few weeks, whoops.

I’m not sure yet what I think of Any More Questions for the Corpse? — I’m already 20% of the way through it, but not totally sure I’m enjoying it. There’s some intriguing stuff about the world-building, but something about the style isn’t quite working for me, I think.

What will you be reading next?

I still have some spooky books I’d like to finish (or at least try) in the wake of Halloween and the Haunted Shelf readathon: Emmeline Duncan’s Chaos at the Lazy Bones Bookshop, for one. Mostly, though, I’m thinking about starting my reread of After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, in prep for the next and final volume which is coming next week! I know I only read it in August, but I was honestly tempted to reread it right away, so I wanted to do a reread before reading the final volume.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Let Him Lie [Ianthe Jerrold]

Posted November 4, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Let Him Lie

by Ianthe Jerrold

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

Synopsis:
Murder begins with the death of a kitten...

Artist Jeanie Halliday is thrilled to move into a country cottage of her own, next door to the home of her dear childhood friend Agnes. But the countryside idyll isn't quite what she might have expected: Agnes is suddenly and unaccountably unfriendly for one thing; and then the neighbours are a little peculiar - old Mr Fone, obsessed with burial mounds; the scandalous Hugh Barchard; and an estranged mother taken to brandishing pistols around.

Soon after the feline victim is found, a shot is heard - the corpse of Robert Molyneux, Agnes's husband, is discovered with a bullet in his brain. Was Molyneux a meddler in sacred places, a secret lothario... or simply a man who knew too much? And how does the unfortunate cat fit in? It will fall to Jeanie to assist the local police superintendent and fit the pieces of a baffling mystery.

I hadn’t come across Ianthe Jerrold before, but her work came up while I was perusing similar books in Kobo Plus, and I’m always keen on trying more classic crime fiction, so I thought I’d give it a go. Let Him Lie falls into the spot in the tradition where ordinary citizens with no aspirations to turn detective end up doing a spot of amateur detection in order to figure out who has actually committed a murder.

I’d say Let Him Lie’s Jeanie isn’t much of a deliberate detective. She tries to find things out mostly out of curiosity a couple of times, but her discovery of the murderer is largely incidental, and she’s not really systematic about the whole thing. It’s almost more of a study of what it’s like to be caught up in the outskirts of a violent crime — but the reader does get enough information to start putting some of it together.

Overall, for me it fell down a bit on the characters, because Agnes turns out to be straightforwardly just a bit contemptible. There’s no real complexity there, and her anguish about being found out for… having a sister who was an actress was way overdone. I believe there were and are people like that, to be clear! I just found it not so enjoyable to read because I kinda hoped she’d get what was coming to her, while also not believing that she actually had anything directly to do with the crime because she’s so ineffectual.

It was equally clear that several other people weren’t likely criminals because they were generally too sympathetic, too unsympathetic, etc — the twist wasn’t clever in that way.

I’d be curious to read some of Jerrold’s other work; it’s not that I think it’s bad, it just wasn’t entirely the shape and tone of mystery I prefer. It’s entirely possible that some of her other mysteries will work better for me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Ianthe Jerrold, mystery

Review – The Green Man’s Heir [Juliet E. McKenna]

Posted November 3, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Green Man's Heir

by Juliet E. McKenna

Genres: Fantasy, Mystery
Pages: 368
Series: Green Man #1
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
A hundred years ago, a man with a secret could travel a few hundred miles and give himself a new name and life story. No one would be any the wiser, as long as he didn’t give anyone a reason to start asking questions. These days, that’s not so easy, with everyone on social media, and CCTV on every street corner. So Daniel Mackmain keeps his head down and keeps himself to himself.

But now a girl has been murdered and the Derbyshire police are taking a closer look at a loner who travels from place to place, picking up work as he goes. Worse, Dan realises the murder involves the hidden world he was born into. When no one else can see the truth, who will see justice done?

Juliet E. McKenna’s The Green Man’s Heir was a bit up and down for me. In the first half of the book, the main character acts like a teenage boy, and the way women’s bodies are described is just… facepalm. I think there are reasons it’s that way, for characterisation and to later contrast the purely mortal sex with the temptations Daniel experiences with the naiad — but that doesn’t mean I had to enjoy reading it.

That aspect does improve, but the pacing feels pretty weird, with the book falling pretty sharply into two halves: it feels like two novellas in a series welded together to make a single book, even though the ending leaves plenty of room for the sequels as well. It feels like one arc (the wose) gets resolved in a fairly neat way, and then it leads into a whole second story that’s only tenuously linked.

The second half is definitely my preference, though; Eleanor seems pretty great, and the lore is pretty fun. I won’t spoiler what Daniel runs into, because it’s a pretty cool reveal.

Overall, I probably wouldn’t keep reading the series if it weren’t for the second half of the novel, where it feels like things settle in and some of the annoyances smooth out. Right now, I’m willing to give the second book a try and see how it goes.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Juliet E. McKenna, mystery, SF/F

Top Ten Tuesday: One-Word Reviews

Posted November 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 30 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is a fun one: “One-Word Reviews for the Last Ten Books I Read”. Let’s see if I can keep it that succinct! It won’t be quite the last ten books I read exactly because I’m writing this a couple of days in advance…

Devil Inside, by Clay McLeod Chapman. “Transgressive.”
Paper Girls, vol 1, by Brian K. Vaughan et al. “Confusing.”
Trail of Lightning, by Rebecca Roanhorse. “Electrifying.” (Yes, I am pleased with myself, why do you ask?)
The Nightmare Before Christmas, by Sara Raasch. “Cute.”
Startup Hell, by Caitlin Rozakis. “Familiar.”
The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City, by Susanna Clarke. “Short.”
Wearing the Lion, by John Wiswell. “Infuriating.”
Kakegurui, vol 1, by Homura Kawamoto. “Oversexed.”
Domnall and the Borrowed Child, by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. “Inconclusive.”
The Airless Year, by Valentine Barker, Adam P. Knave, & Frank Cvetkovic. “Stifling.”

I’ll be curious to see what everyone else is reviewing, and what you all have to say!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – There Is No Antimemetics Division [qntm]

Posted November 2, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

There Is No Antimemetics Division

by qntm

Genres: Horror, Science Fiction
Pages: 275
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Humanity is under assault by malevolent "antimemes" – ideas that attack memory, identity, and the fabric of reality itself – in this wickedly brain-bending tale of science-fiction horror, an entirely reimagined and expanded version of the beloved online novel.

They're all around us, hiding in plain sight. One could be in the room with you, now, just to your left. You could be seeing it right now - but from this second to the next, you'll forget that you did. If you managed to jot down a note, the paper would look blank to you afterwards. These entities can feed on your most cherished memories, the things that make you you - and you'll never even know anything changed. They can turn you into a living ghost – make it so that you're standing next to your spouse, screaming in their ear, and they won't know you're there. They are the perfect predators, equipped with the ultimate camouflage - the ability to wipe out memories of their own existence. And they aren't just feeding on us. They're invading.

But how do you fight an enemy when you can never even know that you're at war? How do you contain something you can't record or remember?

Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

No, this is not your first day.

I started reading the older version of qntm’s There is No Antimimetics Division, and then found there’s differences between that and the recent edition, so I switched over to that. I’m not sure how different they were overall, but definitely differences in the first chapter or so. So if you’re seeing people talk about character names that are different to the ones you remember, it’s not an antimemetic thing chewing on your brain — it’s different publication histories. Relax!

Anyway, this has a lot of fun with a single idea: what if there are things living alongside humans that we physically can’t remember? They could kill your sibling right now, and you’d never remember that you’d had a sibling: your brain would just adjust completely.

Then… what if people created medication that helped people remember seeing those things, and humanity started a war against them, from the harmful to the ones that only take your memory of how to ride a bicycle? And what if there was a really, really big one, so huge that nowhere in the world is safe from its influence? And the only way to be safe from it is not to know it’s there?

That’s basically this book, digging into the various ramifications of what all of that could mean. There’s not a lot by way of characters to hang on to here, though Marie and Adam come closest (with some genuinely touching scenes about their relationship, even as it falls apart): it’s mostly about the idea, and how to find a way to possibly kill a creature like that.

I’m not 100% sure if I feel it stuck the landing, but I sort of don’t mind anyway. It’s a rare book that’s actual novel-length but had me so riveted I read it all in one go, but here we are. Horror fans will find plenty to like here, while SF fans might be grossed out by some of the creatures and scenarios that ensue — but I think it has cross appeal to both groups.

I did have some truly horrible nightmares after staying up late to finish it, though. Oops.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, horror, qntm, SF/F

Fantasy with Friends: Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Posted November 2, 2026 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

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 sci-fi’s relationship with fantasy:

Science fiction and fantasy are often bundled together. Why do you think this is? How do you see the two genres as related or distinct? Do you enjoy both?

I think the two get bundled together because they’re fundamentally about imagining something that doesn’t exist (yet). There’s that saying about how any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic: if you watch something like Star Trek, a lot of the tech doesn’t exist and we can’t even extrapolate that it could exist. It’s fantasy in space, and the rules bend to whatever’s convenient for telling a good story.

So I think both genres rely on imagining the world to be different than it is, and they’re closer than you’d think. There are some amazing series that blend the two, like Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman, which looks like one thing and develops into another as you understand the world more. (Though really this is a bit spoilery about The Steerswoman; forget about it if you’re going to read the series!)

Sometimes when there’s something speculative going on, it’s hard to say whether it should be characterised as sci-fi or fantasy — I recently felt that There Is No Antimimetics Division straddled a few genres, for instance. (My review of that will actually go up later today, which is probably why it just popped into my head.)

I do enjoy both genres, both separately and in the cases where they seem to blend. I’d say I lean more toward fantasy than sci-fi, because I’m not a huge fan of the sci-fi that focuses on big ideas over plot and character — I’m definitely a character kind of reader, and my investment often (though not always) stands and falls by the characters, in any genre. But there are some amazing sci-fi works that have it all.

Tags: books, discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F

Review – Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (manhwa), vol 4

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

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

by Sleepy-C, Umi, singNsong

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 240
Series: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (manhwa) #4
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Dokja has his hands full dealing with the relentless monster attacks, as well as Landlord Coalition’s schemes. But when Junghyeok Yu disappears amidst the chaos, he’s faced with a chilling question—when the main character of this universe dies, what happens to the rest of the world...? Not wanting to find out, Dokja sets out to look for the missing Regressor in the Theatre Dungeon!

Volume four of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhwa (adapted from singNsong’s novel by Umi, illustrated by Sleepy-C) covers the events at Chungmuro Station, as Dokja uses his foreknowledge to protect his little group without committing atrocities and help everyone resolve the scenario. It also features the beginning of the Cinema Dungeon, though there’s more to come.

I really like the Cinema Dungeon part, so I’m looking forward to that, but the whole Chungmuro scenario is pretty fun. We meet Jihye, who has already been recruited by Junghyeok, and she seems pretty cool (though I don’t know a lot about her as this is close to the extent of what the light novels have featured so far in official English translation).

I also really giggled at the extra with Huiwan and Hyeonseong where she guesses that his sponsoring constellation is actually Captain America. I don’t think that’s right, but it’s still funny.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, manga, SF/F, singNsong, Sleepy-C, Umi

October Reading Wrap-Up

Posted November 1, 2026 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

Welp, October’s over and 2026 is really hurtling to a close. Have you had a good month?

October in general:

October’s been a busy month for a lot of folks in tech or tech-adjacent roles, with some scary website vulnerabilities… but I still found plenty of time for gaming, reading and crochet, and I’ve even finally got back to cycling after a year without thanks to the wrist injury I sustained in August 2025.

Speaking of crochet, it’s time to show off my progress! I’ve now finished the main body of the blanket, and “just” need to crochet the envelope border to finish it off and hide all those ends. My wife’s going to help me with tidying those up some before I start crocheting the border: they don’t need to be woven in, but I left some very long tails as insurance after the first couple of times I pulled back a few rows to fix mistakes.

I’m really happy with how it’s coming out! If you’re curious about the size, without the border it covers me from my toes to the top of my chest when I’m sat down, and it’s wide enough to wrap most of the way around me.

Gaming-wise, it’s been a month of pretty casual gaming, which has been great. I enjoy being a raider, but it’s been good to get off the schedule a while. I’ve been playing a ton of short free hidden object games, like Cats & Seek: Tokyo and the puzzle/hidden object game Membrillo Hid My Socks, in the last week or so, but I did also pick Lost and Found Co. back up to play the two new levels. There’s been more of Dressmaker, which I’ve been delighted to see has really taken off for gamers of all stripes, plus a new-to-me word game, Wordatro! and the puzzle game Mosaic of the Strange (which is a little bit spooky and seasonal). I’ve been replaying Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! thanks to the demo of the remake of the first game, as well.

Finally, in the last couple of days I’ve been playing Usagi Shima: Bunny Island. It used to be a mobile game with microtransactions, but the Steam version has cut that out, meaning I’ve just been having pure fun attracting bunnies to my island, buying toys for them with carrots, petting them, etc. The art has clearly been done by someone who knows bunnies, as there’s so much recognisable about the way they flop, sploot and loaf. I’m loving it.

Reading stats:

Total books read: 50
Total pages read: 10,502
Rereads: 2
ARCs: 0
Series finished/up to date: 6
Books owned pre-2026: 3
Books owned from 2026: 16
Borrowed books: 29

Fiction: 46
Non-fiction: 2
Poetry: 2
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 15

It’s been an absolutely epic month, thanks to the Haunted Shelf readathon which runs on Litsy (and now in an off-shoot Discord as well) in October each year. I ran a lot of reading sprints at the weekends, so I got a lot of reading done there… especially on the last Saturday of the month, where I read an absolutely ridiculous amount.

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 289/300 (38 books ahead)
Overall pages read: 68,140/75,000 (5,469 pages ahead)
Books read from backlog: 38/50 (2 books behind)
Books bought in 2026 and not yet started: 38/40

Some good progress on my reduced reading goals, as you see! It’s possible I’ll bump it back up a bit, though I don’t think there’s much chance of meeting my original goal of 400 books this year — I’d have to read two books a day, which I didn’t even manage in October!

In November the limit on books bought in 2026 and not yet started will drop to 35… though I don’t think it’ll make it back to 20 before Christmas, ahaha. Still, I’m glad I decided to be flexible with it this year, and maybe next year it’ll work better for me again.

Blogging stats:

Views: 17.3k (up)
Visitors: 16.1k (up)
Likes: 329 (down)
Comments: 338 (down)
Reviews: 23
Other posts: 23

Bit of a downward trend for me on comments and likes lately, but lots of views! I think with the readathon and lots of weekend reading sprints, maybe I was doing less visiting of other blogs? And I know there were a couple of weeks this month where I didn’t post as much as usual, with fewer reviews this month than typical.

Most viewed posts:

Top Ten Tuesday: British Library Crime Classics (68 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Make Up My Perfect Day (44 views)
Review – Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 3 (35 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Scary Books This Wuss Enjoyed (32 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Autumnal Colours (31 views)

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

From Books, Bones & Buffy: A WALTZ OF SINISTER IMPORT by Stephanie Burgis – Review, by Tammy
From Books, Bones & Buffy: FIND ME WHERE IT ENDS by Cassandra Khaw – Review, by Tammy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: Dive Bar at the End of the Road by Kelley Armstrong, by Mogsy
From Becky’s Book Blog: Wondrous by Heather Fawcett – ARC Review! by Becky
From Books, Bones & Buffy: THE KILLING OF A CHESTNUT TREE by Oliver K. Langmead – Review, by Tammy
From Becky’s Book Blog: The Scarlet Ball by Nghi Vo – ARC Review! by Becky
From Dark Shelf of Wonders: DIRECT DESCENDENT by Tanya Huff | Review, by Veronica
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: It Looks Like You in the Dark by Mathilda Zeller, by Mogsy
From Books, Bones & Buffy: IT LOOKS LIKE YOU IN THE DARK by Mathilda Zeller – Review, by Tammy

As ever, it was really difficult to pick from a looong list of reviews I had saved for this post. I’m also sure there were some others I saved that have disappeared somehow, gaaah.

I hope everyone’s had a good month with all the reading they could wish!

Tags: books, monthly wrapup