Review – Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, vol 5 (manhwa) [UMI, Sleepy-C, etc]

Posted November 13, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint

by Umi, Sleepy-C, singNsong

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 272
Series: Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint (manhwa) #5
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
In the penultimate stage of the Cinema Dungeon, Dokja’s group find themselves in the midst of a fierce naval showdown. This should be a piece of cake—after all, it’s a reenactment of the famous battle won by Jihye Lee’s Constellation! But Dokja’s confidence soon turns to panic when he finds the heroine of this story reduced to a tearful mess, wracked by sorrow and guilt. Will Jihye succumb to her trauma, or can she draw her sword and become the peerless ruler of the sea she’s destined to be?

Volume five of the Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint manhwa pushes just beyond where volume two of the light novel ends, adding just a bit more detail to the cliffhanger that ends on. I had pretty much figured out what’s going on, but it’s fun to get that confirmation and start getting a picture of where the story’s going.

I didn’t like the Cinema Dungeon stuff as much in the manhua somehow — maybe it felt a bit more chaotic/less explained? Though I still laughed quite a bit about what Jihye made of the scene where Dokja yells at Junghyeok about not giving up, and her promise to give his love letter to him. She ships it, and I don’t disagree…

All in all a bit of a chaotic volume, but I’m having a lot of fun.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

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

Book Blogger Hop: Takeaways

Posted November 13, 2026 by Nicky in General / 3 Comments

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 what you hope for from your blog:

What do you want readers to take away from your blog and your love for books?

If I wanted people to come away with just one impression of me, it’d be “they’re up for reading pretty much anything”, I think! It’s not totally literally true, since I don’t want to waste my time reading fascist screeds or something like that, and I’m not a big fan of self-help and such… but still, something of the spirit of being willing to try anything at least twice is something I’d love to communicate.

Related to that, I wish I could get people to have more of that spirit for themselves, assuming they’ve got time/energy/money/etc — I don’t want to downplay the importance of picking something you’re more likely to enjoy when resources are limited in some way. There have been some genres I’ve turned out to really enjoy which I was very reluctant to dip into, like non-fiction (funny as that sounds if you know me now) and horror (more recently). Exploring with curiosity can lead to some amazing finds!

Other than that, but also related: I’d like people to let go of thinking of books as “trashy” or “guilty pleasures”, too. It’s good to read widely, and reading something that stretches you can be very rewarding, but pure enjoyment is worthy too.

Plus, though I don’t recommend reading for just that reason, exploring genres you wouldn’t normally read just to understand the appeal they hold for others can be really fun. You definitely need to read with an open mind for that, and recognise that where you see something boring/negative, someone else might see something comforting or helpful.

In the end, though, if people leave my blog thinking “damn, I really want to grab a book and read right now“, I’ll be happy. Whatever that book might be!

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

My Year in Novellas

Posted November 12, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

I did my year in non-fiction for Nonfiction November, so it seems only fitting I do a roundup of this year’s novella reading for Novellas in November. It’s not quite as extensive, at least when it comes to books I rated highly: I’m more prone to taking chances and trying novellas I’m less sure about, because the time investment is lower, so I did have a few disappointing reads as well that we’ll skip over.

Still, I’ve read some great novellas this year that are worth celebrating!

(Note: a couple of the below come up on StoryGraph with over 200 pages, but Kobo’s store said they were under when I got them. Caveat emptor.)

Four-star novellas:

These are books I’ve rated as “really liked it”, and this really is a high rating for me — I keep five stars rare and special.

Cover of Dirt-Stained Hands, Thorn-Pierced Skin by Tabitha O'Connell

Cover of The Double Dorothy by Olivia Waite

I don’t have reviews up for all of these, because some of them are recent reads (though I’ve made sure my next week of reviews is almost all novellas to catch up with some of this!) but here are links to the ones I’ve posted reviews for already:

A Long and Speaking Silence, by Nghi Vo (fantasy)
The Killing of a Chestnut Tree, by Oliver K. Langmead (fantasy/mystery)
Brimstone Slipstream, by Matt Weber (fantasy)
Daedalus is Dead, by Seamus Sullivan (myth retelling)
The Album of Dr Moreau, by Daryl Gregory (sci-fi mystery)
The Double Dorothy, by Olivie Waite (sci-fi mystery)
And Side by Side They Wander, by Molly Tanzer (sci-fi)

Three-star novellas:

I know three stars seems a bit lukewarm, but in my rating system it still means “liked it”, so I think they’re still worth talking about — especially as something that isn’t my cup of tea may go down well for others!

Only a couple of these reviews are up already, as most of these are recent reads:

Find Me Where It Ends, by Cassandra Khaw (fantasy)
Fate’s Bane, by C.L. Clark (fantasy)

Novellas?

These books meet the page-count criteria, but I didn’t really think of them as novellas and I’m not sure their authors did… but you know, just to round it out, here are a handful of those I liked! Mostly crime fiction, plus a verse novel.

Here are the reviews!

The Home Child, by Liz Berry (historical, in verse)
Tenant for Death, by Cyril Hare (mystery)
Sweet Poison, by Mary Fitt (mystery)
The Last Escape, by E.C.R. Lorac (mystery)

And that’s it… for now! I have some more novellas coming up that I want to get to, like the below:

Tags: books, discussion, Novellas in November

Review – A Hundred Doors [Michael Longley]

Posted November 12, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A Hundred Doors

by Michael Longley

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 89
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Michael Longley has remarkable powers of reinvention. Certain themes remain constant - the natural world, war, violence, love, friendship, art, death - but they also keep changing because the forms and genres of his poetry never stand still. In A Hundred Doors a sinuous short line complements his variations on pentameter and hexameter. And Longley's interlacing of individual lyrics, so that a diverse collection seems a single poem, intensifies in the shadow of mortality.

A sequence about his grandchildren's births is counterpointed by elegies, including Longley's continuing elegy for the Great War dead. The Mayo townland, Carrigskeewaun, with its cast of leverets, otters, swans, wrens, lesser twayblade and bird's-foot trefoil, also takes on fresh guises. Longley is among Europe's foremost 'ecological' poets. Yet Carrigskeewaun is ultimately symbolic, a microcosm, a 'soul-arena'.

A Hundred Doors roams in time and space. The title-poem evokes the oldest Byzantine church in Greece: Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on the island of Paros. The remains of a Greek temple 'ache' beneath its floor. Wild orchids, which crop up in Greece and the Italian Garfagnana as well as Ireland, are among the collection's multiple 'doors'. Others are music and paintings, 'cloudberry jam from Lapland', a Shetland pony. This is work of power, precision and delicacy: poems that 'bend and magnify the daylight', poems by a master craftsman.

I picked up Michael Longley’s collection A Hundred Doors out of curiosity after reading one of his poems in Carol Rumens’ daily column in the Guardian, though it took me a while to get round to it. I quite liked it, but somehow the full collection didn’t entirely work for me.

It’s clear he was a close observer of nature, the nature just outside his door, the nature of his own landscape, and it feels like that’s part of it — it’s a landscape I don’t know or feel connected to, so I didn’t connect as well to the intimate knowledge of his little world that several of his poems are expressing.

Not my thing, overall, though there are some striking imageries and ways of putting things that will stick with me.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Michael Longley, poetry

WWW Wednesday

Posted November 11, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I picked up a couple of epistolary novellas, both because of the blogging event Novellas in November and because I needed something to review for Postcrossing’s blog. I finished Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members on Monday, and thought that it was a lot of fun but that I have no urge to read more — one book of Professor Fitger seems like plenty. Yesterday I read Kim Fay’s Love & Saffron, which was sweet though a touch predictable. Both ended sadly, though it was more of a surprise (and better conveyed) in Dear Committee Members.

What are you currently reading?

I’m almost done with Ashley Douglas’ With My Own Hand, a biography of Marie Maitland, a Scottish poet who wrote love poetry to another woman and concealed it in an anthology of her father’s poetry. There are obviously some limitations on what we can know about her (and a lot of general history to contextualise her and flesh out the book), but I’m enjoying it.

What will you read next?

I’m not sure. I’d like it to be my reread leading into the final volume of Liu Gou Hua’s After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, which should’ve been out yesterday… but since my copy hasn’t shipped and nowhere seems to have copies available, I guess Seven Seas (or their distributor, Penguin) have done goofed again. Maybe it’s a good thing I hadn’t started my reread yet, or I’d be pretty sad!

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Illumino [Michelle P. Brown]

Posted November 11, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Illumino: A History of Medieval Britain in Twelve Illuminated Manuscripts

by Michelle P. Brown

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 320
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Incandescent with illustrations, a history of Britain as told through a remarkable collection of illuminated manuscripts--at once chronicles of their time and works of art.

Illumino explores the history of medieval Britain through the biographies of twelve remarkable illuminated manuscripts and their creators. Each manuscript serves as a gateway into the lives of its makers and commissioners, and as a springboard into the era of its creation. Illuminated manuscripts are among the most intricate and fascinating forms of medieval evidence, blending literature, art, science, faith, and human thought with the materiality of their production. By undertaking the detective work needed to determine the nature of each project and the underlying human-interest stories, this book reveals their social, economic, and cultural contexts and charts the exchange of ideas and materials across time and space. Featuring over a hundred beautiful illustrations, this is a unique and accessible introduction to Britain's history as well as art and book history over a thousand years.

Michelle P. Brown’s Illumino is a really lovely volume, beautifully illustrated with in-line colour images. There are full-page images and double-page spreads, as well as smaller images set into the text, and it’s all pretty gorgeous. All in all, it does make for a good history of manuscripts.

What it isn’t is a good history in manuscripts. I love this genre of “a history of X in Y things”, and the best remember to keep the focus on the object, and use the object to tell the story. There are glimpses of it here, like the reference to a girdle book belonging to Anne Boleyn that contains a love-note written by Henry VIII — but that’s not the manuscript the chapter is about.

Mostly, this is a history of medieval Britain that mentions many more than twelve illuminated manuscripts, throwing names and contexts at the reader swiftly, and sticking to what feels like only a handful of pages actually about the manuscripts discussed in the chapter. This might be more satisfying and more relevant if you’re interested in more general manuscript culture in Britain, and at another time I might be… but I was promised a history in twelve manuscripts, and I’d be hard-pressed to name even six of the manuscripts that allegedly headed their chapters here.

I’ve encountered this a couple of times now, and I think it’s a desire to jump aboard a trend that readers (including yours truly) enjoy. Don’t do it if that’s not the book you want to write, please! We actually want the format we bought the book for.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Michelle P. Brown, non-fiction

Review – Eat, Drink and Be Murdered [ed. Martin Edwards]

Posted November 10, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Eat, Drink and Be Murdered

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 266
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
A mouth-watering feast of crime fiction, including stories of mushroom murders, brown bread spread with bacillus botulinus, and tales in which the identity of killers is proved by a purchase of fillet steak or an inexpert knowledge of fine wines.

This new collection from British Library Crime Classics features some of the greatest mystery tales from the Golden Age of detective fiction to be based around food and drink. Complete with a well-stuffed introduction from expert editor, anthologist and crime author Martin Edwards, detailing the fascinating role of what we imbibe to the genre, this anthology includes tales from the likes of Dorothy L Sayers, Michael Gilbert and E.C. Bentley, and is sure to leave readers hungry and wanting more.

The latest British Library Crime Classic is another short story collection edited (as usual) by Martin Edwards, and this time themed around food and drink — hence the title, Eat, Drink and Be Murdered. The stories aren’t all about poisons (for example, there’s one with contraband hidden in a cake), but the majority are, as you’d expect. We even get more than one story where a knowledge of wine allows the mystery to be solved.

There are some big names in this anthology (like Dorothy Sayers) and some that Edwards obviously really likes and tries to include whenever he can (Christianna Brand, who I can generally take or leave, usually leave — and whose story here is predictably misogynistic); overall it comes out to a pretty good mix of stories from 1930 to 1969.

As always, I don’t love the individual stories enough to give this four stars just on their merit (or at least, some of them are decidedly mixed), but something about the themed collection always works really well for me and makes me feel a lot more positive about it.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery, short stories

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Characters I Wish Were Real People

Posted November 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

This week’s prompt from the Top Ten Tuesday list is “Book Characters I Wish Were Real People”. I’ll have to put on my thinking cap for this one, because the answers aren’t coming to me very readily — but I’ll give it a shot.

Maia Drazhar (Edrehasivar VII), from The Goblin Emperor (Katherine Addison).
Just because he’s a favourite, really! And not too good to be true: he struggles with a lot of negative feelings, with difficult history with others around him, with anger and spite — but he rises above. If only more people with power were like him!
Harriet Vane, from the Lord Peter Wimsey books (Dorothy L. Sayers).
Quite simply, I’d love to read her books!
Greta Helsing, from the Dr. Greta Helsing books (Vivian Shaw).
Okay, we’d have to also have various folklore creatures in order for her to actually have her usual job, but… even if she were just a normal British GP, it seems like she’d be pretty awesome. She has the right motivations to be a doctor, and will help everyone because she feels she has to, no matter what they’ve done. Excellent qualities in a doctor.
Lady Isabella Trent, from the Lady Trent books (Marie Brennan).
A pioneering female scientist to look up to? Yes, please. Also… I wouldn’t mind a few dragons to come along with her, to keep her from getting bored. (Maybe also bring her husband Suhail along too. She’d be a menace if she got really bored, so let’s give her plenty to keep her busy.)
Shen Yuan, from The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (Mo Xiang Tong Xiu).
Transmigration and all, please! If the webnovel can be in English and I can be one of the readers who so torment him by pushing the change to the genre, that’d be hilarious, too.
Masaru, from Dinosaur Sanctuary (Itaru Kinoshita).
A real dinosaur I could actually visit in a zoo? Yes please! I’d love to see all of them, like Trom and Benki, too, but Masaru’s a special one.
King Arthur, from the Arthurian legends.
If he could make his prophesied return to fix the world (or at least Britain; if we start there, maybe it’ll make a difference?) now, I’d love that, please.
Chief Inspector Macdonald, from the Macdonald mysteries (E.C.R. Lorac).
And his whole team, to be honest. If cops were all actually like Macdonald, we at least wouldn’t see the abuses of power etc etc that we do. It’s nice to imagine.
Phryne Fisher, from the Miss Fisher mysteries (Kerry Greenwood).
Okay, she and I would have very little in common, but I’m pretty sure she’d be a net positive to the world all the same.
Breq, from the Imperial Radch books (Ann Leckie).
Breq knows a fair bit about dealing with tyranny, after all. She could sure shake things up!

In most of these cases, I don’t think I want to meet these people (I’m shy anyway), I just want them to exist! They’d do some good in the world.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Bad Dolls [Rachel Harrison]

Posted November 9, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Bad Dolls

by Rachel Harrison

Genres: Horror, Short Stories
Pages: 192
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
In Reply Hazy, Try Again, an indecisive young woman finds a mysterious Magic 8 Ball that might just have the answers she's been looking for...or might lead her down a path of self-destruction. In Bachelorette, a bridesmaid attends her childhood best friend's bachelorette weekend only to discover the itinerary may demand more than she's willing to sacrifice. In Goblin, an unusually brutal dieting app wreaks havoc on the life of a timid, insecure woman preparing to attend her ex's wedding. In Bad Dolls, after the death of her younger sister, a wayward young woman comes into possession of a strange porcelain doll that could offer a connection to her lost sister, but could also just be pure evil. These dark tales navigate the complications of modern life with humour, insight and the odd blood sacrifice...

Rachel Harrison’s Bad Dolls is a collection of four short horror stories, which I found sort of predictable, but satisfying because it was (mostly) obvious how things were going to fall into place. Sometimes that’s fun, in the same way that there’s a satisfaction in knowing what the picture’s going to look like from the lid of the puzzle box, and so it was with these stories for me (that and noticing the smaller details here and there that did stand out).

I think my favourite of the four was ‘Bachelorette’, which I hadn’t expected to end quite that way (I’d expected an ending that was worse for the main character, shall we say? I’m trying not to spoiler here!).

The title story is pretty darn creepy, too, in the way that the main character just… gives into it. She has no real plan to make sure this ends, like someone in an abusive relationship who holds on to the “good parts”. It ends on a pretty unsettling note.

Not unmissable or anything, but I had fun.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, horror, Rachel Harrison, short stories

Fantasy with Friends: Graphic Novel Adaptations

Posted November 9, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 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 graphic novel adaptations:

An increasing number of books seem to be newly adapted as graphic novels. How do you feel about this trend? Are you excited to see new adaptations? Do you think new audiences could discover the story? Are there some books that you think might be difficult to adapt in this way?

I’m sort of ambivalent on this topic. On the one hand, a lot of the ones I’ve read seem to either simplify the story too much or not really do a great job of adaptation. Sometimes they feel more like they’re just illustrated versions, and that’s disappointing, because the thing about graphic novels is that they’re a whole different form, and you have to tell the story in a different way. I get why they sometimes stick close to the source (like A Wizard of Earthsea‘s adaptation does), but it sometimes means they don’t really work as graphic novels.

On the other hand, I’ve been reading some great manhua and manhwa adaptations of various Chinese and Korean webnovels, like Solo Leveling, Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, Heaven Official’s Blessing… and I really appreciate the way the switch to a visual medium helps me understand what characters and settings look like (which I need a lot of help with, given that I’m completely aphantasic). Often I find that reading the graphic adaptations helps the details fall into place, as well.

So I definitely feel there have been bad adaptations, and ones that are not to my taste, and ones which are just cash-ins… but that doesn’t mean I won’t try more, just that I’m maybe a bit cautious about it.

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