Review – A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

Posted July 2, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks

by David Gribbins

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 289
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

From a Bronze Age ship built during the age of Queen Nefertiti and filled with ancient treasures, a Viking warship made for King Cnut himself, Henry VIII's spectacular Mary Rose and the golden age of the Tudor court, to the exploration of the Arctic, the tragic story of HMS Terror and tales of bravery and endurance aboard HMS Gairsoppa in World War Two, these are the stories of some of the greatest underwater discoveries of all time. A rich and exciting narrative, this is not just the story of those ships and the people who sailed on them, the cargo and treasure they carried and their tragic fate. This is also the story of the spread of people, religion and ideas around the world, a story of colonialism and migration which continues today.

Drawing on decades of experience excavating shipwrecks around the world, renowned maritime archaeologist David Gibbins reveals the riches beneath the waves and shows us how the treasures found there can be a porthole to the past to tell a new story about the world and its underwater secrets.

David Gibbins’ A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks was perfect for my mood and exactly what I’d been hoping for. I’ve been fascinated by underwater archaeology since watching certain episodes of Time Team as a kid, but I’d read another book recently about wrecks that really didn’t satisfy. This worked well, though!

As usual with this kind of thing, he doesn’t quite stick to just twelve shipwrecks, because contextualising each ship in comparison with other similar finds, documentary evidence, etc, can be really helpful — but each chapter does focus on a particular period and context, and there’s detail about the archaeology as well as the context surrounding it. My favourites were the earliest chapters/oldest wrecks, since modern history tends to leave me tuning out, but the author made all of it engaging.

I might maybe wish for numbered footnotes, but I feel I’m on a losing streak with those: few authors feel that’s necessary in a book for laypeople. I definitely wish the bibliography etc were printed in the book; my copy has a link where you can find the resources on the author’s website, but link rot is a thing and I wish people would be more cautious about it and just put the info in the darn book.

Rating: 4/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted July 2, 2025 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Cover of R.U.R. by Karel CapekWhat have you recently finished reading?

I reread Karel Čapek’s R.U.R., which I’d forgotten I’d read before. I think I “got” it better this time than previously, judging from my previous reaction. It’s still weird how all the men are in love with Helena, though.

Before that, I finished David Hone’s The Future of Dinosaurs, which… well, I’ve already posted the review; it was interesting, but quite dense to get through. At the same time, I guess it was kind of bitty as well, since it covers a broad range of topics.

Cover of The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective by Sara LodgeWhat are you currently reading?

I’m most actively reading The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective, by Sara Lodge, which I’m finding quite interesting given my interest in the development of crime fiction as a genre. It’s not really about that, but it does discuss fiction alongside the real-life female inquiry agents, etc. It’s funny reading it and thinking about Sayers’ Lord Peter thinking he’s so clever and innovative by recruiting Miss Climpson etc; clearly just a couple of decades before that was a whole well-known thing, based on the evidence of ads in papers and at least one court case so far.

As ever, I have a number of irons on the fire — probably too many — but I’m not making a lot of progress on anything else I’m reading.

What will you read next?

Who knows? The next week or two are gonna be pretty focused on moving into the new house, and then organising and shelving my book collection. Something unexpected might jump out at me! Right now I have no plans except to pick up whatever I feel in the mood for, to be honest. It’s likely to be non-fiction, given the givens.

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Review – The Future of Dinosaurs

Posted July 1, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Future of Dinosaurs

The Future of Dinosaurs: What We Don't Know, What We Can, and What We'll Never Know

by David Hone

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 272
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Discover the latest frontiers in dinosaur research with Dr David Hone.

Ever since we first started discovering dinosaurs in the early-1800s, our obsession for uncovering everything about these creatures has been insatiable. Each generation has made huge strides in trying to better our understanding of these animals and in the past twenty years, we have made more discoveries than in the previous two hundred.

There have been extraordinary advances in palaeontological methods and ever more dinosaur fossils promise a landslide of new data and huge leaps forward in our understanding of these incredible animals. Over time, we have been bale to look at the sizes and shapes of bones, we have identified patches of fossil skin, we have looked at footprints and bite marks and we've calculated mass estimates and walking speeds.

With surprisingly little data to work from, we can put together a picture of an animal that has been extinct for a million human lifetimes. But for all our technological advances, and two centuries of new data and ideas, there is stull much more we don't know. What parasites and diseases afflicted them? How did they communicate? Did they climb trees? How many species were there?

In The Future of Dinosaurs, palaeontologist Dr David Hone looks at the recent strides in scientific research and the advanced knowledge we've gathered in recent years, as well as what we hope to learn in the future about these most fascinating of extinct creatures.

David Hone’s The Future of Dinosaurs: What We Don’t Know, What We Can Know, and What We’ll Never Know has a very descriptive title that tells you pretty much what’s to come. The seventeen chapters cover various aspects like anatomy, physiology, mechanics and movement, appearance, etc, discussing a little about what we do know, and illuminating where that knowledge can grow, and where we may never know more.

For the enthused dinosaur fan who reads loads of popular science books about dinosaurs, there’s probably not a lot here that’s very surprising — certainly I’m a fairly moderate dinosaur fan, and I wasn’t very surprised by most of it, though I did learn some snippets here and there. For example, about the fact that dinosaurs could and modern birds can isolate infection in one part of the body rather than tending to see systemic spread like humans. I want to do a bit more research into how; more localised immune responses, rather than a lymphatic system…? Or some kind of trigger-happy immune cell policing things harder? I’d like to know.

It’s a pretty dense book, with some black-and-white photos and illustrations; it looks very slim on the shelf, at least in the edition I read, but it has tiny text, so there’s more here than you’d think.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Cyanide in the Sun

Posted June 30, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Cyanide in the Sun

Cyanide in the Sun and Other Stories of Summertime Crime

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 288
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

“All about them, happy holiday-makers were strolling and laughing, evidently oblivious of the prevailing perils of their chosen resort...”

A cold case of poisonings heats up at a quaint guest house. A string of suspicious murders follows a crime writer’s tour bus. Two seedy stowaways uncover an infamous smuggling ring. Everyone needs a break now and then, but sometimes getting away can be murder.

In this new anthology, Martin Edwards presents a jam-packed travel-case of eighteen classic mysteries, featuring short stories from crime fiction legends such as Christianna Brand, Anthony Berkeley and Celia Fremlin alongside rare finds revived from the British Library archives. Including intriguing notes on the stories and their authors, this volume is your ticket to a thrilling journey from 1920s seaside skulduggery through to calamity in 1980s suburbia – perfect for armchair travelling or your own summer getaway.

Cyanide in the Sun and Other Stories of Summertime Crime is, as usual, edited by Martin Edwards and collects a range of “classic” crime stories (where “classic” means mostly within a certain period of crime fiction, rather than “well known and has stood the test of time”, etc), this time themed around holidays.

There’s a surprising number of short ones in this volume, which makes it speed by quite a bit, and I feel like there was less reliance on the same few obvious names (though of course Christianna Brand, Anthony Berkeley and Julian Symons do appear), maybe. Perhaps the net is being cast a bit wider now, with so many collections already out there.

As usual, there were one or two I didn’t care for, but it’s an interesting collection as a whole.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Mortal Follies

Posted June 29, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Mortal Follies

Mortal Follies

by Alexis Hall

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 402
Series: Mortal Follies #1
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

It is the year 1814 and Miss Maelys Mitchelmore finds her entry into the highest society of Bath hindered by an irritating curse. It begins innocuously enough, with her dress slowly unmaking itself over the course of an evening at the ball of the season, a scandal she only narrowly manages to escape.

However, as the curse progresses to more fatal proportions, she realises she must seek out urgent assistance, even if that means mixing with the most undesirable company-and there are few less desirable allies than the brooding Lady Georgiana Landrake-who may or may not have murdered her own father and brothers to inherit their fortune.

If one is to believe the gossip, she might be some kind of malign enchantress.

Then again, a malign enchantress might be exactly what Miss Mitchelmore needs.

Alexis Hall’s Mortal Follies is a lot of fun: I love the conceit that it’s narrated by Puck (as in, Oberon’s servant). I thought that might become tiresome, but actually it’s well done. Hall knows how to let the narrative voice get out of the story’s way at the right moment, so it doesn’t create a weird distance, despite the fact that technically we’re being told everything at second-hand by an invisible fairy turned narrator.

I love Maelys and Georgiana, too: yes, at times I felt like yelling at Georgiana to open her eyes and see the woman in front of her not her own fears, but at the same time, she has a lot of good reasons for her fears. And Maelys can at times be a bit inclined to sit back and see what happens, but she does learn through the story to take things into her own hands when she needs to, and that works well.

And let’s face it, Miss Bickle’s adorable and deserves her very own amazing romance.

At times it felt like this was dragging just a touch, because there’s a lot of back and forth, a certain amount of will-they-won’t-they, and some repetitive elements — but once I was into the book, that seemed a very minor quibble. I ended it reluctant to let the characters go, and eager to read Confounding Oaths (although it doesn’t follow Maelys and Georgiana, it should still have the fun narrative voice).

Rating: 4/5 

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 28, 2025 by Nicky in General / 18 Comments

Good morning! Moving continues apace, but this weekend should actually be fairly chill. Next weekend there are movers, so that’ll be less chill, ahaha.

Books acquired this week

N/a! I haven’t been out much, certainly not anywhere with a bookshop — and my birthday isn’t far off, so I’m trying to leave some books on my wishlist that people might want to buy me.

Posts from this week

As usual, let’s do a bit of a roundup…

That was it for this week!

What I’m reading

I haven’t actually been reading a lot this week, by my standards or… honestly, anyone’s standards, at least among book bloggers. It’s just these two volumes of Solo Leveling:

Cover of Solo Leveling manhwa vol 4 by Dubu Cover of Solo Leveling manhwa vol 5 by Dubu

I’m not sure what I’ll be reading this weekend, if anything, actually. I might try to get some books I’m close to finishing actually wrapped up, so I can pack them or donate them. But we’ll see!

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 All-Nighter, vol 2

Posted June 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The All-Nighter, vol 2

The All-Nighter

by Chip Zdarsky, Jason Loo, Paris Alleyne, Aditya Bidikar, Allison O'Toole

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 119
Series: The All-Nighter #2
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In the wake of Ian's disappearance, tensions are running high at the diner. Alex and Joy are stuck covering shifts when they'd rather be out fighting bad guys. To make things worse, people start disappearing just as a new super hero team arrives in town--could the two be related?

What if they're dealing with something bigger and more dangerous than super villains--and what if Alex's decision to become Nightshock put it all in motion?

“Season Two” of Chip Zdarsky’s The All-Nighter picks up not long after the first volume, with everyone trying to reckon with the disappearance of Ian at the end of the volume. We see a bit more of the “found family” aspect in this volume, even if it fragments a bit toward the end, and we also see a bit more development of Cynthia as a character.

And of course, come the end of the book there are some preeeetty big consequences for Alex’s actions, and everyone’s thrown into even worse turmoil.

I haven’t said much about the art so far. It doesn’t bowl me over but it works, characters and events are pretty clear and easy to follow.

Overall, the middle volume is okay, and the ending sets things up for an explosive finale.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Magic Books

Posted June 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Review – The Magic Books

The Magic Books: A Medieval History of Enchantment in 20 Extraordinary Manuscripts

by Anne Lawrence-Mathers

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 368
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

In this beautifully illustrated account, Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores the medieval fascination with magic through twenty extraordinary illuminated manuscripts. These books were highly sought after, commissioned by kings and stored in great libraries. They include an astronomical compendium made for Charlemagne's son; The Sworn Book of Honorius, used by a secret society of trained magicians; and the highly influential Picatrix. This vivid new history shows how attitudes to magic and science changed over the medieval period--and produced great works of art as they did so.

Medieval Europe was preoccupied with magic. From the Carolingian Empire to Renaissance Italy and Tudor England, great rulers, religious figures, and scholars sought to harness supernatural power. They tried to summon spirits, predict the future, and even prolong life. Alongside science and religion, magic lay at the very heart of culture.

Anne Lawrence-Mathers’ The Magic Books: A History of Enchantment in 20 Medieval Manuscripts isn’t quite laid out in the format that might lead you to believe. I didn’t count the manuscripts mentioned, though I suppose there are probably at least 20. It’s structured more as a series of themes/time periods, charting the development of magic and how it related to the church (which often produced or owned the manuscripts even as the church discouraged the use of such magic).

It’s a really nice volume, with colour images alongside the text where necessary, with detailed notes and bibliography. I think it’s rather on the academic side, and certainly verged on the edges of what I’d be interested in as someone who has random interest in a lot of things, but not very specific interest.

Mostly, it’s focused on the information contained in the manuscripts, often describing in detail exactly what a given manuscript gives as instructions for this or that piece of magic. There is also discussion of the illuminations and art, but it feels less focused on the manuscripts as objects than I think I was hoping.

If this is your area of interest, though, I expect it’s a delight!

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Cold Night Lullaby

Posted June 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Cold Night Lullaby

Cold Night Lullaby

by Colin Mackay

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 87
Rating: five-stars
Synopsis:

No publisher summary found, so I'll have a go: Cold Night Lullaby is a volume of poems written by Colin Mackay, a Scottish poet who took aid to Bosnia during the war, and saw horrific things there. Cold Night Lullaby is his account, in poems, of that experience.

Cold Night Lullaby is Colin Mackay’s working-through of the things he saw and experienced in Bosnia: the deaths of other people who were there, like him, to provide aid; the death they saw all around them; the violence; the corpses.

And the death of the Serbian woman he fell in love with, Svetlana, along with her two children. He said goodbye to them in the morning, drove away in the afternoon to arrange taking them with him to Britain, and drove back to find them dead, killed by other Serbs as traitors. Graphic details: View Spoiler »

Colin Mackay found them and saw all of this, and he was never alright again — couldn’t, in fact, imagine a world in which he would be alright. The whole collection is a haunting, his ghosts and trauma, and — in the wake of his suicide in 2003 — of Colin Mackay himself. It’s hard to evaluate the technical merit of the poems against how raw the emotion is. I think the emotion is a good part of what gives them heft, and the blunt horror of some of the things he saw, most particularly surrounding the death of Svetlana. If you’re easily shocked by graphic language and violence, I’d avoid this one.

It’s a powerful volume which I know about because of Karine Polwart’s song, Waterlily. I recommend the song as well, though it’s less graphic by a very long way.

This was a reread for me, and it hasn’t lost any of its punch.

Rating: 5/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted June 25, 2025 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Cover of Into the Riverlands by Nghi VoWhat have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I finished was my reread of Nghi Vo’s Into the Riverlands — I got tempted to reread the novellas after reading an ARC of the latest, A Mouthful of Dust, and I’m definitely enjoying the revisit, and also spotting little links between the stories. Each can stand alone, but sometimes a little stray detail pops up that I only really notice because I’ve got them all very fresh in my mind.

Cover of The Correspondent by Virginia EvansWhat are you currently reading?

Not very much, I’ll be honest. I have quite a few books part-started, but I’m not finding anything that quite clicks with my brain. I most recently started Wendy A. Woloson’s Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, which I’m finding very interesting. It isn’t always directly relateable to the UK and experiences here, but there are definitely similarities.

I’m also reading Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent, somewhat on a whim; it’s doing a really good job at building a personality through letters, and I look forward to reviewing it for Postcrossing’s blog at some stage.

Cover of volume one of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong XiuWhat will you be reading next?

It’s really hard to say since I’m mostly playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, not reading! But I’m in a danmei book club Discord server, and they’re starting on The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation soon, so maybe that.

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