February Reading Wrap-Up

Posted March 1, 2026 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus — Happy St David’s Day! I can’t believe it’s 1st March already, and time for month #2 of my reading wrap-up. For now it’s mostly the same stats and format as last month, but still excited to hear if anyone has any fun ideas for additions.

February in general:

February involved quite a bit of gaming, so a quick shoutout for the new-to-me games I was really loving: Loophole (a fun puzzle game with time travel and tricky paradoxes) and The Chef’s Shift (a typing game that’s also a restaurant management sim). I’ve been trying to do better at getting 100% achievements in the games I pick up and not consigning games to oblivion half played, so I really got stuck into those and got 100% on both, plus a few games I’d been neglecting for a while, like Fossil Corner (a game where you sort fossils, and find fossils matching people’s requests).

My wrist was pretty painful and stiff early in the month, but I kinda figured out why and gave myself a bit of a break, and was able to get back to physio without too many problems. I don’t know if it’s helping, but I’m giving it a bit more time before I go back to the GP, since I know I was (accidentally) doing some stuff that hurt my wrist in the last couple weeks.

I also sorted out my attendance at both my graduations: I’ll be graduating with an MSc in Infectious Diseases from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine at the end of March, and then from the University of London at the end of April. I’m in one of the last few cohorts to do so, since University of London shut down the course and LSHTM decided to keep it going by themselves. It’s kinda nice that I still get to graduate from both, as it means I’m graduating from the same university as my mum did (albeit in different subjects/from different schools, as she’s a doctor).

Alright, now let’s talk about the really important stuff: books!

Reading stats:

Total books read: 37
Total pages read: 8,660
Rereads: 1
ARCs: 6
Series finished/up to date: 2
Books owned pre-2026: 8
Books owned from 2026: 18
Borrowed books: 10

Fiction: 24
Non-fiction: 4
Poetry: 9
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 12

I’m ending the month ahead on my yearly reading goal, wooo. One major cause of that was mainlining the manhua adaptation of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation. I read the light novel recently, but reading an adaptation is always a little different, and I found it helped bits and pieces of the story come together for me that hadn’t really clicked before. Volume 13 should finish off the story, and is out in March, so I’m looking forward to finishing the series.

I read less non-fiction than I expected, but more poetry. I’m still enjoying exploring more poetry!

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books read: 68/400 (2 books ahead)
Overall total pages read: 15,966/100,000 (472 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 21/100
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 12/20

Good progress here, really! I was a few books behind (and further behind on pages) until I did a marathon of reading yesterday to finish off my BookSpinBingo card. I actually managed it, finishing nine books in a single day, which was a lot of fun but not something I want to do often, ahaha.

I need to work more on getting the number of books I’ve bought this year and not started doooown, since my graduation this month means a trip to London and therefore to a bunch of bookshops.

Blogging stats:

Views: 13.7k
Visitors: 11.9k
Likes: 353
Comments: 389
Reviews: 28
Other posts: 16

A busy month! I’m not entirely sure why, though I’m sure bots are a part of it. Still, all the numbers are up, including likes and comments, so I don’t think it’s just bots. It’s probably also the fact that I took part in Top Ten Tuesday and added a new weekly meme I participate in (Fantasy with Friends), plus trying to be generally active and add fun blogs to my own RSS feed.

Most viewed posts:

Review – Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 3 (63 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Cool Typography (57 views)
Review – The Correspondent (56 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: British Library Crime Classics (50 views)
Review – The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter (LN), vol 3 (48 views)

I continue to get a fair bit of traffic to reviews of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, which I guess is due to the anime. I wonder if I’ll see more for Heaven Official’s Blessing, given the release of the new short film, though I think the audience for the short films are already pretty locked in and don’t need to read book reviews to know that Hualian invented love…

My own favourite posts:

Posts I loved from elsewhere:

From Reactor Magazine: How to Uphold the Status Quo: the Problem with Small Town Witch Romances, by Jenny Hamilton
From Books, Bones & Buffy: NIGHTSHADE & OAK by Molly O’Neill – Review, by Tammy
From Books, Bones & Buffy: STRANGE ANIMALS by Jarod K. Anderson – Review, by Tammy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: Strange Animals by Jarod K. Anderson, by Mogsy
From Book’d Out: 2026 Non-Fiction Award Announcements, by Shelleyrae
From Books, Bones & Buffy: A FOREST, DARKLY by A.G. Slatter – Review, by Tammy

Alright, that’s me for February! Time to go and start on that March reading.

Tags: books, monthly wrapup

Review – The Hungry Empire

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Hungry Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World

by Lizzie Collingham

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 367
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
The glamorous daughter of an African chief shares a pineapple with a slave trader ... Surveyors in British Columbia eat tinned Australian rabbit ... Diamond prospectors in Guyana prepare an iguana curry ... In twenty meals The Hungry Empire tells the story of how the British created a global network of commerce and trade in foodstuffs that moved people and plants from one continent to another, re-shaping landscapes and culinary tastes. To be British was to eat the world. The Empire allowed Britain to harness the globe's edible resources from cod fish and salt beef to spices, tea and sugar. By the twentieth century the wheat to make the working man's loaf of bread was supplied by Canada and his Sunday leg of lamb had been fattened on New Zealand's grasslands. Lizzie Collingham takes us on a wide-ranging culinary journey, charting the rise of sugar to its dominant position in our diets and locating the origins of the food industry in the imperial trade in provisions. Her innovative approach brings a fresh perspective to the making of the Empire, uncovering its decisive role in the shaping of the modern diet and revealing how virtually every meal we eat still contains a taste of empire.

Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire takes two different tacks in addressing the subtitle, “How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World”. One is to discuss the food the British Empire imported to Britain, the adoption of new spices, of sugar, of tea — a fairly well-worn story, but nonetheless part of understanding imperialist expansion, and sometimes even the explicit cause of it.

The other is to discuss the less intentional way that food travelled with immigrants and slaves, especially the slaves, or was shipped around the world to cope with the needs of slaves and indentured people, and how these diets affected health. The latter part was a bit more interesting to me because I’d read less about it elsewhere. As a note, it’s fairly dispassionate about all this, rather than outraged at the casual treatment of people as chattel; it does comment about stuff like horrible conditions on slave ships and the high mortality rates, but it mostly just gives the facts… aside from when discussing opium and China, at which point it gets very defensive about Britain’s role in that and argues that the impact of opium on China is over-exaggerated. It’s hard to say how to take that without more context.

I did find the book fairly slow/long-winded, personally; there was something about the author’s writing that I really couldn’t keep my attention on for long, unfortunately. I found the inclusion of the recipes an interesting idea but intrusive — they aren’t always positioned at the ends of chapters, and sometimes just break in mid-paragraph. Weird choice.

It’s an interesting book and I am glad I read it, but it was definitely slow-going.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Lizzie Collingham, non-fiction

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in General / 13 Comments

Woooo, weekend time! And I have plans. Reading plans.

Books acquired this week

First up, some poetry via the library:

It seems to be really popular — I had to put a hold on it (and I was third in the queue), and there’s one person after me, so I should get to this soon. From my (short) experience of being a National Poetry Library member, it’s rare to need to put a hold on books (even award winners), much less see multiple holds on it, so I’m very curious about why. My hopes are high!

I did also get a review copy this week; I hesitated over accepting it because it’s a PDF, and because I don’t always get on with modern crime/mystery stories… but I figured I’d give it a shot.

Though I don’t know when I’ll get to it, ahaha.

Posts from this week

Let’s start with the review roundup, as usual:

Horror: Wolf Worm, by T. Kingfisher (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
SF novella: And Side By Side We Wander, by Molly Tanzer (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Non-fiction: Posted in the Past: Revealing the True Stories Written on a Postcard, by Helen Baggott (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Poetry: Hedonism, by Chris McCabe (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy comic: The Chromatic Fantasy, by H.A. (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
SF: Longer, by Michael Blumlein (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
Fantasy romance (baihe): The Beauty’s Blade, by Feng Ren Zuo Shu (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

Aaand the other posts:

What I’m reading

I’ve read quite a bit this week, but I haven’t finished many books (I expect that to happen in a marathon this weekend, ahaha). So it’s a short round-up of books I’ve finished this week:

If I want to get a blackout on my BookSpinBingo card (and I do!) then today will be spent reading a lot. I first plan to finish up reading the new Murderbot, Platform Decay, and (finally) Heather Fawcett’s Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, but I have a few books close to finished, so they won’t be the only ones.

I’m rather looking forward to my marathon reading today, but probably tomorrow I’ll chill with video games a bit more, ahaha.

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.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – The Beauty’s Blade

Posted February 28, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Beauty's Blade

by Feng Ren Zuo Shu

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 394
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Two powerful swordswomen face off in this enemies-to-lovers historical tale.

Ruthless and mercurial, Fu Wanqing is hardly the type of woman anyone expected to be heir to the jianghu’s preeminent righteous cultivation sect. Yet she’s famous for more than just her attitude: her raw power and beauty are renowned, rivaled only by those of demonic sect leader Yu Shengyan.

As such, Fu Wanqing is determined to face her in battle; after all, she must prove herself not just worthy of her station, but superior beyond the rest!

Unfortunately, the ice-cold Yu Shengyan couldn’t be less interested in her challenge. Yet when Fu Wanqing offers the rare medicine Yu Shengyan needs to cure one of her comrades, she relents. The catch? Yu Shengyan must agree to stay by Fu Wanqing’s side for three months. Fu Wanqing is certain that by the end of their deal, she’ll get her duel—but will her fascination with Yu Shengyan come to encompass more than just her sword?

I really wanted to be absolutely in love with Feng Ren Zuo Shi’s The Beauty’s Blade, the first baihe I’ve read. I love the cover, the inside art’s nice too, and I love that it flips various things on their heads (the fiery, impetuous, red-robed light-aligned cultivator, and the cool and virtuous head priestess of the demonic guild), and the whole presentation of the book is really pretty.

In the end, I did enjoy the book, but not as much as I hoped to. The story is a bit all over the place, with (at least to an English audience) lots of similar-looking names and unfamiliar terms. Some of the context I knew or could quickly work out from reading danmei, but terms like “jianghu” and “wulin” were new. There is a glossary in the back, at least, but still, it can be a lot to juggle. It did all come together for me in the end, given some time, but I can understand readers finding it a bit much — especially if they don’t have the context of reading other cultivation novels.

The two main characters are a lot of fun, though: Fan Wanqing and Yu Shengyan have a lot more in common than it appears at first, and their growing obsession with each other is quite fun. Unhealthy! But fun nonetheless. Fu Wanqing is less of a meathead than she appears at first, and Yu Shengyan has a lot more passion than it appears at first, and they both end up murderously possessive of one another.

I think at times certain parts of this felt rushed, or were maybe just underexplained for this audience (which it wasn’t written for, so that’s fair, but could maybe have been fixed with a bit of localisation), but overall I had fun. And though Fu Wanqing at the end indicates she’s no longer interested in the jianghu… I think they had fun wandering around messing things up together, and I expect they’ll continue, really.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: baihe, book reviews, books, Feng Ren Zuo Shu, light novels, romance, SF/F

Review – Longer

Posted February 26, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Longer

by Michael Blumlein

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 240
Rating:

Synopsis:
In Longer, Michael Blumlein explores dauntingly epic topics--love, the expanse of the human lifespan, mortality--with a beautifully sharp story that glows with grace and good humor even as it forces us to confront deep, universal fears.

Gunjita and Cav are in orbit.

R&D scientists for pharmaceutical giant Gleem Galactic, they are wealthy enough to participate in rejuvenation: rebooting themselves from old age to jump their bodies back to their twenties. You get two chances. There can never be a third.

After Gunjita has juved for the second and final time and Cav has not, questions of life, death, morality, and test their relationship. Up among the stars, the research possibilities are infinite and first contact is possible, but their marriage may not survive the challenge.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I remember trying Michael Blumlein’s Longer previously and bouncing off it, but I couldn’t really remember why (and what I did seem to remember didn’t really match what I read now, so maybe I’m mistaken). So I figured now I’d give it a proper shot. There are some interesting ideas here — the consequences of a (limited, but extended) long life, the possibility of some kind of extraterrestrial life (with, in the background, the aftermath of a hoax about the same), a developing mismatch between people who’ve lived together for a long time.

Buuut it reaches way too hard for profundity, trying to write in a stripped-back way to give it gravity, and thus stripping it also of personality and emotion. For something that’s really heavy on dialogue (multiple exchanges without any inquits to note who is speaking, what they’re doing as they speak, their tone, etc) it’s really bad at differentiating the characters from one another. In one exchange I carefully counted it out so I could figure out who was saying what, and one character must have had two lines in a row at one point (which is something you have to be really careful of when you do that).

The footnotes didn’t really add anything either; it didn’t feel like it was meant to be an in-world document, so why in-world footnotes? Did the author just fail to think of a way to get vital information into the narrative? But the footnotes didn’t really give vital information in any way, just extra flavour (such as it was).

Overall, kinda bland and boring, unfortunately. It isn’t really digging into the sci-fi concepts for the cool sci-fi nature, but more a philosophic take on the potential impact of longevity treatments. There’s a place for that, but I didn’t find this effort at it particularly interesting or fun to read.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Michael Blumlein, SF/F

Review – The Chromatic Fantasy

Posted February 25, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Chromatic Fantasy

by H.A.

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 300
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
A Faustian bargain kicks off in this gorgeously drawn graphic novel reminiscent of stained glass and illuminated manuscripts, telling the story of queer transmasc romance, daring adventure, and (literally) fighting your demons. Jules is a trans man trapped in his life as a nun. The devil that the convent guards against offers him a deal to escape: an illicit tryst and lifelong possession. Jules takes the deal, and begins his new life as a criminal who's impervious to harm. He soon meets Casper, another trans man and a poetic thief, and together they steal, lie, and cheat their way through bewildering adventures, and develop feelings for each other along the way. But as Jules and Casper's relationship deepens, so does the devil's jealous grasp...

H.A.’s The Chromatic Fantasy is a pretty mad book, with beautiful colours and fun character designs, which seems mostly designed to satisfy the artist’s desire to show transmasculine characters having fun, falling in love, having sex in a variety of fun ways, and getting into trouble. It’s a weird mix of medieval-esque and modern elements, all jumbled together very energetically.

There’s minimal dysphoria in the story, to be clear, but it’s worth knowing that the characters are portrayed naked and as not having had surgery. There’s a reference or two to the possibility of surgery, but very minor.

It’s hard to explain exactly what happens in this book, it’s pretty nuts, but I enjoyed the artist’s enthusiasm.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F

WWW Wednesday

Posted February 25, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I finished up The Keeper of Magical Things the day before yesterday; I didn’t love it as much as I loved Julie Leong’s previous book, because I felt the magic was a little less interesting (or a bit less of a unique angle, anyway). Still, it was cute and fun, and I’m glad I finally settled in and got round to it!

What are you currently reading?

A few books at once, as always. I’ve finally got back to Heather Fawcett’s Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter; I’d actually hoped to finish it yesterday, but I didn’t manage to settle down into quiet reading time early enough to have a chance. I still think it has such Howl’s Moving Castle vibes.

I’m also now reading Selena Wisnom’s The Library of Ancient Wisdom, which I started a while back and then stalled on because it was quite dense and I was in the middle of exams. It’s really interesting, because working from the starting point of discussing the library of Ashurbanipal means the author is able to dig into various aspects of ancient Mesopotamian beliefs and knowledge. I didn’t know (for instance) that they were actually really good on hygiene and quarantining the sick: it might sound a little patronising to be surprised that they washed their hands with soap and had good hygiene around sick people, but when you consider that in the 1800s Ignaz Semmelweis was treated as a literal madman for suggesting washing your hands between doing autopsies and delivering babies… welp.

What will you be reading next?

Definitely Molly O’Neill’s Nightshade and Oak, and probably also Martha Wells’ Platform Decay, since they’re both on my BookSpinBingo list! I’ve been more into reading again in the last couple of days, so I’m still hopeful of finishing most of it.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Hedonism

Posted February 24, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Hedonism

by Chris McCabe

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 101
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Join a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges, and a medieval pilgrim on a journey to buy a PlayStation, in McCabe's sixth and most daring collection. Part-written in Scouse dialect and invented languages, Hedonism offsets the comic with the elegiac in a spectral and polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination. This is a book where haunted pasts and futures collide; in a post-Brexit landscape, through cities both imagined and real, McCabe's poems merge through timeslips and ghostly encounters, all the time electrified by the great connector of language at its most radical and unruly. These incandescent poems surge and resist expectation and formula – declaring "can it be, after all, that hedonism is the only activism?"

Okay, I confess, I went into Chris McCabe’s Hedonism pretty certain that it wasn’t going to be my thing, based on the description. That’s the lovely thing about libraries, after all: you can just try something, even if you don’t think you’re going to love it, and sometimes you strike gold.

This time, well, I’m not sure about striking gold, but definitely some kind of precious metal! I didn’t get on with all the poems in here by any means, but there were several that jumped out at me immediately, others that grew on me, and some where I liked parts of them, such as a few lines or phrases, or an image.

Here’s one excerpt I thought was great:

Futurists are living ghosts, like the self-hauntedness of Tony Blair,
spectral / spectographic / sparkplugs of machinistic thought,
medievalists of a culture-to-come, cruising in a six-gear typewriter,
mistaking quick print for acceleration & accumulation for progress,
stalling at time’s hedgerow.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what “the self-hauntedness of Tony Blair” means, but it’s perfect all the same, absolutely. “Medievalists of a culture-to-come” is pretty great too.

Then there was this snippet of a longer poem:

The snow falls as we conjure Robert Denos
His body alive in a dead lover
What is my body doing here packing a bag
Checking a ticket to London
Feet printing out steps
Marking an EXIT that is writ without me
Whose policy decrees we part today?

“Feet printing out steps”… perfect.

A great experiment for me, and a poet I wouldn’t actually mind reading again, even if not all of it was to my taste. I had fun.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chris McCabe, poetry

Top Ten Tuesday: Quotations

Posted February 24, 2026 by Nicky in General / 24 Comments

I don’t actually save quotations from books very often, so for this we’re reaching for some snippets I remember (or at least half remember, enough to look them up) to see what’s made an impression on me… let’s see what I can rustle up. Some of these I’ve surely posted before (and am posting again because they remain as vital to me as ever), but some are definitely newer.

From John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis, because TB remains a terrible and destructive disease that we must all take responsibility for:
We cannot address TB only with vaccines and medications. We cannot address it only with comprehensive STP programs. We must also address the root cause of tuberculosis, which is injustice. In a world where everyone can eat, and access healthcare, and be treated humanely, tuberculosis has no chance. Ultimately, we are the cause.
We must also be the cure.
From Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, because Maia’s efforts to be better than what was done to him (without it being easy) make him a wonderful character:
“In our inmost and secret heart, which you ask us to bare to you, we wish to banish them as we were banished, to a cold and lonely house, in the charge of a man who hated us. And we wish them trapped there as we were trapped.”
“You consider that unjust, Serenity?”
“We consider it cruel,” Maia said. “And we do not think that cruelty is ever just.”
From Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Heaven Official’s Blessing, because Xie Lian’s strong determination to save whoever he can is something I aspire to:
“If a day isn’t enough, let it take a month. If a month won’t do, then two months, three months! If I can’t save ten thousand, then I’ll save a thousand. If I can’t save a thousand, then I’ll save a hundred, or ten, or even just one!”
From Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Heaven Official’s Blessing, because it struck a chord for me in emphasising choice:
“I might not be able to decide whether the road is easy or not, but whether I walk it is entirely up to me.”
From Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, because this scene is actually really important, and we really do have to know when to say sorry:
Wei Wuxian strode over with his hands clasped behind his back. “Young man, sometimes in life, there are a few sappy things one must say.”
“What?” Jin Ling asked.
“‘Thank you’ and ‘I’m sorry’,” Wei Wuxian replied.
Jin Ling clicked his tongue. “Well, I refuse. What’re you gonna do about it?”
“There’ll come a day when you’ll say them through tears,” Wei Wuxian said.
Jin Ling scoffed, and Wei Wuxian suddenly said it himself.
“I’m sorry.”
From Susan Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, because it’s easy to wait for someone else to save us:
“For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy the world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvelous joy.
And the world will still be imperfect, because men are imperfect. Good men will still be killed by bad, or sometimes by other good men, and there will still be pain and disease and famine, anger and hate. But if you work and care and are watchful, as we have tried to be for you, then in the long run the worse will never, ever, triumph over the better.”
From Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, because this is the turning-point of the story, and in a way taught me to be less anxious by facing my fears:
“You must hunt the hunter.”
From Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, because it’s true but hard to learn:
“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”
From Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, so that not all of these are serious (and because this, too, is true!):
“Books are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with ’em, then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development.”
From Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, because it’s a good one to end on, and a line I will never forget:
Only the margin left to write on now. I love you, I love you, I love you.

With apologies to those who could’ve predicted the inclusion of those quotes from Cooper, Le Guin, Addison, Smith and Sayers…

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Posted in the Past

Posted February 23, 2026 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Posted in the Past: Revealing the True Stories Written on a Postcard

by Helen Baggott

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 286
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Posted in the Past - the man who helped prepare Kitchener's last meal and other true stories.

A young pupil writing to a teacher, a courting couple that might get married, a 10-year-old servant working for a laundress in 19th-century Bath, a maid who worked for Edward VII's doctor - all are connected by messages sent using the first real social media phenomenon of the 20th century.

Using a genealogist's toolbox, Posted in the Past reveals the stories behind postcards sent more than a hundred years ago. Families who emigrated across the Atlantic to America and Canada, those who returned, and those who found tragedy aboard RMS Empress of Ireland in an event that could only be eclipsed by that of Titanic's, are remembered through postcards.

The safe arrival of a precious grandchild, a train delayed by the first national rail strike, bad weather, good luck - messages that go beyond 'wish you were here?' and open the door to the past. Weavers, button makers, butlers, motor bus drivers, a fitter of sanitary appliances and even the owner of a steamship - industrious employment from mills to the sea and all revealed in Posted in the Past.

Have you ever watched Who Do You Think You Are? and A House Through Time and thought about researching your own family's history? Perhaps you've started a family tree and soon become stumped? Posted in the Past is sure to ignite your enthusiasm to learn more about your own history. As well as revealing the stories behind the postcards, Posted in the Past also shares how some of the research was completed, providing tips for the beginner genealogist.

The book is illustrated with black and white images of both sides of the postcards and can be viewed in colour on a blog that accompanies the book.

Helen Baggott’s Posted in the Past focuses more on the genealogy of the senders/recipients of the postcards she discusses rather than the actual stories of the postcards themselves. In part that makes a lot of sense — most postcards are fairly prosaic due to the small amount of space to write, and the ephemeral details they often contain are hard to track down.

Still, it doesn’t make for the most riveting reading, alas. Each story is much like the last, varying only in the details, even down to the kind of detective work needed to discover the connections between people. There were some neat connections made — a realisation that one postcard was actually related to another card in the author’s collection — but overall, I found it more interesting to look at/read the postcards and try to fill in the details a bit, rather than reading the genealogy stuff.

I’m certain it has an audience, though, it’s just not me!

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Helen Baggott, history, non-fiction