Happy weekend! I have big reading plans again this weekend, even though it’s just a normal weekend, because I really want to clean up my TBR a little before birthday books start rolling in.

Acquired this week

First, before I forget, library books!

The National Poetry Library had a display of Welsh poetry up top for a few weeks, and I added sooo many to my wishlist. In the aftermath of reading Afonydd, I definitely wanted to try the editors’ other bilingual book, and I figured I’d try Ness Owen’s solo collection too.

I’ve also been very lucky with book mail, with a bunch of new books to review: Hachette decided to bless me this week, and I got these three in quick succession! I also got an eARC from Little, Brown, which I’ll slip in here too…

Horror isn’t always my thing, but I’m very tempted by The Sea Hides Its Dead — and of course I’m keen on The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood, since it’s Arthurian. (For those who don’t know, I wrote my MA thesis on Sir Kay from Celtic to modern Arthurian stories. I semi-recently talked about some of my favourites!) Hopefully I’ll get to all three of these soon.

And of course, given how much I loved A Letter to the Luminous Deep and its sequel, I’m excited by Sylvie Cathrall’s new book!

Finally, a preorder came in, almost right after I finished the previous book:

Obviously I’m keen to get started on this!

Posts from this week

It’s been a busy week again around here, so here’s the round-up in case of anything you’ve missed. Reviews first:

• Non-fiction: How to Kill a Language, by Sophia Smith Galer (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
• Poetry: Afonydd, ed. Sian Northey & Ness Owen (5/5 stars, “loved it”)
• Manga: Cat + Gamer, vol 1, by Wataru Nadatani (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
• Fantasy romance: The Wife Comes First, vol 1, by Lv Ye Qian He (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
• Fantasy novella: Find Me Where It Ends, by Cassandra Khaw (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
• Children’s book: How Animals Sleep, by Jiří Dvořák (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

As ever, most of these aren’t books I finished that recently — I hold back reviews to try to give y’all a mixture to read, rather than dump reviews for all volumes of Cat + Gamer on you in the space of a week, ahaha.

There were also some other posts, as ever, so here we go with those:

• Fantasy with Friends: Tropes in Children’s Fantasy
• Top Ten Tuesday: Books that Live in my Head Rent-Free
• What Are You Reading Wednesday
• Book Blogger Hop: Fastest/Slowest

What I’m reading

Last weekend I took a long weekend, partly for catching up with housework and getting some specific bigger tasks done (woooo, I have a little shed for storing my bike in now!), but it also meant some really good reading time, so I started the week off very well. I slowed down toward the end of the week, but still preeeetty good.

As ever, here’s the sneak peek of what I’ve been reading!

My big plans for the weekend include finishing up Mary Beard’s Twelve Caesars, reading my new danmei (The Wife Comes First, vol 3) and working on some of my review books, like Megan Bontrager’s The Sea Hides Its Dead and Becky Chambers’ As You Wake, Break the Shell.

Buuut as always it’ll depend on my whim!

Hope everyone else has a great weekend, and looking forward to doing the rounds and dropping by all your blogs.

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.