Author: Nicky

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted December 27, 2025 by Nicky in General / 28 Comments

Happy weekend! I hope everyone who was celebrating had a good Christmas, or indeed any other holiday you might’ve been celebrating!

Books acquired this week

As in previous years, I’m going to split my Christmas haul into a couple of different posts, because it’s a lot! First up, a bunch of light novels (some danmei, some not):

A couple of those are the special editions, too! I got Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 2 for myself, actually, and promptly devoured it.

Also, I was very pleased to get those two volumes of Solo Leveling — I started the first volume on Christmas Morning, and was absolutely tearing through it, and already beginning to pout about the idea of having to wait to get my hands on the next volumes (if only due to shipping being delayed over Christmas/New Year, since I do have some Bookshop.org credit from trade-ins). Welp, my sister-in-law to be had me covered!

Aaand of course I got a bunch of new non-fiction to read!

Looking forward to digging in. It’s a mix of different themes, as you can see!

Posts from this week

I kept it light this week, in part just to chill out, and in part because I was quite busy with Christmas prep. (I did mostly manage to stay chill with the Christmas prep, due to being quite organised, but Christmas Eve was a bit packed.) Still, there are a couple of reviews to highlight:

Non-fiction: The Secret Life of Clothes, by Shahidha Bari (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
History: City of Ravens: London, the Tower, and its Famous Birds, by Boria Sax (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Fantasy manhwa: Solo Leveling, vol 10, by Dubu (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

Plus a quick What Are You Reading Wednesday post!

What I’m reading

Since I had time off this week, I did manage to fit in quite a bit of reading around Christmas stuff! Here’s a peek at the books I plan to review on the blog:

As for this weekend… I have a lot of new books to choose from, it’s hard to pick! I’ll at least start by finishing the first volume of the Solo Leveling light novel, I think, and then go from there, but I expect I’ll pick up some new non-fiction.

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Solo Leveling, vol 10

Posted December 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Solo Leveling

by Dubu, Chugong

Genres: Fantasy, Manga
Pages: 300
Series: Solo Leveling #10
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Saving Japan from total destruction at the hands of the King of Giants earns Jinwoo and Ahjin Guild world-wide recognition and a spot at the International Guild Conference. But heading to America means crossing paths with Dongsoo Hwang, who has a bone to pick with Jinwoo about the death of his brother—and isn’t above using Jinho as bait!

The tenth volume of the Solo Leveling manhwa is as action-packed as ever, and it gives us more of a glimpse into what’s going on below the surface, introducing us to a bigger conflict that Jinwoo is now going to be part of, whether he wants to be or not. I love that he’s clever enough to see a trap, and wise enough to evade it.

Oh, and I love the fact that he’s so kind to Jinho. Despite his decision to rely mostly on himself, he doesn’t actually stop being kind — even though his powers are dark, in a sense he hasn’t really let them change him.

Well… mostly. In the last part of the book, Jinwoo pretty much ends up charging in to rescue Jinho, and while I’m sure he’s going to triumph in the end, this is probably the most even match we’ve seen in a while. And naturally the book ends on a cliffhanger, arghhh…

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Chugong, Dubu, manga, SF/F

WWW Wednesday

Posted December 24, 2025 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

Looks like the last thing I finished was David Hone and Mark P. Witton’s Spinosaur Tales, which was really interesting. I don’t know that much about spinosaurs; they’re not a dinosaur I’d ever been particularly interested in. I mostly remember Baryonyx because of playing Jurassic World Evolution and having trouble making the habitat comfy for it, ahaha. Hone’s books are usually really clear, and Witton’s drawings added a lot too.

What are you currently reading?

A few things at once, but still kinda struggling with attention span except when something really grabs me. I’m trying to finish Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World today; I’ve learned a couple of kinda surprising-to-me things so far, but I’m not blown away by it (sadly — I generally rather enjoy food history).

Still, hopefully I can finish it this evening.

What will you be reading next?

Who knows! It depends on what Santa brings me, probably. Though I’m rather tempted to dig into the Solo Leveling light novel, which is a Christmas present I already received. I love the manhwa, after all.

Still, we’ll see. I doubt I’ll get change to start on anything new this evening, and tomorrow could change eveeeerything.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – City of Ravens

Posted December 22, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

City of Ravens

by Boria Sax

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 206
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Tales tell of how Charles II, fearful of ancient legends that Britain will fall if the ravens at the Tower of London ever leave their abode, ordered that the wings of the six ravens be clipped. But the truth is that the ravens only arrived at the Tower in 1883, when they were brought in as props in tales of Gothic horror that were told to tourists. The legend itself originated from the summer of 1944, when ravens in London were used as unofficial spotters for enemy bombs and planes.

Boria Sax gives us the first book to tell the true story of the ravens, which has far more high drama than any of the tales the tourists get to hear. Its heroes are the raven couple Grip and Mable, who eloped from the Tower together after World War II, leaving it empty and prompting fears that the British Empire would end; Jackie, who kept watch at a brewery; McDonald, who was murdered; and Thor, who could not accept his loss of flight. For over a century, the ravens have been symbols of cruelty, avatars of fate—and cuddly national pets. But Sax shows us how the ravens have come to represent Britain's natural heritage, without which any nation would be impoverished. This informing and reflective volume addresses the need to connect with animals and the natural world and shows us the human need for wonder at nature.

Boria Sax’s “history” of the ravens of the Tower of London, City of Ravens, is pretty slight. While he uses plenty of sources for what he does say, and I don’t doubt his assertion that the tradition of the ravens in the Tower as known today is fairly recent in date… I had big problems with linking that tradition to the tradition of Bran the Blessed based on no more than the coincidence of name (Bran = raven) and place (the Tower of London).

It’s not the whole of his theory, but it’s one of the more interesting ones, and it’s mostly unsupported. Given that Welsh mythology is comparatively unknown now even after several translations of The Mabinogion and slightly wider knowledge of the Welsh triads, and an amount of scholarly interest in them, I have doubts that they were known at the time the tradition grew up again. I’d be ready to see evidence, but as far as I can tell Sax presents none, just “it can’t be a coincidence”.

Yes, yes it can. Sources, please.

It’s not a bad short read, but otherwise not revelatory.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Boria Sax, history, non-fiction

Review – Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes

Posted December 21, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes

by Shahidha Bari

Genres: Fashion, Non-fiction
Pages: 312
Rating:

Synopsis:
We are all dressed. But how often do we pause to think about the place of our clothes in our lives? What unconscious thoughts do we express when we dress every day? Can memories, meaning and ideas be wrapped up in a winter coat?

These are the questions that interest Shahidha Bari, as she explores the secret language of our clothes. Ranging freely through literature, art, film and philosophy, Dressed tracks the hidden power of clothes in our culture and our daily lives. From the depredations of violence and ageing to our longing for freedom, love and privacy, from the objectification of women to the crisis of masculinity, each garment exposes a fresh dilemma. Item by item, the story of ourselves unravels.

Evocative, enlightening and dazzlingly original, Dressed is not just about clothes as objects of fashion or as a means of self-expression. This is a book about the deepest philosophical questions of who we are, how we see ourselves and how we dress to face the world.

Sadly, Shahidha Bari’s Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes (as it said on my cover) is perhaps more accurately described by the alternative title, Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up under the latter title, and predictably I didn’t love what I ended up skimming of this: pretentious, full of stuff like “the folds in clothes are symbolic vaginas, obviously” (differently put, but that’s the gist), and prone to gender essentialism. There’s a lot along the lines of how every woman knows what she means when she talks about that special dress that blahblahblahblahblah.

Boring, and then she went ahead and described a trans girl character from a movie… using male pronouns throughout…

I never really understood what Bari meant about writing about a philosophy of clothes that goes beyond how they shape and project identity, because she didn’t seem to get there to me, and I couldn’t be excited or engaged by her prose. Better luck somewhere else.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, fashion, non-fiction, Shahidha Bari

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted December 20, 2025 by Nicky in General / 14 Comments

Yay, weekend! And also: yay time off! I’m now off until the 29th, so let’s hope for lots of reading.

Books acquired this week

This week I received a generous gift of books for Christmas, so here they all are!

Quite the weird mix, which suits my reading tastes perfectly!

Posts from this week

I’ve eased off on posting the (already written) backlog reviews so I can maintain the variety, but there were still some review posts this week! Here goes the roundup:

Poetry: Answering Back: Living Poets Reply to the Poetry of the Past, ed. Carol Ann Duffy (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Graphic novel: Glass Town, by Isabel Greenberg (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Fantasy romance: Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (light novel), vol 1, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Mystery: Clues to Christabel, by Mary Fitt (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

And of course there’s also these posts:

What I’m reading

It’s been a busy week for me at work, so I haven’t finished a lot, but let’s do the usual sneak peek at the books I intend to review:

As for this weekend, I’m really not sure yet, except that I want to finish Rowenna Miller’s The Palace of Illusions. Other than that, it’s as my whimsy takes me.

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Clues to Christabel

Posted December 19, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Clues to Christabel

by Mary Fitt

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 289
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
When successful novelist Christabel Strange dies suddenly aged 32, the bequests are hard to fathom. She leaves one wing of the ancestral home to good friend Marcia Wentworth for her ongoing use; the rest of the house remains in the hands of her mother, grandmother and siblings. Christabel made it known that Marcia would write her biography, but leaves her sixteen volumes of meticulous diaries to wily eccentric Grandmother Strange, who loathes Marcia and refuses to allow her to see them. Dr George Caradew, Christabel's childhood friend, finds himself between opposing and increasingly hostile camps, and begins to wonder why Christabel behaved in such a peculiar way, and whether her death was really due to a fever. The possibility of foul play becomes a certainty when another murder occurs and a volume of the diaries is stolen. Gradually, Caradew pieces together the clues to Christabel's hidden life.

Clues to Christabel was the second Mary Fitt book I’ve read, and again, I really liked it. It’s more a psychological bent than some of her peers, and less focused on dogged police work but more on the people on the outside of that (even if they’re also trying to solve what happened). It really dragged me in, trying to figure out who was sincere, who was a bit of a vampire, and whether scheming meant someone was guilty or merely serving some other end.

The end of the story surprisingly made me turn against Christabel, rather — there’s a certain manipulativeness throughout, a too-good-to-be-true-ness, which left me ambivalent about her, but by the end I had my eyebrows fully raised. I won’t explain why, though: that’s definitely for you to find out by digging through the story. That didn’t change my enjoyment, to be clear: you don’t need to like Christabel, since she’s dead already right from the start.

In the end, I worked out the whodunnit part less by clues and more by certain aspects of the narrative structure, but it was fun to play guessing games all the same.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Mary Fitt, mystery

Review – Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (light novel), vol 1

Posted December 18, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation

by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 395
Series: Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (LN) #1
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Wei Wuxian was once one of the most outstanding men of his generation, a talented and clever young cultivator who harnessed martial arts, knowledge, and spirituality into powerful abilities. But when the horrors of war led him to seek a new power through demonic cultivation, the world’s respect for his skills turned to fear, and his eventual death was celebrated throughout the land.

Years later, he awakens in the body of an aggrieved young man who sacrifices his soul so that Wei Wuxian can exact revenge on his behalf. Though granted a second life, Wei Wuxian is not free from his first, nor the mysteries that appear before him now. Yet this time, he’ll face it all with the righteous and esteemed Lan Wangji at his side, another powerful cultivator whose unwavering dedication and shared memories of their past will help shine a light on the dark truths that surround them.

The first volume of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation has a lot of fun elements, and I did enjoy the interactions (past and present) between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji — it’s really funny how Wei Wuxian teases him and gets under his skin in the past, and how he turns the tables in the present. I can see a lot of potential in that relationship, especially if I’m reading clues about their past correctly.

That said, this book does the mother of all infodumping, and the transitions between past/present aren’t that well managed. I’m not sure I quite followed all of the infodumps, if I’m honest: I’m kinda letting it wash over me, in hopes it’ll start to come together later (as has often happened to me with danmei, and with other non-English-language works with a large cast or complicated stories in the past). In some chapters there are pages of pure exposition, and it’s a lot.

I am intrigued by some of the other characters, too, and by some of the worldbuilding; I’m curious to know more about why Wei Wuxian became so reviled (and why some people still clearly think he did good things), and what the bigger story is going to look like. So I’ll definitely read more, but with the caveat that volume one (at least) isn’t the most polished.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, danmei, light novels, Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù, romance, SF/F

WWW Wednesday

Posted December 17, 2025 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

It was a couple of days ago, but I finished E.C.R. Lorac’s Still Waters. It’s interesting to see Lorac’s books with some repeat characters (the Hoggetts), since the others mostly just have Macdonald and Reeve (the detectives) and not really any other recurring characters. Lorac’s love for the area is clear, and there are some really tense scenes — it’s not really “cosy” in that sense!

What are you currently reading?

A few things at once, trying to find something that “sticks”. Mostly, Rowenna Miller’s The Palace of Illusions, since it’s kinda seasonal (as a Nutcracker-inspired fantasy set at Christmas); I was enjoying it, but I’ve just kinda stalled — I think because I’ve been working extra in order to get next week off. Hopefully I’ll find my mojo again soon.

I did also start PJ Ellis’ We Could Be Heroes, but I’ve barely read any of that yet.

What will you read next?

I don’t really know. I might start on Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, since volume one is relatively short, and I’ve been curious about it for a while. Or I might read Spinosaur Tales, because non-fiction might grab my attention a little bit more right now.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Winter TBR

Posted December 16, 2025 by Nicky in General / 14 Comments

It’s been a minute since I participated in Top Ten Tuesday, again, but I always like the TBR ones! So here’s my winter TBR… which is not really themed, because I don’t go for that much.

The Palace of Illusions, by Rowenna Miller. This is kinda seasonal, since it’s Nutcracker-inspired, and I’ve got started on it already. I’m not very far into it, but I’m very curious about the magic, and how it all relates to the Nutcracker.
We Could Be Heroes, by PJ Ellis. A romance between a guy playing a superhero who sounds like the equivalent of Superman or Captain America… and a drag queen? Sounds fun, I’m curious! Again, this is on my December TBR and I’ve actually started it already, but I’ve only read two chapters. I think the guy who plays the superhero is about to show up at the drag show, and I presume sparks will shortly fly for some kind of meet-cute.
Strange New World, by Vivian Shaw. This is the latest in a series I love, so I’m keen to jump in, and it’s part of two reading challenges I’m in. I didn’t expect a sequel given that the last book was so apocalyptic, so I’m quite curious where it will go.
The Otherwhere Post, by Emily J. Taylor. I know very little about this one, but picked it up to review for Postcrossing’s blog since it involves magical mail. I did start reading it, and the multiple worlds idea — and the postal workers who are the only ones who can slip between them — is pretty intriguing.
After Hours at Dooryard Books, by Cat Sebastian. I’ve heard a couple of glowing recommendations for this, and someone just bought me a copy, so it’s quite high on my list! I generally love Cat Sebastian’s romances and find them very satisfying anyway, so the praise is just the cherry on the cake there.
Spinosaur Tales: The Biology and Ecology of the Spinosaurs, by David Hone and Mark P. Witton. Yeah, I know, this is an abrupt switch in gear, but y’all know me! I love my non-fiction too, and I really liked David Hone’s The Future of Dinosaurs and The Tyrannosaur Chronicles. His work is very readable, but thorough; I know very little about spinosaurs, so I’m extra interested to get into it, especially since I’ve been reading the Dinosaur Sanctuary manga. Who knows when that might feature some spinosaurs?!
Solo Leveling, by Chugong. I read the manhwa adaptation earlier this year, so I’m curious about the original! I’m told there are some differences in the story, which sounds intriguing, and also I usually find novels a bit easier to follow than visual media. Again, just got gifted a copy of the first volume, so it’s an excellent time.
Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, by singNsong. I’ve heard great things about this series, so I want to dig in and give it a go. I got gifted this as well, so I want to dig in ASAP.
The Wife Comes First, by Lv Ye Qian He. The first volume is out as of today, and I’m curious about this one from the summary — it sounds like an interesting idea for a romance, with some fun court politicking, without being a many-volumes long investment like some other danmei I’m interested in. I’m not sure if I’ll get it for Christmas, since it’s not in stock currently in most places and Bookshop.org says a few days for delivery (which often means they don’t actually have copies yet)… but maybe I’ll get it for myself after Christmas if not.
Thrice Married to a Salted Fish, by Bi Ka Bi. Another danmei I’m curious about! I read the preview, and I’m dying to know what’s going on, I must be honest. Again, I don’t have a copy yet, but might get it for myself if Santa doesn’t bring it.

Curious to browse other people’s lists when I get the chance! Hope everyone’s having a good December so far.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday