What have you recently finished reading?

Volume 13 of the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation manhua adaptation was the last thing I finished, I think! I enjoyed the adaptation quite a bit, it helped cement things in my head a bit more and give me more of an idea how things look (being totally aphantasic, I don’t imagine things in the way other people do). It’s still not my favourite MXTX story, but it was enjoyable in its own way.

What are you currently reading?

Oh boy. Let’s think. The last one I picked up was Steve Roud’s Folk Song in England, which is dense and slow going, but I would like to finish it before my graduation trip — if only so we don’t have to haul such a big book with us! I’m enjoying it, though; the far-away and petty-sounding arguments of the early folk song collectors are mildly entertaining, and the things they wrestled with are useful to understand.

I also started on R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis last night. I don’t feel like I have a good handle on what I’ll think of it yet, but it certainly feels like it has an axe to grind about the postgraduate experience at Cambridge, and abusive/careless advisors.

I’m also slowly easing into Joseph Shearing’s Airing in a Closed Carriage, which is a classic crime novel reissued this month by the British Library Crime Classics series, and definitely the chunkiest book they’ve published. It’s slow going, because it’s setting up a story based heavily on a real murder case, in which Florence Maybrick was accused of killing her husband. I really want to read up more on that case to get the context for this, really.

At the weekend, I started on T. Kingfisher’s Swordheart, and really want to get back to it. It feels like the male protagonist/presumably love interest (given the pattern of these books) maybe isn’t quite such a typical paladin as many of the other male protagonists? But of course I’m not far in and it’s all been from Halla’s perspective so far; we’ll see.

That’s still not quite it, but we’ll stop there, because the rest are pretty much on pause.

What will you be reading next?

An Opinionated Guide to London Museums (Emmy Watts) and An Opinionated Guide to London Bookshops (Sonya Barber and James Manning), somewhat on a whim. I won’t be in London that long for my graduation next week, and we do have some tentative plans already… but that includes a day of bookshopping and potentially some extra time to look at museums, so I thought I’d do a little research.

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Gryffin Murphy’s Twig’s Traveling Tomes, which I got as an ARC via Netgalley. The romance didn’t really work for me, since it felt a bit too much like insta-love and I didn’t feel the chemistry, but the book magic was pretty fun. I’d love to have magic that can tell me the perfect book for someone I don’t even know; that sounds pretty darn cool.

What are you currently reading?

As ever, I have a couple of books on the go. My current non-fiction read is a chonker by Steve Roud, Folk Song in England. I’ve been a fan of folk music since I was a teen, though Roud is using a stricter definition that excludes singers like Seth Lakeman or bands like Bellowhead (who have done modern interpretations of traditional folk songs, often with a decidedly non-traditional sound). He draws a line at the 1950s and declines to discuss modern stuff for the purposes of his work. Still interesting to me, since many of these traditional songs are sources for the modern folk singers I’ve enjoyed.

I also settled into a classic mystery yesterday while feeling sorry for myself about my dentist visit: Michael Gilbert’s Sky High, which enjoyably features a comfortably middle-aged lady who rides a motorbike, manages the choir, and has some clever ideas about amateur detection. After the last book of Gilbert’s I read (Death in Captivity) I was kind of putting this off in case it was similarly grim, but though it’s haunted by war, it doesn’t have the same feel. I’m enjoying it well enough so far!

What will you be reading next?

If I told you, I’d have to kill you…

Nope, as so often, I have no real idea. I’m trying to clear the decks a bit since I’m going to have a few days in London at the end of the month, and undoubtedly that will mean getting some new books. I have a challenge for 2026 (that worked well in 2025) not to have more than 20 books bought in 2026 that I haven’t started yet, plus a goal of generally reading more books than I buy to slowly chip away at the backlog, so I want to create some space there. That means I’ll probably read the rest of the MDZS manhua volumes I have, and maybe start on a couple more ARCs.

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was George the Poet’s Part of a Story That Started Before Me, a reflection on Black British history through poetry. It has introductions to most sections explaining what we know about Black people in a given period, some of which I didn’t know about already, so it was a worthwhile read for that alone. I wasn’t a huge fan of most of the selections, admittedly, though some of the poems have a heck of a rhythm to them — you can practically hear them spoken, you can’t help it — which was fun.

What are you currently reading?

I finished a lot of the books I had on the go, so I’m onto pastures new! I just started reading James Fox’s Craftland, though so far I’ve only read through (most of) a chapter about dry stone walls and the work that goes into repairing those. I’m curious what other almost-lost crafts he’ll discuss.

I’m also reading the February British Library Crime Classic, Carol Carnac’s The Double Turn. It feels very much an E.C.R. Lorac novel so far, though since it’s under her other name, I think the detectives are likely to hit quite different to her usual MacDonald. I prefer him, somehow; he’s a very humane, ideal detective.

What will you read next?

Probably Uketsu’s Strange Buildings, which is just out. I’ve been anticipating it for a while, and it arrived today, so it’d be nice to dig in right away.

Other than that, I don’t know, though I have my new Book Spin Bingo card ready… so maybe something from that, so I don’t end up reading nine books in one day again as I did on Saturday, stubbornly finishing February’s card.