Category: General

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted October 17, 2026 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

After a busy week last week with lots of library books and lots of reading, this week’s been a bit quieter!

Books acquired this week

This month’s British Library Crime Classic was their Christmas release, which is how they usually do things, and that dropped onto my doormat this week:

That’s it, after the recent excesses, hahaha. I haven’t been back to the library this week, since I haven’t done a lot of reading in that time.

Posts from this week

Time for the usual roundup! Reviews first, and as ever, they’re not books I read this week but reviews written sometimes quite a while ago, since I try to keep things varied and plan in advance.

History: A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, by Elinor Cleghorn (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Poetry: Dream Work, by Mary Oliver (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Fantasy manhwa: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, vol 3, by Sleepy-C, Umi & singNsong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

And as usual, I really mean it when I say 3/5 stars means I liked a book! I know other people have other rating systems, but I stick with the old Goodreads definitions that were around over twenty years ago now.

Here are the other posts from this week:

And that’s it for the week! I hope to get back to posting more reviews again, since work should be quieting down a bit for now (though just in time for the Christmas/New Year rush, ack).

What I’m reading

As ever, I’ll start with the books I’ve been reading in the last week! Mostly last weekend — I didn’t get as much reading time as I’d have liked during the workweek, this time round. As I mentioned last week, I want to be clear: these are just the books I’ve finished this week, and I’m not saying I recommend them at this time. You’ll have to watch out for my reviews for that! Please don’t read them because I mentioned them and then blame me when you don’t like a book that I’m planning to give one star… 😉

For this weekend, I’m a chunk of the way into Rachel Harrison’s Black Sheep and Francis Vivian’s Dead Opposite the Church, so those are my priority to finish. I’d like to read more of The Summer Hikaru Died as well… but otherwise, I’m not sure. I’ll probably go by whim!

Hope everyone else has a great weekend.

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

Book Blogger Hop: Bookish Escape Room

Posted October 16, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

It’s Friday, so it’s time for the Book Blogger Hop again, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about designing a bookish escape room:

If you designed a book-themed escape room, what puzzles would be part of it?

I have no idea about anything specific, but I’d steer away from using details of specific books in order to appeal to a range of bookworms, using mostly general knowledge. There might be some puns on the names of authors and titles of books, for example, but they’d be guessable by people with a general knowledge of literature.

I imagine there could be something with organising books, possibly with a clue to how they should be organised (I think alphabetical by author is usually the sensible way, but I know other bookworms prefer to make rainbows, sort by book title, or sort by height)… perhaps to open a secret panel or something like that.

If I were to design something specific, it’d be an escape room based on some kind of vintage mystery, and I’d definitely put some decipherment in — if possible, based on a Playfair cypher, as a reference to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase. I don’t think those need to be too difficult, if you left some way to decipher the key word in the room, and I know I’ve written notes to my wife in Playfair cypher once or twice, and they did get deciphered!

I’m not really very good at coming up with stuff like this, though, so generally I’ll leave it to the enthusiasts!

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I finished was Yuta Yagi’s Why I Adopted My Husband, which is about the practicalities of getting around the fact that gay marriage isn’t legal in Japan. I don’t think it’s super useful for most people outside of Japan, honestly, because the issue (and solution) is pretty specific to Japan.

Still, if you’re researching and if you want to read some commentary about what it’s like to be a gay couple in Japan, this could work.

What are you currently reading?

I have three books on the go that I started more or less at the same time, because I was having difficulty settling down. The first was John Wiswell’s Wearing the Lion and… I don’t know. I don’t disagree with Hera that Zeus is a dipshit, but the narration is grating on me in general. It’s hard to say exactly why, because I don’t think the Greek myths have to be treated with dignity or anything. Maybe it’s just a tone I don’t get on with in general.

I’ve also started Rachel Harrison’s Black Sheep, which has been cited by several people I know lately as their favourite of her books. I’m not far enough into it to judge, really, but I was relieved to have a character with a decidedly different (less mopey) feel to Willa in Kiss Slay Replay or Annie in Cackle. Something about those two characters was a little similar, but Vesper does feel a bit different.

Aaaand I’m also digging into The Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan, which is fun so far. I’m curious where it’ll go, because I’ve heard comparatively little about the plot.

What will you be reading next?

Uhhh, let’s focus on my current reads first, mostly! Don’t tempt me to pick up more, ahaha. But I would like to read more of The Summer Hikaru Died; I’ve read three volumes, and I definitely want to read more.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Autumnal Colours

Posted October 13, 2026 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

Just a couple of weeks ago I already did a variation on this theme, and swore I’d try to do ten more totally different ones for this week. So let’s see what I can do!

Plenty of reds, yellow and oranges there! I think I win (at my self-imposed game, haha).

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted October 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 34 Comments

Hurrah, it’s the weekend again! And I have no plans (that’s a good thing).

Books acquired this week

I finally finally ended up going out for a ride on my bike this week, which means I made it to the library for the first time in a while! So here’s what I picked up on that adventure.

I picked up The Beheading Game because someone tantalised me by saying they felt there are links to the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in it, so I’m curious about that, despite it not being totally my thing… and I picked up a bunch of poetry collections almost at random because they were on a display, I didn’t know any of the poets, and I do like to explore poetry lately.

I did also get a book in the mail for review from Orbit/Hachette, too!

I actually got another one as well, but I’ve put it aside until I can get the first book in the series, as I hadn’t realised it was a sequel when I requested it (the email was not super clear, or I was daft, I don’t know which).

And finally, my rabbits (helped by my wife, of course, who definitely wasn’t the actual source) bought me two books on Kobo, and I accumulated enough Kobo Super Points to get myself a third:

So that’s quite a lot of new books on my plate this week. Oh nooo, etc.

Posts from this week

As ever, let’s do a bit of a roundup. Since it’s a busy time, I haven’t managed to post a review every day — the review posts are all ready to go, since I write reviews as soon as I finish a book generally, but I kept forgetting to come back and send a review post out as well on days I had other features. Still, there’s been a post every day, so there’s plenty to catch up with!

First up, the reviews:

Fantasy: Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die, by Greer Stothers (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
Historical romance: After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, vol 1, by Liu Gou Hua (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Classic crime: The Duke of York’s Steps, by Henry Wade (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

As ever, please do take my rating definitions literally! If it says I liked it, I liked it, even if you don’t use 3/5 stars that way. And these aren’t books I’ve read this week — those are discussed in the next section below!

Here are the non-review posts:

What I’m reading

As a quick note, it’s come up a few times that people assume me posting books I intend to review here constitutes a recommendation, so just to clarify: nope! I didn’t enjoy all of the books below, and at least one was a one-star read. I review everything I read, regardless of whether I liked it. If you see me post a book in the ‘What I’m reading’ section then try it yourself and don’t like it, that is not my problem. Even if the book is racist/misogynist/transphobic/etc, I don’t put a warning/disclaimer on this bit because I’m purely showing people what I’ve been reading; you’ll have to wait for my review (or ask me!) if you’re really keen to know my actual thoughts. Yelling at me about it or calling me out on your blog isn’t going to help anything!

Anyway! It’s been a good week for reading, thanks mostly to the month-long readathon I’ve been taking part in on Litsy! It’s been encouraging me to read some novellas and shorter books, and honestly that’s been nice, since sometimes it means taking a chance on something new to me. Here’s a sneak peek at the books I’ll be posting reviews for sometime in the foreseeable future…

As for this weekend’s reading, I want to focus on finishing Rachel Harrison’s Kiss Slay Replay and dig deeper into my actual October TBR, but I’m also planning to read some poetry and manga for palate-cleansing purposes (inasfar as trying different horror manga is very palate-cleansing, I suppose), and more of The Summer Hikaru Died because it’s really good so far.

In the end, as ever, it’ll be whatever my whim drives me to, though!

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

Book Blogger Hop: Running Blogs

Posted October 9, 2026 by Nicky in General / 9 Comments

This week’s prompt is about having multiple blogs:

Do you run more than one blog? If so, how do you manage your time?

Not really. I have in the past had this blog and a science blog, but it was indeed very time-consuming to try to keep up with both! I tried to write something once or twice a week for the science blog, while I was posting something here just about every day. The science blog depended a bit on whether there was some interesting news.

Obviously I do a lot for this blog alone, and that does take quite a bit of time. Reviews get written within a day or two of finishing the book, so I don’t forget details, but at the moment I mostly set aside some time at the weekends to pre-write discussion posts like this one and prep some (pre-written) reviews ready to post. Then during the week I mostly come on, tweak the draft with anything that comes to mind, and then write the little blurb I use when posting to social media… and that’s it.

Of course, there’s also responding to comments and visiting other people; I tend to do that either on my lunch break or just after work, and never to skip it for more than a day. When people do me the courtesy of commenting, I do my best to return it — and to do so as thoughtfully as I can. It can be tough if we have little in common, but I do try to be a bit more substantial than just “have a nice day!” or something, as long as time permits.

I do have a journal on one of the successors to LiveJournal, but my friend list there is relatively small, so it’s mostly a tradition of writing something about my day at the end of it, dropping a few comments here and there on others’ posts, etc. I’m not active in communities in the way I was in the golden years of LJ.

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, discussion

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 7, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I’ve been reading a bunch of novellas, because bite-size has suited my brain well during a pretty busy time at work, so the last one I finished was Tabitha O’Connell’s Dirt-Stained Hands, Thorn-Pierced Skin; it’s a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast which I thought was pretty well-handled, with some caveats.

Before that, I read Steven L. Peck’s A Short Stay in Hell; I’d picked it up because I was curious after another blogger hated it, and it was free in Kobo Plus. I really liked it, actually; I thought it was well written, and explored the idea in a way that was interesting to me.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve been keeping the list surprisingly slim: I’m still slowly working through John Goodall’s The Castle: A History a few castles at a time, and I’ve started one other book, but that’s it.

The other book is Rachel Harrison’s Kiss Slay Replay, which has been piquing my curiosity since reviews started coming out for it. I liked Harrison’s Cackle, so I ended up with several of her books to read in honour of October/Halloween, and this was one of them. I’m not far into it so far, and it’s only juuuust started bringing in the horror elements (someone’s lurking outside the wedding). I’m not 100% on board yet, because a lot of the detail so far just feels like “contemporary women’s fiction”… but I already know it’s going to take a turn, and I’m curious what that will be like.

What will you be reading next?

No idea. I’ve just added a bunch of interesting-to-me comics to my reading list on Comics Plus, so in my need for low commitment reads at the moment I might turn to those. I’ve also got a few more books added on Kobo Plus, like Akimitsu Takagi’s The Noh Mask Murder, that I’m very curious about.

I might also start something else from my Haunted Shelf TBR; maybe Sara Raasch’s The Nightmare Before Kissmas or Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, for a bit of a change of pace.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Happy Memories

Posted October 6, 2026 by Nicky in General / 27 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is about books that conjure up happy memories, and I’m sure I can find plenty of those! Let’s have a think.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë.
I read the start of this more than anything, because I rather liked the opening with the cosy nook behind the curtains. I mean, that doesn’t work out well for Jane all in all, but still; I often read this while I was curled up on the sofa under my high sleeper bed, with a sheet down over the opening, so I had much the same effect, without the less cosy follow-up.
Martin the Warrior, by Brian Jacques.
I loved this — and indeed all the Redwall books — so much, I read them over and over. I wonder if they’re easy to acquire in ebook, and whether the Suck Fairy has visited.
Five on a Treasure Island, by Enid Blyton.
Can I endorse Blyton as a person? Absolutely not. Did I enjoy the heck out of her books as a kid? Yup! I remember reading them in all kinds of circumstances, including reading the Malory Towers books one week when I was staying with Nanny (Dad’s mum).
The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper.
I read this whole sequence over and over again, and shared it with my now-wife, when I was in my teens.
Also, the BBC radio adaptation from when I was a kid (not the more recent one) scared me silly, but is also really well done. I remember listening to it while doing foil engraving kits (stuff like this) as a kid, and also listening to it while crocheting when I re-found it in some mp3 files online in my twenties.
I also remember fuming at my sister for years for losing one of the tapes Dad recorded it off the radio onto, which meant I couldn’t listen to it again until someone found me archived mp3s much later! Sorry, Squirtle.
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
There are a lot of happy memories associated with this for me: Mum telling me about it after I read The Hobbit, before she thought I was old enough to understand it properly. Reading it at my grandparents’ sat in the shower room (long story, discussed here). Listening to the BBC radio adaptation with my sister, lying on our beds at my grandparents’ house. Rereading it as a student, because I was studying it. (Contrary to the stereotype people bandy about, I’ve never found that analysing a genuinely good work of literature spoils it for me.) Finding tiny pocket-size copies in Amsterdam, and my wife buying me them for our first wedding anniversary (because that’s the “paper” anniversary).
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison.
Another one I’ve read over and over again, often with my wife, but also with anyone else I could get to sit down long enough.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.
The first time I read this, I had it in my bag as I was going to lectures, in my first year — maaaaybe my second — of my degree. I kept going to the library during the gaps between lectures (which were often a couple of hours: a bit annoying to go home, but long enough to need some occupation) and devouring it. I devoured it again some years later, and it was just so satisfying. And I did really love my time at Cardiff University, in general.
Fadeout, by Joseph Hansen.
A university friend wrote her dissertation partly on the Brandstetter books, and I ended up really tempted to read them too (I caught my interest in vintage crime fiction in the same class she got interested in queerness in detective fiction). So I did. In great big gulps.
The Scum Villain’s Self Saving System, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu.
This was my first danmei! And the first time I read it was on holiday in Bath with my wife for a long weekend. I was so confused! But the books sucked me in, and I remember reading volume three/four while at my parents’ house for a while, and eagerly sending my wife updates on the plot, ahaha.
The Starlight Barking, by Dodie Smith.
I remember reading this over and over, just so wrapped up in the weirdness of it. I only knew the first book from the Disney movie, but this was… something else. Oddly enough, the friend who wrote her dissertation partly on Brandstetter also remembered this: each of us had never met anyone else who’d read it!

Some of these were predictable choices for me — but I like to think there were some surprises too!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Over the Years

Posted October 5, 2026 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantasy as a genre over the years:

How do you think the fantasy genre has changed over the years? Is there a particular time period of fantasy writing that you particularly enjoy?

I have a pretty good knowledge of some genres/eras within certain genres because I studied them, so I’m a bit scared of this question: it’s not really my area at all! I haven’t brought a lot of my academic practice to the fantasy genre at all, and it feels like my personal knowledge is coloured as much by just growing up and the natural change/growth in my interests as by real trends and changes.

Obviously there’s stuff like the rise of cosy fantasy and romantasy (though there were low-stakes fantasies before the trend, and plenty of romance in fantasy before it became a named subgenre), and the grimdark fantasy that came some years before it — but I think that it’s probably much like fashion, and some things go around and come back in later.

I can’t think of really good rigorous examples, but I also think there are things my generation loved at children that are surfacing in adult fiction. I haven’t thought this through on a serious level, but… is dark academia in fantasy perhaps a response (at least for some of us) to the magical school we may’ve loved as kids, and what’s become of that for many of us? And even if we didn’t love it, was it popular enough to weave its way though our psyches and shape what we want to write and read about anyway? I think it’s likely.

Anyway, to the point about what we enjoy, I really enjoy a lot of cosy fantasy and romantasy: there’s plenty of it that feels a bit cookie-cutter, or not polished, or naive, but that’s the nature of any trend. Standalone books are also a joy — I don’t know if I’m right that there’s been more of that and fewer automatic trilogies, though. But I’m also a fan of older fantasies like Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn… they really had a lot to sink your teeth into. Long story short, perhaps I’m easy to please.

Overall, probably an unsatisfying answer, I’m afraid; I don’t think about things this way, it seems! At least when it comes to fantasy, unless it’s related to Tolkien or Arthuriana, I think I’ve kept my academic life out of it — helped by the fact that I finished my MA over a decade ago now, and switched away from the arts to science for a while.

Tags: books, discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted October 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 24 Comments

I’m a bit late to write this post today because I’m a creature of infinite distraction, after a long week. But here I am!

Books acquired this week

This week I haven’t got anything new (thank goodness, since I’ve been doing plenty of that, ahaha), but I did get a couple of poetry collections from the National Poetry Library:

I’ve read both already, but I do want to page back through and re-read some of the poems in each before I write my review.

Posts from this week

As ever, here are the posts from this week, reviews first!

Crime: The Rasp, by Philip MacDonald (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Non-fiction: Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go, by Emily Cockayne (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Poetry: A Thousand Mornings, by Mary Oliver (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Graphic novel: Paper Planes, by Jennie Wood et al (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

I meant to post a review a day as usual, but life kept getting on top of me. The same drill as always: these aren’t necessarily recent reads, because I have all my reviews pre-written and then arrange my posting schedule for variety, and please do take my ratings literally: when I say 3/5 stars means I liked it, I’m saying I liked it, not that it was disappointing or whatever it is you mean when you give something three stars! 🙂

As for the other posts this week:

I’ve developed some tricks to make posting my monthly wrap-ups a bit faster, this month — thanks to my wife helping me set up a tracking spreadsheet, instead of just winging it and counting at the end of the month!

What I’m reading

It’s been a busy week for reading, particularly since the Haunted Shelf readathon has now started! I’ve been participating in a lot of the games on the Litsy and in the Discord, but also getting a fair bit of reading done. Here’s a peek at the books I’ve finished since my last post (click to embiggen to see the details properly if the thumbnail cuts it off too much!):

For this weekend, I’m digging into Rachel Harrison’s book of short stories, Bad Dolls, and then… I’m not sure. I’ve set up a solid TBR for the month, so I’ll pick something off there, or go totally by whim. Whatever works!

Through the rest of the week, it’ll be much the same theme: probably more of Rachel Harrison’s work, and maybe getting started on The Library After Dark, by Ande Pliego, which has been tempting me since I picked up a copy. Murders in a library, irresistible.

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