Category: General

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted August 22, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Happy weekend! I’ve been off work for two days already, so I’m starting to get into my stride with this relaxation thing… nah, kidding, I’m really bad at it! Even on my birthday on Thursday I was doing chores like a normal day…

Books acquired this week

So far the birthday haul has been very restrained — because Lisa’s waiting until my indie bookshop spree on Monday. So it’s just the one book from my friend Alys, plus a book I got myself because I’ve been wanting it for ages…

I’ve actually started Steeple Chasing already, since for some reason it just kinda worked with my mood, though I haven’t read much yet! I’m not super interested in churches per se, but more about what they can tell us about people, and so far it does seem to lean that way too!

Posts from this week

Despite my birthday, I’ve kept busy as ever on the blog this week, so here’s the rundown! Reviews first:

Manhua: Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 1, by STARember (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: If All the World and Love Were Young, by Stephen Sexton (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Fantasy romance: Mistakenly Saving the Villain, vol 2, by Feng Yu Nie (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Non-fiction: The Queer Thing About Sin, by Harry Tanner (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Manga: Cat + Gamer, vol 4, by Wataru Nadatani (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Fantasy: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, vol 3, by singNsong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
SF/F: Moon-Flash, by Patricia McKillip (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As ever, I haven’t read most of these books that recently, since I spread out my reviews to get a range of different books featured. And 3/5 isn’t a bad rating!

Of course, I’ve also participated in various discussions and linkups, as usual…

What I’m reading

First up, a quick round-up of the books I’ve finished in the last week! Which wasn’t a lot, since work was pretty busy prepping for my time off, and I’ve got a couple of other books in progress which are quite dense.

For this weekend, I probably won’t be reading a ton, since I’m having dinner with my parents and sister for my birthday, and my wife and I are heading off on our week away. But we’ll see! I’d love to finish up a couple more books before we go, so I don’t have to wedge them into my packing somehow…

Thanks all for your birthday wishes last week! And I hope you’re having 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: Trends

Posted August 21, 2026 by Nicky in General / 9 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 whether you follow trends or not:

Do you follow book trends and bestsellers, or do you prefer hunting down lesser-known titles?

I don’t specifically try to follow what’s trending; I don’t pick up a book because it’s a hit on BookTok or Bookstagram (I probably wouldn’t even know that it is!), or read something just because it’s a bestseller… but I don’t refuse to read such books, either. A lot of the time they aren’t the sort of book I’m interested in, but e.g. the trend for cosy fantasy and romantasy has been a fun one, and I have read some of those, and sometimes popular books have worked well for me even if they aren’t a genre I normally read. Sometimes then I’ll seek out other similar books (as with romantasy, cosy fantasy, my deep-dive into danmei, etc)… so I guess in that sense I follow trends, since that can be a good way to find other similar books.

Because I don’t actually use stuff like TikTok or Instagram, I mostly come across books through blogging or through just exploring in bookshops, or occasionally via The London Review of Books or The New York Review of Books, so I’m usually well behind on the trends either way. I don’t think that’s a particular virtue, though; there’s value in popular fiction, even if it’s just people enjoying it. Some of what I read is lesser-known just because it’s old, but it was popular fiction of its day even if it’s sometimes treated as “classic” now: my addiction to golden age crime novels is no secret.

All in all, I guess my answer is a bit of a shrug. I don’t particularly do either, I just pick up whatever pings my interest, which may or may not be a bestseller or a less-known book, and might sometimes mean picking up books because they fit the same description as something else I liked, which might happen to be “trendy” (do people still use that word?).

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

WWW Wednesday

Posted August 19, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

The last book I finished was Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress, which worked a lot better for me than I’d expected. I’d been a little put off by people talking about how dark it is, and it is… and I was also worried that Terren would somehow turn out to be secretly a great person despite his actions, and the answer to that is that it’s complicated. The ending really got me; I hadn’t thought about the way it actually worked out.

Overall, ended up really enjoying it.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve made a bit of a start on The Villain’s White Halo vol 1 (Hao Da Yi Juan Wei Sheng Zhi), but I’m really still finding my feet with the worldbuilding at this moment. It feels like being confronted with The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System all over again on the amount of detail about the sects, peaks, different martial siblings, etc, but I’m really only 100 pages in and there’s plenty of time for the information to settle once my brain prioritises what I need to know. I’m curious where it’s going, but not enormously invested.

I also got back to a book I’d previously started, John and Colleen Darnell’s Egypt’s Golden Couple, but the amount of imaginative reconstruction they’re doing (at least two pages at the start of every chapter, and some chapters are only four pages long) is starting to get on my nerves. It’s not based, as far as I can tell, in actual concrete evidence — it’s based on their knowledge as Egyptologists, of course, but it’s not like “we found a specific broken cup and theorised about it”, more “we imagined an event that seems reasonable”.

Or maybe they are all based on specific objects! But it’s really not clear. It’s all very readable but… hm.

I’ve also started Greer Stothers’ Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die, but I’m not super sure if it’s going to be my thing. The jokiness seems unlikely to jive well for me. But we’ll see!

What will you be reading next?

Shake me like a Magic 8 ball for the answer, “Ask again later.”

Quite possibly more danmei, maybe Thrice Married to a Salted Fish vol 1 (Bi Ka Bi)… but really, no decision yet. It’s my birthday tomorrow and I hope to do a lot of reading since I’m off work, but definitely not constraining myself to reading anything in particular.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Series I Want to Catch Up On

Posted August 18, 2026 by Nicky in General / 43 Comments

This week’s prompt for Top Ten Tuesday is about series you want to catch up on and… uhoh. So many!

Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books.
I haven’t read Radiant Star yet, despite having a review copy. Ugh. I’m sorry. I also haven’t read Leckie’s short story collection, Lake of Souls, which I’d love to catch up with.
Vivian Shaw’s Greta Helsing books.
I still haven’t got round to Strange New World. I hadn’t even realised there would be another book, so I was very surprised to see it, and I guess not mentally ready yet!
T. Kingfisher’s… everything.
This is cheating slightly, I know, but I know there are various of Kingfisher’s books that I haven’t got to yet, including books that fit in the same world/series. I’ll get there, I swear.
Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher books.
I didn’t actually know there had been more books after Murder and Mendelssohn until a few months ago, so I had no idea I was behind! Not sure how I’d missed that. I want to do a reread of at least the later books before I get to the new ones, but I’m looking forward to it.
Deanna Raybourn’s Veronica Speedwell books.
I was getting a little tired of the repeated artificial barriers to Veronica’s relationship with Stoker, but still, it’s a fun series and I’d like to read at least the next book to decide whether I’m really done with it.
Erica Ridley’s Wild Wynchesters.
These books are a lot of fun, and I think there’s… 2-3 I haven’t read yet? Certainly I have at least one on my shelves.
Genevieve Cogman’s Scarlet Revolution trilogy.
I read the first book and liked it quite a lot, but I didn’t get round to Elusive when it came out, and now I think I’d have to reread the first book — or at least do a quick skim — to get myself back in the loop. Still, I usually have fun with Cogman’s books so I expect it’ll be a riot.
Freya Marske’s The Last Binding trilogy.
This is another where I read and loved the first book, but have yet to continue.
Tad Williams’ Osten Ard books.
I’ve read the original quartet and loved it, but that’s it!
Rou Bao Bu Chi Rou’s The Husky and His White Cat Shizun.
I haven’t even started this series, but it seems fitting to end with it because there’s a lot to catch up with: there are eleven volumes! And I regularly get asked by other danmei fans if I’ve read this one…

So many books, so little time… especially for a mood reader!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Anachronisms

Posted August 17, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Monday, Monday, Monday… so, as usual, I’ve got a Fantasy with Friends post for you! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on anachronisms in fantasy:

Do anachronisms in fantasy bother you? Should fantasy be “similiar” to the time period it’s based on, either in terms of language used or things like invention, fashion, customs, etc.?

I think the question implies an assumption that all fantasy is necessarily copying a historical period and should do so in its entirety, rather than coming up with an aesthetic and historical background of its own, which is interesting! I don’t see fantasy that way: obviously, historical fantasy needs to believably fit into the period it’s set in to work, but otherwise, I don’t see why a fantasy story needs to be copying a given time period with all of its assumptions. If it’s making its own thing, why should things be the same as in our world’s past?

When it comes to something like language, unless the dialogue is written in Anglo-Saxon, a book set in a fantasy setting that’s kind of like Britain in 999AD is just as “anachronistic” whether the protagonist is speaking modern English or weird faux Ye Olde Englishe. Most of the dialogue people think is “appropriate” in a pseudo-medieval setting is far more modern than that (and also super fake and contrived), but people are so lacking in education about how language has developed that they somehow think that a) that’s “Old English” and b) it actually suits the period.

Just gonna say it straight, unless the dialogue of a given “medieval” fantasy novel set in Britain sounds something like this, it’s already anachronistic: “Haþel, by heuen, þyn askyng is nys, and as þou foly hatz frayst, fynde þe behoues. I know no gome þat is gast of þy grete wordes; gif me now þy geserne, vpon Godez halue, and I schal bayþen þy bone þat þou boden habbes.”

(That’s Middle English, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.)

Pretty much nothing about the way fantasy novels are written actually sounds anything like “authentic”, and few modern readers can parse sentences like the above, so I don’t personally care when authors choose to avoid faux Ye Olde Englishe in favour of something more familiar. I definitely prefer that over badly done faux archaic phrasing.

(That said, there are also authors who do it well, usually those who’ve considered exactly what they’re doing and are building congruent, sense-making worlds of which that language is a part.)

Moving on from language, often there are assumptions that come with certain levels of technology (“if you’ve got peasants with carts you must have knights and homophobia as well”) that lead to accusations of anachronism as well. Mostly, I think that kind of thing is often used as an excuse for unexamined assumptions (like sexism and racism), and again… if you’ve got a fresh new world where you control all the rules, why should you feel constrained by what “actually happened”?

Sometimes, when writers don’t include sexism and racism in their world, it’s used as a stick to beat them with because it’s not “historical”. Well of course not — it’s fantasy!

I would also gently note that a lot of what we think “actually happened” and things which we think are “true” are not. When it comes to sexuality and gender alone, there are so many assumptions about what the past was like which don’t hold true… and the same is true on almost every topic. I’ve seen readers claim things are “anachronistic” when they’d existed for hundreds of years by the time a given story was set. Your average fantasy reader is a terrible judge of what’s “realistic” for a given “period”, even assuming you grant that fantasy is set in any specific “period” at all.

Overall, I’m personally less worried about anachronism and more about what feels congruent: does your social structure make sense with the other moving parts like, I don’t know, levels of literacy and provision of education? I don’t need it to look exactly like a specific period of history: mixing and matching if you need inspiration is fine, or just coming up with something out of whole cloth, just… try to have it make sense. Don’t, for example, have “Christmas” in a world that doesn’t have Christ, and consider carefully whether the social mores you’re importing make sense without factors like religion and colonialism that have affected our history.

Overall, my grasp on what is historical is not always amazing anyway: I’m terrible with keeping historical periods straight, especially when you add different countries into the mix. So I’m fairly easy to please on that front, even in historical fiction! For me, it just has to make a certain amount of sense, and we’re good.

Tags: discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F

Let’s Talk Bookish: Mental Health

Posted August 15, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

Let’s Talk Bookish is a monthly bookish discussion meme created by Rukky @ Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @ Book Nook Bits and Dini @ Dinipandareads! It’s recently moved to this lower-frequency posting schedule which you can check out here.

August’s prompt is about books and mental health, and I’m posting it a day late because of the issue where I can’t schedule posts, ugh! Anyway, here’s the prompt:

Are there any books that have helped you during a difficult moment in your life? What books would you deem a must-read-must-have when it comes to mental health awareness? What are your favorite book/s that feature a main character going through a rough patch?

Books in general are really important to my mental health. I do better when I make plenty of time to read, and I read more when I’m doing better — it’s one of those virtuous cycles.

I don’t read self-help (in general, there’s been one or two) and the like, but I do have a fiction book that has been an important part of figuring out how to deal with my anxiety better. The first trigger was an article or blog post that I’ve never found again which says the opposite of anxiety is curiosity: anxiety makes you scared, makes you close up, makes you run away, while curiosity is all about being open to something, learning more about it, sitting with it.

At some point, I made a connection with Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. While Ged fears and runs from the monster that his shadow has become, he’s mastered by it; once he turns and seeks it out, seeks to embrace it, it can no longer harm him — more than that, it makes him incredibly powerful.

Reading that as a metaphor for mental health… welp.

I don’t really have any recommendations for books that feature characters going through mental health struggles, though I did recently read Cassandra Khaw’s Find Me Where It Ends, which is both literally and figuratively and at pretty much every level you can think of about suicide. It’s a rough read, and one I found it hard to read as a result, but it’s beautifully written and I do recommend it if that’s the kind of narrative you’re looking for/enjoy. It’s out in October, if I remember rightly.

Of my other recent reads, there is of course Mistakenly Saving the Villain, which involves Yue Wuhuan dealing with severe trauma and what seems like OCD. I… would not recommend it as a serious book about mental health, since it’s a fantasy romance (specifically danmei, so in translation) and Song Qingshi (Yue Wuhuan’s saviour and love interest) absolutely enables him — if anything it’s more of a “what not to do”! But I’ve been having a lot of fun with it: despite the darkness of Yue Wuhuan’s past, most of it is surprisingly light.

Tags: books, discussion, Let's Talk Bookish

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted August 15, 2026 by Nicky in General / 40 Comments

Happy weekend! With my birthday coming up on Thursday 20th, this is my last push to tidy up my TBR a bit ready for birthday books… Wish me luck.

Books acquired this week

I’m still trying to whittle things down so I can get books for my birthday, but I did get a couple of manga this week for some lighter reading!

My Younger Knight Takes Care of Me in Another World is a bit of a silly series (and a very clear ripoff of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter), but it was a fun palate cleanser. As for Love in the Palm of His Hand, I hadn’t realised that volume three had been out for a while, so I eagerly snagged that!

And of course, my British Library Crime Classic subscription book came in:

This is a new-to-me author, so I’m curious!

Posts from this week

There’s been plenty of wordcount posted on the blog this week and I wouldn’t blame anyone who waits for the roundups or couldn’t keep up this time! So here’s the rundown, reviews first:

Non-fiction: Dressing the Queen: Two Hundred Years of Makers and Monarchy, by Kate Strasdin (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: Ambush at Still Lake, by Caroline Bird (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Manga: Cat + Gamer, vol 3, by Wataru Nadatani (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Romantasy: An Ancient Witch’s Guide to Modern Dating, by Cecilia Edward (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Non-fiction: 100 Unforgettable Dresses, by Hal Rubenstein (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Children’s graphic novel: I’m a Dumbo Octopus! A Graphic Guide to Cephalopods, by Anne Lambelet (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As usual, don’t forget that most of these reviews are for books I read weeks or months ago, because I pre-write the reviews and post them in a spread-out way to provide variety. Also, 3/5 is a perfectly good rating, since for me it means “liked it”, and I give 5/5 rarely!

And of course, the other posts:

What I’m reading

First, as always, a quick preview of the books I’ve finished this week which I plan to review on the blog:

And as for my plans for this weekend… well, my birthday/holiday trip approaches, with just three working days left, so I really need to get my read on if I want to finish some more books in order to clear the decks for the trip. I’m planning on finishing up Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress, reading my new British Library Crime Classic, and… I’m not sure what else. Lots, hopefully!

Hope everyone has a good 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: Rereads

Posted August 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 10 Comments

This week’s prompt is about whether you reread:

Is there a book you keep coming back to, reading it more than once?

And ohhhh yep! There’s a lot: I semi-recently talked about some of them in short in a Top Ten Tuesday post.

I’d say each era of my life has had one book I came back to again and again, more than any others. As a kid, it was C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In my teens, it was definitely Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. My late teens/early twenties saw me rereading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (the whole sequence, really) over and over, and sharing it with my wife.

After that, it gets a bit blurrier, since I don’t have as much distance. I know that by the time I got married (in 2016, aged just barely still 26) it was definitely Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, and I’d say that’s still in pretty frequent rotation! But I also started reading and rereading Dorothy L. Sayers’ mysteries, and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice…

As you see, I’ve always been a big rereader, and of far more than just those books, though they’re some of the most special to me! I feel like each time I come back to a book, I read it a little differently; I’ve changed, and so it speaks to different parts of me. The best books offer more every time.

Tags: Book Blogger Hop, books, discussion

WWW Wednesday

Posted August 12, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I actually finished was volume three of Liu Gou Hua’s After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine, which I loooved. The vibe reminds me of… well, for other danmei readers, if Shen Qingqiu and Liu Qingge got together in The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, and that made Liu Qingge warm up and show unexpected amounts of happiness (eventually). It takes Huo Wujiu time, but in this volume he’s fully in love with Jiang Suizhou, and happy just to be around him, it’s adorable. The plot has been fairly satisfying so far, too.

I really need volume four and I hate that I’m now waiting until November.

What are you currently reading?

I’m most actively working on Elinor Cleghorn’s A Woman’s Work, which is basically discussing how motherhood has been constructed and viewed over time. It makes for sometimes uncomfortable reading, since that’s not always been positive by any means, and it definitely fits thematically with her other book, Unwell Women — you can see how one led her towards writing the other.

I’m also partway through Shen Tao’s The Poet Empress, which I’m enjoying more than I expected. I was warned that the topic was really heavy and that it’d be a difficult read, but it’s surprisingly quick-moving for me, even though it is heavy.

I did also start on Becky Chambers’ As You Wake, Break the Shell, but haven’t read enough to really have an opinion yet.

What will you be reading next?

I’ll be continuing my quest to read some of my bought-in-2026 books to “make room” for birthday books (since I cap the number of books I can have bought this year and not started at 20). That means reading my two newest manga, vol 2 of My Younger Knight Takes Care of Me in Another World (which is an absolute ripoff of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, but not unfun) and vol 3 of Rinteku’s Love in the Palm of His Hand, and starting my new British Library Crime Classic, Shelley Smith’s The Party at No. 5.

Ideally I’ll start more than that, but we’ll see how it goes.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: On This Day…

Posted August 11, 2026 by Nicky in General / 29 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is “Books I Was Reading On This Day Over the Last Ten Years”. I stopped using Goodreads and didn’t have a replacement for a couple of years in the middle, so this will be easier to do with the books I was reviewing on this day (or as near as possible) in previous years, so I’m going to go with that!

So without further ado…

11th August 2016: Brother Jacob, by George Eliot (1/5 stars). No memory of this one, really, but I don’t think I ever did read any more George Eliot!
11th August 2017: Incognito, by David Eagleman (3/5 stars). I sort of remember the discussion of what to do about criminal behaviour, but not enough to have an opinion now
11th August 2018: Witchmark, by C.L. Polk (3/5 stars). I wasn’t an enormous fan of this at first, just kind of liked it, but IIRC I liked it more on a reread, and liked the second book!
11th August 2019: The Pandemic Century, by Mark Honigsbaum (3/5 stars). Hmm! I do actually remember this one, and that I was kind of irked that it wanted to have things both ways: you shouldn’t panic about a pandemic but you should contain it effectively. I’d have recently graduated from my BSc, so I was in a good position to critique the book (having studied infectious diseases for part of it and chosen that for my dissertation topic). I’m kinda curious if there’s been a version updated to discuss SARS-CoV-2.
10th August 2020: The Green Mill Murder, by Kerry Greenwood (4/5 stars). This was from a point where I was still writing fresh reviews for every reread of a book. It’s one that always sticks in my mind from this series, though I can never remember the way the two halves fit together. (The 11th that year was a Tuesday, so my post on that day was a Top Ten Tuesday post, Books My Bookclub Have Read!)
11th August 2021: Magic Strikes, by Ilona Andrews (4/5 stars). Another reread review! I do love the Kate Daniels series still, and this book is a fun one since it features the arena.
1st July 2022: The Grief of Stones, by Katherine Addison (4/5 stars). I don’t understand why there are no posts between this and the end of 2022; I have no memory of such a massive blog hiatus. But my next post seems to be a post at the start of 2023, where I apologise for a long absence… so I guess it must be so. Anyway, I loved The Grief of Stones, and have reread it a couple of times since. Shame I didn’t like the third book in the series much.
11th August 2023: The Bookshop and the Barbarian, by Morgan Stang (1/5 stars). I definitely remember this one! I was infuriated by it.
11th August 2024: A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, by KJ Charles (4/5 stars). I really enjoyed this one; it’s not my favourite of Charles’ work, but I had a lot of fun, as usual.
11th August 2025: Paladin’s Grace, by T. Kingfisher (4/5 stars). My goodness, this was over a year ago already? I read this one while we were in the process of moving and I was staying with my parents, and I frankly devoured it.

As a reminder, ten years is a long time! Who knows what I’d think of these books now.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday