Category: General

20 Books of Summer: Getting Started

Posted June 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 14 Comments

NB: I made my own banner for this as the official one used generative AI. I used a stock photo from Pexels.com, and added some text. It’s not the most beautiful, but please feel free to use it if you would like to.

I’m a little late to the party, and I don’t think I’ve ever participated before… but better late than never, right? The challenge is a simple one: read 5, 10, 15 or 20 books over the summer, between 1st June and 31st August. You can sign up over at AnnaBookBel’s blog and join the monthly link-ups there.

I usually read a lot more than 20 books over the course of the summer, so I’m going to narrow things down a bit and use it to try to read specific books — but if that starts feeling unpleasant or annoying in any way, I’ll stop or swap in other books: the below are just a preliminary list of ideas, though I’ll try to stick to the categories I’ve set up here.

So let’s see…

Five non-fic:

I love non-fiction, especially when I’ve been stressed and struggling to read, so let’s start with some of those! (Not that I’m planning to read these in any order, but I’m hyping myself up here, shush.) I’m not going for any particular theme here, just picking some that I feel enthusiastic about in this moment.

And yet a bit of a theme emerged anyway, ahaha. Technically I’ve started the first three, but I’m not far into them. Which reminds me of my next section…

Five in-progress:

I started a lot of books at once and ended up feeling a bit guilty about not getting back to them, and truthfully, a bit overwhelmed at having so much on the go. So let’s lock in and agree that I’ll try to finish these five.

I haven’t even got far into the latter two, but the whim changed after I’d read a couple of chapters, and I drifted away.

With the other three, I’m solidly in the midst of ’em. I won’t say they’ll be easy wins, because The Book Eaters and The Water Outlaws haven’t quite been gelling for me, and Queen James is dense.

Five ARCs:

I’ve been well in control of my ARCs for the last year or so… until I got a bit overwhelmed again, and pulled back on reading. I’ve got some catching up to do! So let’s get these read, if possible!

Five danmei:

I got a lot of new danmei at once, and ended up a bit overwhelmed/wondering if I should read one series at a time, or wait for more to come out (so I can get the next book right away if I’m really into it), etc. But I wouldn’t normally do that, and at least since they just need translating, we know new volumes are coming soon! So I think I’ll just jump in.

I’ve been looking forward to several of these for a while, after all! So should be some good light reading over the summer.

Five wildcards:

I know, this brings us to 25 in total, but I wanted to give myself the easiest possible out if I’m struggling with any of the above books. Without a specific backup plan, I might just feel like I’m cheating (I know, I know, the rules are very flexible, but my brain isn’t). So here’s a wildcard for each of the above in order, and a spare!

And you never know… maybe I can make it the 25 specific books of summer, and really flout the rules, ahaha.

So here we go, for at least as long as this sparks joy!

Tags: 20 Books of Summer, books

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

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

Happy weekend, folks! I have plans for the day, so I’m looking forward to that… but I’m hoping for a quiet Sunday to go with it. For now, let’s look at my week in books, though it’s been a pretty quiet one.

Books acquired this week

I thought I hadn’t got anything, but actually I was wrong! I got offered the first one to review, and I’ve been curious about this author for a while and enjoying other pre-release reviews. Plus, my British Library Crime Classic for this month arrived!

I’ve already tucked into Puzzles of the Parish, since short stories sounded exactly my speed this week. What a contrast in those covers, ahaha.

Posts from this week

First up as always, the reviews:

Fashion history: Japanese Dress in Detail, by Josephine Rout (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: A Dress of Locusts, by Safa Khatib (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
Romance manga: The Stranger in the Hoarding House, by Joe Aruku (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Manga: Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 4, by Itaru Kinoshita (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy short stories: Seasons of Glass & Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

None of these were read this week, since I have a long backlog of reviews ready to post and try to mix it up and keep a range ready to post!

What I’m reading

This week, the line-up of books I’ve finished is very small, because I’ve been busy with a new work thing and also just letting my brain rest and do whatever in my downtime. I did finish one book, though — a random pick from Kobo Plus!

I’m not sure how much reading I’ll get done today, since I’ll be out for most of it, but I hope to finish Puzzles of the Parish. Other than that, I’d like to finish up volume two of Mistakenly Saving the Villain, but we’ll see! I’m still trying to let myself settle down and just read whatever’s fun to me in the moment.

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

Let’s Talk Bookish: Pride Month Reading

Posted June 12, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

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

June’s prompt is as follows:

Happy Pride! ️‍ What are your favorite books with LGBTQIA+ representation? Are there authors or series you always recommend? What books are on your Pride Month TBR? What do you think makes representation feel genuine?

I have to say that I don’t really think of what I read in terms of representing minority groups at the moment: not that it doesn’t, because I am interested in books that are by and about and for groups that are marginalised in society on all kinds of different axes. It’s mostly because I pulled back on the number of obsessive stats about books I was keeping for my mental health, and also because I got somewhat uncomfortable about some of the associated baggage like “own voices”, which became an intense pressure on people to come out and share personal details. I’m thinking about e.g. the situation where Becky Albertalli was pressured to come out because of Leah on the Offbeat.

Given my swing to reading more non-fiction as well, I kind of naturally fell out of the habit of thinking about books this way, so despite the fact that I read plenty of queer fiction, I didn’t have an immediate answer here, but let’s see if I can do better!

At the moment, a lot of the queer stuff I’m reading is danmei, which I wouldn’t necessarily refer to as being good LGBTQIA+ representation in general. I think it does things which are radical, particularly in context, where queerness is common and people are accepting… but there are also a lot of issues baked in, like gong and shou dynamics, and the fact that the shou sometimes ends up with a rather feminised role (sometimes down to being referred to as “wife”), authors insist that the dynamic is immutable, etc. Still, I don’t think ruling danmei out entirely as queer fiction is fair, and I’ve been deeply enjoying Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s work, Priest’s Guardian, Xue Shan Fei Hu’s The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, and currently Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain.

Most of the other queer books I read are sci-fi or fantasy, where I really enjoy hopepunk takes like Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and sequels, where homophobia just isn’t a thing, or Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice et al, which play with gender and relationships — everyone in the Radch is referred to as “she”, no matter what. Malka Older’s murder mysteries set on Jupiter are a lot of fun too, with a gender-swapped Sherlock and Watson duo who are, yes, in a romantic relationship as well…

There’s so much I’m missing here: I love K.A. Doore‘s roundups of each year’s queer SFF for this, which often help me find books I’d somehow never come across at all that sound amazing. I highly recommend keeping an eye out for these.

When it comes to romance, of course there’s plenty out there: favourites of mine include Jordan L. Hawk (usually his work has SF/F and horror crossover), KJ Charles (sometimes has fantasy elements too) and Cat Sebastian.

In my non-fiction reading, fear not, there have been some queer books there too! Most recently Anthony Delaney’s Queer Georgians, which uncovers various stories of queer people in the Georgian period in the UK. I have Will Tosh’s Straight Acting on the go, which is about Shakespeare’s sexuality and all the debate there is around that, and I’m quite looking forward to picking up a copy of A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World when I can, especially after reading Jane Cholmeley’s A Bookshop of One’s Own.

As you may have guessed from the preamble above, I don’t have a Pride-specific reading list. I’m queer all year round, and so is my reading.

I’d say that’s also the key to what makes representation feel genuine: you can’t just be checking a box. The queerness has to be lived in, baked into your story (even if that’s in small ways) in the way it’s baked into the world. If you can cut it out by simply swapping the pronouns of your side character’s partner and omitting to mention the pride flag in the coffee shop window… well.

Tags: books, discussions, Let's Talk Bookish

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

Here we are again! As usual lately, trying linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What have you recently finished reading?

I haven’t finished anything in a few days; I’m trying not to stress about that and just let my brain do a bit of a reset, because I have been reading… just not necessarily focusing on finishing books. Looks like the last thing I finished was How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside, by Brian Bilston: it’s ostensibly a guide to writing and enjoying poetry, but it largely felt like a platform for Brian Bilston to show off his poetry and humour. That might work better for others, but I didn’t enjoy it a lot.

What are you currently reading?

A bunch of books at once, as ever, but with a decent amount of enthusiasm now, which is a relief. I most recently started John Darnell and Colleen Darnell’s Egypt’s Golden Couple; so far I’m raising an eyebrow slightly at their stated decision to take “the small liberty of providing the royal couple with personal quirks”. I’m giving it some time, especially as the bibliographical essays in the back do show sources, but I do hope the speculative/invented stuff is clearly flagged up.

I’ve also got started on volume two of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, and I’m eager to see how the relationship develops now that some time has passed and Yue Wuhuan has gained more power and confidence.

I diiiid also start on Moorea Corrigan’s Thistlemarsh, but haven’t got far with that, and am knee-deep in Hal Rubenstein’s 100 Unforgettable Dresses, too many of which I find kinda forgettable. Mostly I think it’s not as focused on fashion history and what fashion tells us as I’m interested in, and more on “dresses make women beautiful”, with a dip in the last few entries I read into beliefs that all women want to look beautiful (implied: in a dress), so, yeah, not entirely my thing.

What will you read next?

I just got this month’s British Library Crime Classic via my subscription, and this month’s is a short story collection: Puzzles of the Parish, focusing on stories around churches and clergy (I expect at least one appearance of Father Brown). I often end up gobbling up the short story collections, and they’re a nice range of different authors/periods/styles, so I might well pick this up next.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Handwriting on Covers

Posted June 9, 2026 by Nicky in General / 21 Comments

This week’s prompt from Top Ten Tuesday is another cover-based one, about covers featuring handwriting/fonts that look like handwriting. I don’t actually know what I’ll find, but let’s see!

Aaand the end results are a bit of a mix: mostly I kept finding the same sort of “handwriting-ish” fonts being used, the “I’m based ultimately on handwriting/calligraphy, but everyone’s used to this as a font” ones. But here are some that caught my eye, narrowed down from about twenty…

I didn’t love all these books (and I haven’t finished The Book Eaters yet), but I confess that handwriting fonts do seem to grab my attention, and I definitely like them a lot when I’m making graphics (on the rare occasions that I do). Amsterdam Three, how I love thee.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Series or Standalones

Posted June 8, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

Happy Monday!

It’s time for more Fantasy with Friends: as always, the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantasy series:

Do you currently prefer standalone fantasies or series? Is there a certain number of books that seems like “too much,” whether that means the series feels intimidating to start or just that the author might need to move on to something else? Is there a point at which you worry that a series is just a “cash grab?”

At the moment, I definitely lean toward standalones, or loosely-connected series which don’t require that you grab the next book right away in order to find out how the story ends. There’s something very satisfying about knowing the story has reached a happy-ever-after (or miserable-ever-after, though I’m not so keen on that) or at least a happy/miserable-for-now. And you don’t have to worry whether the remainder of the series will ever come out at all, or that the series will get cancelled before it all comes out.

That said, there are some amazing series out there, and authors I absolutely trust with that — I’ve probably mentioned Marie Brennan’s Lady Isabella Trent books a few times so far, but she’s definitely one example where I was thrilled to hang on and wait for the next instalment, eagerly reading each as it came out, and I’d trust her for the same now. I had a similar feeling about Heather Fawcett’s Emily Wilde books, too. I think it comes down to a certain amount of trust that the story’s going somewhere and that there’s a plan to get there.

There are some series where I find myself having my doubts and finding the sheer number of volumes daunting, though I don’t want to go as far as calling anything a “cash grab”. Seanan McGuire’s books seem to spawn apparently-infinite series, for example. I’m aware that she has a game plan for Toby Daye, for instance, but… I don’t know. It is definitely getting to daunting lengths, and the degree to which hardcore fans breathlessly greet each new story does make me a little worried it’s become too big for McGuire to wrap up.

As far as “cash grabs” go… well, authors need to make money, they have bills to pay, etc, and ongoing series with enthusiastic followings are a good way of guaranteeing a certain amount coming in, the induction of new fans, and the sales of backlist books. Authors have to be businesspeople because we don’t have worldwide universal basic incomes. If an author is looking at a series thinking “the books have to keep coming”, no shade for that except inasfar I think it’s possible for the world/story to end up suffering for it, and that would be a shame… and, well, my ability and desire to follow a series like that at the moment are somewhat limited, so I’m not the ideal audience.

There have been times in the past where I was absolutely into epic series, so it might happen again in time. At the moment I’m even reading Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, which is coming out in translation a volume at a time. What helps there is that I know the story is finished, and it’s just waiting on translation… so it’s already finite. Same goes for a lot of the danmei I’ve picked up lately (though also they’re often just four volumes or so, so not too intimidating).

So in conclusion: mostly standalones or at least short/loosely connected series for me at the moment, but I can’t say I won’t get into an epic sometime in the future.

Tags: books, discussions, Fantasy with Friends

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 6, 2026 by Nicky in General / 20 Comments

Happy weekend! I’ve had a fairly quiet week without feeling in the mood for much, but I got out of the house yesterday for a little adventure (viewing the UK AIDs Memorial Quilt, which is on display this weekend not too far away) and feel a bit perkier today, so let’s hope for some good weekend reading.

Books acquired this week

Nothing new in the mail for me, but I did pick up some library books! These were more or less random choices just based on whatever I spotted in a very quick trawl through while waiting…

And a hold came in from the National Poetry Library:

It’s possible I put it on hold just for the hippos on the cover!

Posts from this week

Starting with the reviews:

Mystery comic: The Great British Bump-Off, by John Allison et al (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Manga: Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 3, by Itaru Kinoshita (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Fantasy mystery: The Killing of a Chestnut Tree, by Oliver K. Langmead (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: Solo Leveling, vol 6, by Chugong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Classic mystery: The Unicorn Murders, by Carter Dickson (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As usual, most of them aren’t books I’ve finished super recently, since I hold back reviews to keep a mix of genres going. The books I’ve read this week are in the next section though!

What I’m reading

It was a bit of a slow week as far as reading goes, though I did some organising of my currently-reading pile and got realistic, so the terrifying stack is a bit better managed now, and I kinda hope that will perk me up. I did finish a few books, and they weren’t short ones either, so it wasn’t a bad week, all the same!

This weekend I’m hoping to return to Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters, which I’ve been neglecting, and maybe start on volume two of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain… but I’m not super set on anything, and mostly planning to follow my whim. Not doing that is what gets me feeling overwhelmed and unhappy with my reading, after all.

I haven’t made much progress on my crochet since last week, but I’m hoping to get some work in on that, too.

Happy reading, folks!

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

May Reading Wrap-Up

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

I know we’re a few days into June, but I didn’t want to do too many posts in one day, so I saved May’s wrap-up for now! So let’s take a look.

May in general:

It’s been a bit of a weird month for me, to be honest. I’ve been busy with work things, and having difficulty relaxing during my chilled out time. My mood was honestly terrible for a bit there, though I think I’m pulling through it now.

In good news, though, I did get back into crocheting for the first time in a long time. I’m making this beautiful bookcase blanket pattern, which uses a technique called mosaic overlay crochet. I got distracted from it a bit this week, but I’m hoping to get back to work on it this weekend. For now, the progress picture I posted last weekend is still pretty current.

As with last month, I’ve been playing a lot of casual/relatively short videogames. One I definitely have to give a shout-out to is TOEM, which is such a fun little adventure. Wandering around taking photos of everything and exploring without a map or guide reminded me of playing Pokemon as a kid. Highly recommended!

Other games I enjoyed include Minami Lane, which is a short and sweet management-type game, A Planet Full of Cats, which is a ‘hidden’ cat game with quests and a story… and Zero Stress King: Idle Defense, which is admittedly like nothing else I play, but had me pretty fascinated for a couple of days. It’s ostensibly a tower defence game, but you cannot lose, so the only thing to do is slowly build up your defences to defeat the waves of enemies.

I also mentioned my Final Fantasy XIV raid group’s progress last month, so as a quick update on that, we’ve beaten the first stage of the final boss of this ‘tier’ of boss fights, and are working on phase two (which is the end of the fight). I think we’re all eager to claim a victory and take a break at this point, so wish us luck for some serious progress in June!

Reading stats:

I know you were all waiting for me to get to this bit!

Total books read: 30
Total pages read: 5,674
Rereads: 1
ARCs: 1
Series finished/up to date: 1
Books owned pre-2026: 3
Books owned from 2026: 9
Borrowed books: 16

Fiction: 15
Non-fiction: 6
Poetry: 9
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 7

It’s more books in total than in April, though does include a bit more poetry, graphic novels, and two children’s books I’d got curious about. Still, I’m hoping for a bit more reading — in previous years, I always thought my reading dipped in March/April/May because of university stuff with final assignments and the lead-up to early June exams, but this year I don’t have that excuse, so maybe it’s something about spring!

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books read: 145/400 (21 books behind)
Overall total pages read: 33,574/100,000 (8,529 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 28/100
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 20/20

As you see, I’m slipping further behind on my goals, and soon it’ll be time to think about whether they’re realistic… but I’d like to see if the improvement in May was a sign of getting back into the swing of things, first. Not that there’s any shame in modifying goals, and I absolutely will if it seems right!

Blogging stats:

Views: 15.9k
Visitors: 14.9k
Likes: 421
Comments: 353
Reviews: 27
Other posts: 18

A dip from last month in stats, maybe partly because Let’s Talk Bookish took a hiatus, so I wasn’t doing those posts or doing any related visiting? And probably also because I was kind of overwhelmed, and not doing as much visiting of other blogs.

Most viewed posts:

I seem to be becoming a bit of a hotspot for danmei and light novel reviews, ahaha. I’m not complaining!

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

From Keira’s Bookmark: A Beginner’s Guide to the World of Ilona Andrews, by Keira
From Publishers Weekly: Why You Should Open Magical Doors, by Sarah Beth Durst
From Books, Bones & Buffy: THE GIRL WITH A THOUSAND FACES by Sunyi Dean – Review, by Tammy
From The Book Haze: Book Review | Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, by Haze
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: Steel Gods by Richard Swan, by Mogsy
From Little Frog Scribbles: Our Lady of Blades – Sebastien de Castell, by calypte
From Becky’s Book Blog: The Unicorn Hunters by Katherine Arden – ARC Review! by Becky
From Bemused & Bookish: Review of The Culting of America by Daniella Mestyanek Young, by Olivia
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: The Dorians by Nick Cutter, by Mogsy
From Lola’s Reviews: Review: The Fossil Door by Celia Lake, by Lola

I was diligent about saving links this month, so I had a really hard time whittling this down to a shortlist… there were several more, but I had to stop, ahaha. I don’t always want to read the books people review, but I do want to show appreciation for good reviews!

And there we go — that was May for you! Here’s hoping for a good April.

Tags: books, monthly wrapup

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Linking up with Taking On A World of Words.

What have you recently finished reading?

I finally got round to finishing Kate Strasdin’s Dressing the Queen! I enjoyed it a lot: it doesn’t actually focus on the various royal women it references, but on the craftspeople who created their clothes and accessories, repaired them, laundered them, sorted them, packed them for journeys, etc. Sometimes there’s not a lot of information out there, but Strasdin did a pretty good job of pulling together what there is, I think.

What are you currently reading?

I still have a ridiculous stack of books I’m supposedly partway through, but I did a bit of reorganising and paused some that I wasn’t really getting anywhere with, so I’m hoping to feel a biiiit more in control and less overwhelmed with that. So I’ll just talk about the two I’ve picked up in the last two days!

First, a random pick that I’d added via Kobo Plus at some point: Marilyn Johnson’s The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, which is mostly a deep dive into the lives and thoughts of obituarists she admires, with examples of their work and how it influence obituaries as a form. I’m getting a little bored with it now, but it has been a mostly interesting read.

I also started a book I put on hold at the library and forgot about until it actually came in, Brian Bilston’s How to Lay An Egg with a Horse Inside, which is about writing and enjoying poetry (and by enjoying poetry, so far it mostly means the process of writing it). I know nothing about Bilston and only realised I’d read one of his poems (“On ‘;..p'[[[[[[[[[[[[[;’;////////////////////////3,’“, about his cat’s “poetry”) when he included it here. It’s a mostly tongue-in-cheek musing on poetry that so far has offered nothing new or insightful as far as writing or enjoying poetry goes, but it’s mildly entertaining and I will probably finish in it.

What will you be reading next?

Not a clue, but volume two of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain is a possibility, as is finally getting round to Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 3. We’ll see — at the moment it’s pretty much whatever gets me reading, so I might also dip into the randomness of the books that turned out to be available on Kobo Plus, got added to my Kobo, and haven’t been thought of since.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read

Posted June 2, 2026 by Nicky in General / 30 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is all about books you can’t believe you’ve never read… and I’m going to steer away from the classics and 1,001 books to read before you die type choices, and look more at my TBR.

Republic of Thieves, by Scott Lynch.
I loved the first books in this series! I was very eager for Republic of Thieves! But somehow I never got round to it, and then I got sulky about being nagged to get on and read it… and of course, there’s no saying when there will be more in the series. I still technically want to read this, but it is sitting in limbo more than a little.
Red Right Hand, by Chris Holm.
I’ve enjoyed Chris Holm’s work since the Angry Robot days with the Collector trilogy, and enjoyed the book that Red Right Hand follows up, The Killing Kind. Unfortunately, by the time Red Right Hand came out, I’d forgotten too many of the details, meant to reread that one first, and somehow… never got back to it.
Malice Aforethought, by Francis Iles.
This is one of the classic mystery stories, but somehow I’ve never got round to it (in part because I’m not a huge lover of Francis Iles AKA Anthony Berkeley Cox’s work). Still, it’s a really important one in the development of the classic mystery genre, and I do want to read it. Eventually.
The Daughter of Time, by Josephine Tey.
I was put off by reading something else by Tey which was just hopelessly racist, but her work is very classic, and I want to get round to this at some point — particularly as people often cite it as a favourite. Plus I am kinda interested in Richard III and the mystery of the Princes in the Tower, which makes the concept interesting to me.
Cassandra, by Christa Wolf.
A copy of this has been following me around for… quite a long time, so long that I’ve actually forgotten who recommended it and why — but they were definitely very enthusiastic. The story of Cassandra is one that interests me a lot, too; the tragic possibilities of knowing what’s going to happen, but being totally powerless to convince anyone else…
Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC, by Susan Fisher-Hoch & Joseph B. McCormick.
I did actually start this at some point, so I’m also surprised I never finished it, but I think I may have got it quite early in my interest in infectious diseases and it was maybe a little too anxiety-provoking. I think I’d tolerate it better now, degree in infectious diseases behind me, and maybe appreciate some aspects of it more, too. That said, this will never be my job, even if I do switch into a career in infectious diseases. Yikes on bikes.
The Tower at Stony Wood, by Patricia McKillip.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of McKillip’s work, but there are several I still need to get to that could all take a turn on this list. I find her writing a little opaque at times; beautiful, but sometimes requires a lot of attention to fully extract the meaning. Maybe that’s just me — either way, her style takes work, and so her books always await the exact right mood. I did pick up my copies from my parents’ house semi-recently (well, at least a year ago, possibly two), so they are at least on my shelves here…
The Outskirter’s Secret, by Rosemary Kirstein.
I really like The Steerswoman, so I don’t know why I’ve never got on with it and read the remaining books. Maybe it’s knowing the story is unfinished. Maybe it’s because I know a little too much about the other books and how things work out, so one element of the tantalising mystery at least is a little bit spoiled (though spoilers don’t usually bother me, this is a bit of a special case, I’d say).
A Brother’s Price, by Wen Spencer.
This is one of several books that I got at some point or another for The Alternative World book club on Goodreads, and never got round to. I remember people being so enthusiastic about it, though, and their recommendations were definitely pivotal to quite a few of the SF/F books I loved (including The Steerswoman, actually) at that time… so yeah.
Or What You Will, by Jo Walton.
Somehow I missed when this came out, and only realised a bit later… and somehow still haven’t got round to it, which is just shocking given how much I’ve generally enjoyed Jo Walton’s work. Soon, I hope!

I keep thinking of other potential choices — I can’t believe I still haven’t managed to read anything of Sarah Pinsker’s, for example, given she was a part of The Alternative World group on Goodreads! But this is a reasonable survey, and covers a mostly-satisfying/representative spread of genres, so let’s leave it there…

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday