Category: General

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted April 18, 2026 by Nicky in General / 31 Comments

Happy weekend! It feels genuinely springlike at last here in the UK — sure, we’ve had our rainy days, but also some lovely sun. Hope everyone’s had a good week!

Books acquired this week

Unsurprisingly, after the spree of my London trip (documented over the last couple Saturdays!), I haven’t been looking to acquire new reading material this week. Still, predictably enough new reading material has found me. First up, two borrows from the National Poetry Library:

I picked up milk and honey because of this week’s Let’s Talk Bookish discussion topic (both my review and my answer to the topic are below in the roundup, if you’re curious!). Ambush at Still Lake was a random choice based on amusement at the pulpy cover; the brief excerpt of poetry I saw suggests I may well not enjoy this volume, but I do like trying random poetry anyway.

I also got a couple of review copies, excitingly — Del Rey sent me a link to get A Trade of Blood on Netgalley, woooo, while I have autoapproval from Tor so simply pounced on The Killing of a Chestnut Tree. I’d seen Tammy talk about it as an upcoming book a few weeks ago, and my interest was piqued, especially given the Holmes pastiche.

Finally… somehow, I’d left a book out of my posts about the London trip! I realised once I was finally getting everything properly shelved. I kinda can’t believe I’d forgotten it, because the title kinda tickles me:

I’m looking forward to digging into that one, too!

Posts from this week

First, as always, let’s round up the reviews I posted this week (though some of them have been written for months):

Fantasy light novel: Solo Leveling, vol 1, by Chugong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: The Hedgewitch of Foxhall, by Anna Bright (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Mystery: Murder Offstage, by L.B. Hathaway (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Poetry: milk and honey, by Rupi Kaur (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Non-fiction: Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, by Alice Roberts (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Romance manhwa: Tied to You, vol 4, by WHAT/Chelliace (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

And of course, the other posts:

What I’m reading

I’m still having trouble settling down to read, finding myself more interested in messing around with casual games (currently doing a lot of hidden object games like A Park Full of Cats), but I did finish a few books this week anyway, so here’s a preview of what will (eventually) be coming up for review on the blog!

For this weekend, I have a few books targeted that I want to finish: Daedalus is Dead (Seamus Sullivan), A Palace Near the Wind (Ai Jiang), The Murder at Gulls Nest (Jess Kidd), and — even though I only just got it! — The Killing of a Chestnut Tree (Oliver K. Langmead).

Other than that, we’ll see. Maybe it’ll be mostly hidden object games. If so, that will be fine!

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: Poetry in the Age of Social Media

Posted April 17, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 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! Every Friday they have a different topic for participants to write about and discuss, e.g. like this post.

This week’s theme is about Instagram poetry and the like:

A few years ago, poetry saw a surge of popularity on social media thanks to “Instagram Poetry” or “instapoetry” by authors like Rupi Kaur, Amanda Lovelace, and Atticus. Do you think social media platforms have changed how people discover poetry? Do you think “instapoetry” makes poetry seem more approachable, or do you agree with critics who say that it’s not “real poetry”? Have you read any instapoetry, and if so, what are your favourite authors/poems/collections?

So let’s take it bit by bit…

Do you think social platforms have changed how people discover poetry?

Like any change in how people communicate, yes, and also because it proves a different potential poetic form as well as a different platform, just like artificial character limits created a trend for very short fiction among a subset of people.

It hasn’t changed how I discover poetry, since I’m not on Instagram and I’ve been a reader (and writer) of poetry since I was a child, before anything even generally like Instagram was accessible: I read poetry collections and anthologies (often via my libraries by just picking at random), follow recommendations from other readers via reviews and blogs (though there aren’t a ton around that talk about poetry much), and am a member of the National Poetry Library (UK folks interested in poetry should sign up!).

Do you think “instapoetry” makes poetry seem more approachable, or do you agree with critics who say that it’s not “real poetry”?

I’m not super interested in artificial cutoffs here; if someone says they’re writing poetry, they’re writing poetry, whether it’s poetry that I like or not. I suspect “instapoetry” is indeed more accessible for some, in part because it’s out there on a social media platform they use, rather than tucked away in specific poetry collections that they might not have access to or know about. Poetry is often seen as less accessible than prose anyway, and putting it out there in people’s Instagram feeds is often getting it in front of people who wouldn’t otherwise seek out poetry.

A lot of people who want to create artificial barriers and say something isn’t “real poetry” or “a real novel” or a real anything else are threatened by it and frightened of change, contemptuous of what “young people” (or other trendsetting subgroups) like as a reflex to prove their superiority, etc. There are reasons why critics may not like a given poem, instapoetry or not, and those are valid… but dismissing the whole form/format? That’s sour grapes about something becoming popular of which they don’t approve, and I don’t have time for it.

Have you read any instapoetry, and if so, what are your favourite authors/poems/collections?

Not much that I’m aware of, but it’s not that I wouldn’t; I don’t promise to like it, but I’d happily try it. I borrowed Rupi Kaur’s milk and honey from the National Poetry Library this week, and didn’t love it, though I could see the appealing factors.

Any other suggestions I should try?

Tags: books, discussion, Let's Talk Bookish

WWW Wednesday

Posted April 15, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Here we are, on Wednesday again somehow…

What have you recently finished reading?

Thanks to a certain friend, the last thing I finished was actually a book called Boring Postcards USA by Martin Parr. It’s… pretty much what it says on the tin: a book full of postcards depicting highways, motel rooms, tools, etc — some of them looking very like tourist postcards, but boring. And sometimes a little horrifying, in terms of the interior decorating. It was very entertaining, all in all, in part because I also know that some Postcrossing members would love to receive and collect things like this. I might review it for Postcrossing’s blog!

Earlier yesterday I also finished Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries, which has some excellent choices and images, but feels a bit fragmented due to being written by various different contributors.

What are you currently reading?

I have a lot of books on my currently reading ‘shelf’ (both physical and on StoryGraph), but realistically I’m only focusing on a couple. One of those is Jess Kidd’s Murder at Gulls Nest, which is going… okay. There’s something awkward about the way it’s written sometimes, like maybe someone’s taken out a thesaurus and got things a bit wrong, or used words they don’t quite understand, e.g. Nora refers to someone as “pertaining to be” a given name, implying that it’s a fake name. That’s… not what “pertaining” means.

I actually quite like the present tense for writing short pieces, but I’m also not sure how well it’s working at this length.

The only other book I’ve actually picked up in the last couple days is Leo Bruce’s Jack on the Gallows Tree, this month’s British Library Crime Classics release. I’m enjoying it more than I feared so far, since it features one of Bruce’s other detectives, not Sergeant Beef (a character I don’t enjoy).

What will you read next?

I’m not sure, but I’m hoping something will grab me soon! Realistically, I should probably focus on some of the books I’ve technically started but haven’t made progress with.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Titles That Describe Me

Posted April 14, 2026 by Nicky in General / 32 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is “book titles that describe me/my life”… and I’m not sure where to start, but it sounds like a fun one. Let’s see what I can come up with!

I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf, by Grant Snider.
To be fair, I didn’t love this book and I don’t actually judge people for what they like to read… but I do like to get an idea of a person based on what they read, if anything!
Book Lovers, by Emily Henry.
Not a favourite book, but it was fun… and the title is irresistible when trying to describe me. I’m a little worried about how much of my personality this list is implying revolves around books, but it’s not terribly wrong, and also it’s just easy to find titles of books about books.
The Constant Rabbit, by Jasper Fforde.
Admittedly I haven’t read this one, but I couldn’t resist the title; my rabbits Eclair and Biscuit are never far away, particularly Biscuit.
A Palace Near the Wind, by Ai Jiang.
One of my current reads, which I’ve been enjoying. I don’t quite live in a palace, admittedly, but I live in Yorkshire and it can be very windy here!
Everything is Tuberculosis, by John Green.
Tuberculosis has been a major interest of mine ever since I read Catching Breath (Kathryn Lougheed), and John Green’s book is an excellent update to that. And friends can attest that I am far too good at dragging TB into conversations somehow…
In my defence, write a dissertation about something and you’ll never stop seeing it everywhere.
The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, by Martin Edwards.
By this point, you could possibly tell that story from my own shelves, ahaha. I studied the development of crime fiction as a genre in my undergrad, and maintained an interest, collecting almost all the British Library Crime Classic reissues and various others.
Solo Leveling, by Chugong.
Okay, I’ll never be even a tenth the badass that Jinwoo Sung is, but I play video games a lot, and often solo! The only multiplayer games I usually play are co-ops like Split Fiction with my wife, or of course, the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV… otherwise it’s mostly solo leveling… 😉
Yeah, okay, I know, I’m not that funny.
Paladin’s Hope, by T. Kingfisher.
Speaking of Final Fantasy XIV! My main class is Paladin, which I play in high-end content, so it can hardly be left out of an autobiography of myself in book titles. I promise I don’t go berserk like Kingfisher’s paladins, though, and I don’t have the same degree of guilt complex. I try not to make playing Final Fantasy XIV my whole personality, but I spend a lot of time with my raid group and other friends from the game, so it’s a significant part of my life, all the same.
The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman.
I said I wasn’t going to keep banging on about books, but I was getting stumped, and I have so many ebooks that the physical books you can see in my house are only the tip of the iceberg.
To Be Taught, If Fortunate, by Becky Chambers.
One of the most important themes of my life has been learning, and continuing to learn… nope, more than that. My family feel it’s pretty inevitable that I will return to formal education before long; the only question is when, and what. I have two degrees in English literature, a degree in biology, and a degree in infectious diseases, so it’s probably time to break off on another tangent — maybe classical studies, with Latin? But who knows. Either way, I believe I have been very fortunate to have the opportunities to learn that I have, and hope never to take it for granted.

Oof, that took me forever to put together; I probably put waaaaay too much time into it. Very curious what other people will choose this week!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: High or Low Fantasy

Posted April 13, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

It’s Fantasy With Friends‘ weekly discussion time (prompts hosted at Pages Unbound), and this week’s prompt is about high vs low fantasy:

Do you prefer low or high fantasy? Or both?

For those who aren’t super into the genre (since I know I have a few of you around here), the archetypical “high fantasy” would be J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It’s usually set entirely in an alternate world (though I would argue that Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree remains pretty high fantasy despite also being a portal fantasy), and involves the typical fantasy trappings — swords and sorcery, elves, dwarves, etc. Low fantasy would cover stuff set in our own world and which feels less immediately epic in scope, like urban fantasy (though series like Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books are ultimately pretty epic in scope despite the apparent “real-world” setting, it takes a while to realise just how big the scope is).

I’m honestly not sure how useful the high/low distinction is for my purposes; I guess if you draw a firm line that you only want to read secondary world fantasy (like The Lord of the Rings) then it might be alright, but even then I think it’s a poor guide to many important aspects of a book. High fantasy just covers so much. In part, I think it’s a high-level label that we’ve pretty much outgrown as a genre, with more and more subgenres to explore and narrow down what you’re interested in: consider cosy fantasy, for instance. It’s often set in wholly different worlds, like Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes — but the concerns are everyday, not epic, and I don’t think someone who only wants books like The Lord of the Rings would be very happy if they picked it up because it’s “high fantasy”.

And then there’s stuff like Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed, which I mentioned last week too: it’s set in a fantasy world, but there’s no magic, and the stakes are small and personal. Again, it doesn’t seem like what people are going to be looking for when they want “high fantasy”, but it also doesn’t really meet the definitions of low fantasy. There have always been exceptions… but there are labels now that explain them well, and give you a better idea of a book’s contents.

I am generally the sort of person who likes things to be more of a continuum than a set of tightly defined boxes, so it’s probably no surprise that I love both high and low fantasy, and many books that fall somewhere between. It’s not the kind of criteria I use when deciding what to read overall, though sometimes I might be more in the mood for one than the other (e.g. hankering for something with good world-building).

Tags: books, discussion, Fantasy With Friends

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted April 11, 2026 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

It’s the weekend again, wooo!

Books acquired this week

First up, let’s have the library books! It’s been a few weeks since I checked out any poetry, but I found myself turning to it this week, hoping for more of Mary Oliver’s work and thus inclined to click on other stuff that looked interesting.

I also got a new book that genuinely arrived this week — this month’s British Library Crime Classic. The author wrote the Sergeant Beef short stories, if I understand rightly, so I’m not sure if I’ll like this one; it’s not about Sergeant Beef, but still, I don’t think I enjoyed the style. Still, novels and short stories can be quite different, as can different characters by the same author! So we’ll see.

We’ll see, anyway! And now it’s time to get back to the books I got in London. We’re now onto the Forbidden Planet section of the “report”! First up, the SF/F. I’d heard of a couple of these from other bloggers, or seen them around for ages (like Wooing the Witch Queen), but a couple were more random choices, like The Palace Near the Wind.

I definitely tried to let myself just browse pretty freely and go with whatever jumped out, without looking it up too much or hesitating. Sometimes the unexpected will jump out at you that way… but honestly the selection at Forbidden Planet was pretty overwhelming and I mostly found myself gravitating to titles I recognised from somewhere, ahaha.

And now onto the danmei, the very last section to explore. Most of the danmei is technically also SF/F, but they also fit together well:

The sharp-eyed and strong of memory will remember that I’ve been hankering after The Wife Comes First and After the Disabled God of War Became My Concubine for a while, so I’m curious to get stuck into them.

If you’re curious about the indie bookshops I visited, the books I got there are in part one of my London trip STS report, while part two has the non-fiction books I found at Waterstones Piccadilly (the biggest bookshop in Europe). I definitely had myself a good time for my graduation treat, ahaha, but how often does one get a master’s degree?

(Well, for me it’s happened twice, admittedly. Shush and don’t ruin my excuse.)

Posts from this week

First up, the reviews:

Fantasy: Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint (light novel), vol 2, by singNsong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: Breath of the Dragon, by Shannon Lee & Fonda Lee (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
History/poetry: Part of a Story that Started Before Me, ed. George the Poet (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Mystery: Murder Like Clockwork, by Nicola Whyte (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Science: The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs, by Riley Black (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy/romance manhwa: Tied to You, vol 3, by WHAT & Chelliace (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

And quite a few other posts!

It’s been nice to get out and about doing more discussion posts, lately!

What I’m reading

This week still involved less reading than I would’ve liked, since I didn’t settle down to it very well… but I did still have some fun reads. Let’s have a peek at what this week and what might be coming up for review on my blog (sooner or later, depending on the genre — Murder Like Clockwork’s review is already up because I haven’t read a lot of crime fiction lately!):

A very small number read for me, but oh well. Maybe this weekend? Or maybe not! Whatever’s fine, really — I don’t want to force myself.

As for this weekend, I’m not sure what I’ll read exactly, but I’d like to get further into Finn Longman’s The Wolf and His King, and I also started reading Jess Kidd’s The Murder at Gulls Nest since it’s due back at the library. Ditto There is No Antimimetics Division. So maybe those!

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: Casting in Adaptations

Posted April 10, 2026 by Nicky in General / 7 Comments

This week’s theme is about casting in (movie?) adaptations of books:

Casting in book-to-film adaptations is always a big topic, and recently, the Wuthering Heights movie starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi has been the source of a lot of controversy. Other 2026 high-profile adaptations include Project Hail Mary, out March 20th, and the new Hunger Games movie, set to release in the fall, both for which the casting has been received more positively. What is most important to you with casting for book-to-film adaptations? Is the perfect hair color, or right height or eyes always a must, or is personality more important? When are book-accurate looks in casting most important? What are your favorite—and least favorite—book-to-film adaptations when it comes to casting?

I must admit I don’t have a lot of skin in the game (again) because I don’t really watch movies very often — nor TV, to be fair. I have surprisingly seen Knives Out and Glass Onion, because I got curious enough about the classic mystery type setups they had going on, but otherwise I’m hard pressed to name anything particularly recent that I’ve seen. I still name Pacific Rim as a recent-ish movie I’ve seen and, uh, well…

It also doesn’t help that I don’t have a visual imagination at all: I’m completely aphantasic, right on the “5” end of the apple test scale, so I don’t really imagine characters in the way described. Instead I get more of a sense of them: you know how birdwatchers get the “jizz” of a bird? Something like that, I think.

I do love the old BBC adaptations of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, so let’s turn to those for an idea of what I think about casting. The main players here are Ian Carmichael (in the black-and-white era) and Edward Petherbridge (in 1987) — I don’t know of any other adaptations, and I don’t know if I want to, because between them Carmichael and Petherbridge set a pretty high bar. Neither of them is quite the right physical type, but they each manage to capture different aspects of Peter’s manner perfectly. I can see Peter right away when I look at Petherbridge, but for Carmichael it takes seeing him in motion and hearing his voice.

The same is pretty much true of the way they speak, to be fair, but reversed: Carmichael needs only speak and immediately he sounds like Peter, while for Petherbridge it’s more the combination… But really, both of them are wonderful Lord Peters, and I delight in their performances.

Ian Carmichael also voices Lord Peter in the BBC radio adaptations, and they’re really good. The BBC often hits it out of the park on radio adaptations, or they did a few decades ago: The Lord of the Rings had a glorious adaptation, and even Andy Serkis (who did a great job as Gollum) can’t quite dislodge my conviction that the radio adaptation’s Gollum is the Gollum. On the other hand, the radio adaptation voice of Aragorn strikes me as wrong every time, though I do get into it as the adaptation rolls along. When it comes to the movie, by contrast, Viggo Mortensen was instantly Aragorn to me: manner, voice, clothes, the way he held himself… Perfect.

(That said, I was disappointed by the movie version of Faramir and never really reconciled with that portrayal, particularly with the changes made to the character for the sake of screen adaptation. Something too “soft” about him, and no, I can’t explain that statement any further.)

There are also times when I’m very sceptical of casting, like casting David Tennant as Crowley and Michael Sheen as Aziraphale in the Good Omens series, but makeup, costuming and pure skill from the actors make it fit like they were perfect all along. I’ve heard the same about the adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot, where Alexander Skarsgård has been able to win over people who were deeply sceptical; I’m definitely curious what I’ll think when I get round to it, if I ever do.

(NB: I’m aware of the allegations against Neil Gaiman. Good Omens was also Terry Pratchett’s — some say the majority of it was Terry Pratchett’s — and I think the TV show was also so much more than Gaiman, though I acknowledge his heavy involvement. I’m not sure if I’ll watch the remainder or rewatch the first two series, and at the moment I don’t expect to. All the same, David Tennant’s Crowley was perfect to me, and I don’t want Gaiman’s misdeeds to take that achievement away from Tennant. Still, I think making this acknowledgement is important.)

All in all, I think I can forgive a lot of infidelity to details like hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, etc, as long as the actors can capture something fundamental about the character. Some can do both, like Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn or Essie Davis as Phryne Fisher, while some can carry the day with voice and mannerisms like Ian Carmichael as Peter Wimsey.

Sorry, though, David Wenham. You just aren’t Faramir. I’m sure you’re perfectly nice, but you’re not Faramir.

Tags: books, discussion

WWW Wednesday

Posted April 8, 2026 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

This post is being scheduled instead of published immediately, as an experiment! A while ago, Jetpack stopped sending emails when I scheduled posts, despite working fine when I manually published them. Let’s find out if that’s still the case or if they’ve fixed their bug…

What have you recently finished reading?

Kimberly Campanello’s An Interesting Detail, a collection of prose-poems which drove me up the wall. Each one is a handful of scattered imagery linked by non-sequiturs, and I hated finding it perfectly readable and at the same time totally incomprehensible.

Before that, it was Nicola Whyte’s Murder Like Clockwork, which I found serviceable but not compelling. My review is already up here.

What are you currently reading?

I just started qntm’s There is No Antimemetics Division, which I requested from the library more or less on a whim and started today on even more of a whim. I find the idea mindboggling and possibly like it’s going to trigger existential dread, and I’m very curious how it plays out.

I have quite a lot of other books on the go, but the other thing I’m most actively reading is Stephanie Boonstra and Campbell Price’s Ancient Egypt in 50 Discoveries, which I got at the Petrie Museum and is scratching my itch for histories that are X in Y objects.

I also very recently started Gareth Russell’s Queen James, but I’m not far into it.

What will you be reading next?

Nobody knows, particularly not me. I have a bunch of books on the go already, so I’ll probably focus on some of that, like reading more of Queen James. My DoubleSpin choice for the Litsy BookSpin challenge is S.L. Huang’s The Water Outlaws, though, so perhaps that?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Recent Five-Star Reads

Posted April 7, 2026 by Nicky in General / 18 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday post is about places on your bucket list, but since I don’t have a bucket list and I read books heavy on the fantasy or that skip around the world a bunch… I thought I’d go rogue. I don’t rate a lot of books five-stars (“loved it”, in the scale I use) — but the books that make the cut deserve to be talked about more, I’d say!

So let’s dig in! Some of these don’t have reviews up yet, but those that do, I’ll link my review. I’ll go backwards through time, starting with the most recent. 2026 has started out pretty well, with five out of the ninety-seven books I’ve read this year so far gaining five whole stars!

Ramesses the Great, by Toby Wilkinson. (Finished 30th March 2026.)
I tore through this one! It helps that Ramesses is a very compelling figure, but Wilkinson presents his evidence well and without speculating too much on stuff we can’t really know for sure about Ramesses II’s inner thoughts, he gives us a good idea of the man all the same. Not always likeable, inasfar as we can make that judgement from this distance of time and from a different culture, but certainly fascinating.
Blue Horses and Felicity, by Mary Oliver. (Finished 26th March 2026.)
It’s cheating a little to bundle these together, but I did read them at the same time! These two poetry collections are both lovely: I find Oliver’s poetry really accessible to read, without being too simplistic.
The Library of Ancient Wisdom, by Selena Wisnom. (Finished 28th February 2026.)
I liked this one a lot: I’ve read a couple of other books on ancient Mesopotamia, but don’t feel like I have the same grasp of it as I do ancient Egypt. This gave me some of that, through focus on the library of Ashurbanipal. It’s necessarily limited and doesn’t really touch on the lives of common people, but it was still pretty interesting.
A History of England in 25 Poems, by Catherine Clarke. (Finished 9th February 2026.)
I thought this one was great: the choice of poems sometimes surprised me, but was always illuminating, and Clarke has a pretty good grasp of the problems between England and the other countries it shares an island with. There were things I’d have liked to see more of, but I was still really happy with this one.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail — The Art of Succession -Relics of Heritage-. (Finished 25th December 2025.)
I suppose I could skip this one as it sort of feels like it doesn’t count as a book read, but on the other hand I find the game’s artbooks really interesting, because they give you a glimpse at the original designs of familiar bosses, characters and in-world assets. It might be a quick read (since it’s almost all images), but a picture’s worth a thousand words and all that.
Strangers and Intimates, by Tiffany Jenkins. (Finished 13th November 2025.)
This one actually stuck with me less than I’d expected given the high rating, but it did raise interesting questions for me about why the value people place on privacy changes, and the differences between generations. There were some fascinating reflections on the scandal with Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and how that has changed politics.
You Should Be So Lucky, by Cat Sebastian. (Finished 28th September 2025.)
This is a lovely romance, with some grumpy/sunshine dynamics, but it’s more than just a list of tropes. There’s a lot of healing from grief, and a lot of hope (even in times that weren’t so great for queer people). Also, there’s a dog!
Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, by Nghi Vo. (Finished 2nd and 5th June 2025.)
These were rereads, so perhaps it’s no surprise that they got such a high rating! They’re the first two books in the Singing Hills series, at least in publication order — I do think they’re also a good place to start in getting to learn about where Chih is from and what they do, and they have my favourite formats for the series too, being focused mostly on stories told to Chih. Some of the later books are more about Chih themself, which is also fun, but I like these best.
Hemlock & Silver, by T. Kingfisher. (Finished 25th May 2025.)
2025 and 2026 have been the years of T. Kingfisher for me, it seems. This one just grabbed me at the right time, I think, and I thought the ideas and the way of retelling the Snow White and Rose Red story were just so fun. Also the mirror monsters were a work of horrible genius.
Cold Night Lullaby, by Colin Mackay. (Finished 22nd May 2025.)
This was another reread. I’m not sure I ever expected to reread this one, because Mackay went through horrors and he certainly paints them vividly in his poetry, but… something made me feel like it was the right time to read it. It’s a poetic working-through of the things he witnessed in Bosnia when he went there as an aid worker — including the mutilation and murder of the woman he loved.

Sorry for going off-piste, but I look forward to seeing everyone else’s TTT posts this week! Maybe you’ll inspire me to create a bucket list.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Definitions

Posted April 6, 2026 by Nicky in General / 5 Comments

Aaand somehow it’s Monday again already, meaning Fantasy With Friends discussion time (prompts hosted at Pages Unbound). This week’s theme is about the definition of the genre:

How do you define “fantasy” as a genre?

The simplest answer I can think of is “a story that somehow pushes outside of our reality, in a way not intended to be explained by science” (which would put it more in the realm of science fiction). I think the conventional definition is usually that fantasy includes magic or supernatural elements, but I think that excludes some stories set in an alternative world that may not have magic, but definitely aren’t our world and read to me as fantasy (like Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed).

I was actually for a long time a member of an online book group called The Alternative Worlds: our interests were mostly sci-fi and fantasy, but alternate history (like Jo Walton’s Farthing) also fell into that, and I think that widened my definitions and shaped what I wanted from genre fiction a lot: alternative worlds, alternative ways of being, alternative ways things might have happened. For quite a while, I found the term “speculative fiction” more descriptive of what I’m interested in.

There are a lot of different subgenres of fantasy where different elements are more or less important, but for me being set in a world that doesn’t work quite like our own is what does it (though I wouldn’t argue that Farthing is fantasy in the traditional sense). That might mean adding magic to our world in hidden corners (like Caitlin Rozakis’ The Grimoire Grammar School Parent Teacher Association), by adding it into our world where it didn’t exist before (like Chugong’s Solo Leveling or singNsong’s Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint), or by creating whole new worlds with different histories and belief systems (like Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor or Victoria Goddard’s The Hands of the Emperor).

Inevitably the definition isn’t perfect and can get a bit porous: is horror fantasy? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Buuut I think that’s a feature, not a bug: we needn’t get too rigid in our definitions, less we miss out on stuff that’s new and fun, or stuff that we’d love that’s just outside our clearly defined box. Humans like to define things very narrowly and it’s pretty much always more complicated than that, and things might be better if we could be better (as individuals and as a society) at noticing that putting things into clearly defined and separated boxes is only useful up to a point.

Tags: books, discussions, Fantasy With Friends