Category: General

June Reading Wrap-Up

Posted July 3, 2026 by Nicky in General / 12 Comments

July’s here, so it’s time for a look back at June! Which was a bit of a weird month, but I seem to have said that last month too…

June in general:

Mostly the thing that sticks out about June this year was how hot it was, in the UK. I’ve had cause to be very glad that we have a couple of portable air conditioners, and even our bunnies ended up having to chill out in an air conditioned room… We rush ordered a pen so they could hang out in comfort, given the rooms with the portable air conditioners aren’t at all bunny-proofed.

It isn’t a huge amount of space, but it worked okay as a place for them to stay cooler during the hottest parts of the day, and they got comfy in it after a while!

I didn’t work on my bookcase blanket a lot during the heatwave, but I did make quite a bit of progress this month all the same, completing the second “shelf”. In the first shelf I stuck quite close to the pattern, but in the second I’ve started modifying the pattern now that I’ve learned the principles, to keep things looking a bit more varied (otherwise I’d be repeating the same book patterns a lot). Here’s a peek at the progress, with a book (of course) for scale!

Gaming-wise, I tore through the puzzles in the game inbento, which was on a pretty steep sale at the time and still is. It wasn’t super tricky, so it didn’t take me that long, but the simple-and-cute story and clever puzzles kept me busy a while. It was nice to play for a short break from other tasks, since you can just do a level or two at a time.

Other than that, my wife and I finished up PowerWash Simulator and PowerWash Simulator 2 (until the new DLC comes out in July!), and finally went back and finished everything in It Takes Two (a game with fun mechanics but a story we don’t recommend), so we started on Flock Around, which is a fairly chill bird-watching co-op game. We haven’t played a ton of it yet, but there was a lot of excited running to each other to find new birds and such.

I finished the month playing a lot of DREDGE, which is a game themed around fishing and eldritch horrors. I confess to some very loud surprised yelps at times when something came after my poor little boat. I have a lot still to do in this game, but I think I’m close to finished with the main story.

Reading stats:

Right, let’s get to the meat of things, ahaha. First up, my StoryGraph graphics for last month!

Total books read: 25
Total pages read: 5,652
Rereads: 0
ARCs: 1
Series finished/up to date: 2
Books owned pre-2026: 2
Books owned from 2026: 13
Borrowed books: 10

Fiction: 14
Non-fiction: 7
Poetry: 4
Comics, manga, manhwa, etc: 2

Slightly fewer books again, but almost the same number of pages as last month — if I’d read at the same pace I was doing at the end of the month, I’d have read a lot more books in total, I think, and it looks like I was reading longer books! So I was pretty happy with that. I changed up my reading habits a bit, trying to read a bit closer to how I used to before I was thinking in terms of how many books I finish a year and all of that… and it seems to be working well.

(Which, if you’re curious and hadn’t seem me talk about it already, is basically that I have 3-4 books “active” at once, and I rotate through them reading a chapter or two at a time. There’s no “rule” about it — I can sit and mainline an entire book if I want! But if I get restless, the next book is there to grab my attention again.)

Progress on reading goals:

Overall total books: 171/400 (30 books behind)
Overall pages read: 39,309/100,000 (10,828 pages behind)
Books read from backlog: 30/100 (20 books behind)
Books owned since 2026 and not yet started: 20/20

20 Books of Summer: 6/20 (0/5 bonus)

As you see, I’m slipping ever further behind on my goals. If I don’t recover things by the end of July, I’ll probably just adjust the targets. Although I set high targets, part of it is just having a good sense for how much I’m reading relative to my “normal”. If I’m struggling to read as much, that usually means something’s wrong, and that’s a very good signal for me to have… but it doesn’t stop me adjusting my goals if it feels crappy.

However, I’m off to a good start with my 20 Books of Summer list! I picked 20 specific books to finish and 5 potential bonus books just in case I wanted to swap some in, and so far I’ve finished six of my original picks: two non-fiction, two books that were in-progress that I’d stalled on, and two danmei.

Blogging stats:

Views: 13.2k
Visitors: 12.4k
Likes: 332
Comments: 325
Reviews: 22
Other posts: 21

Down on pretty much all metrics! Including number of reviews, which is probably part of it.

Most viewed posts:

Review – Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 6 (173 views)
Review – Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 8 (159 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: British Library Crime Classics (63 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Wishes (47 views)
Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Can’t Believe I’ve Never Read (45 views)

My own favourite posts:

Stuff I loved from elsewhere:

From Books, Bones & Buffy: THE CHILDREN By Melissa Albert – Review, by Tammy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: Mortedant’s Peril by RJ Barker, by Mogsy
From The Bibliosanctum: Book Review: The Arcane Arts by S.D. Coverly, by Mogsy
From Becky’s Book Blog: Headlights by C.J. Leede – ARC Review!, by Becky
From Books, Bones & Buffy: HEADLIGHTS by C.J. Leede – Review, by Tammy
From Becky’s Book Blog: These Immortal Truths by Rachelle Raeta – ARC Review!, by Becky
From Books, Bones & Buffy: THE SIXTH NIK by Daniel Kraus, by Tammy
From Foxes and Fairy Tales: ARC Review: The Moonsingers, by Louise
From Lola’s Reviews: Review: Field Guide for the Formerly Villainous by Autumn K. England, by Lola

Once more, I’d saved a lot of really good and interesting reviews (not all positive, or for books I’d necessarily be interested in!) so it was really hard to whittle it down to a reasonable number… but I’ve managed!

I really need to start drafting these posts earlier in the month, though, so I don’t have to spend nearly two hours getting it all organised, ahaha.

Tags: books, monthly wrapup

WWW Wednesday

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

Technically it’s now Thursday, but pfft, doesn’t count as a new day until I’ve slept, right?!

What have you recently finished reading?

Cassandra Khaw’s Find Me Where It Ends, which I’m going to find difficult to review and talk about because it’s profoundly a book I don’t think it was a good idea for me to read. It’s about suicide, and while there’s an amount of metaphor going on with the black dog that shows up to let the women of Antigone’s family know they’re going to die, and the fact that she welcomes it into her home… it’s also very much not a metaphor, and suicide is woven through the whole book. Read with care if you have any mental health issues — if I thought too hard about this one I know I’d end up feeling very, very anxious, and those who struggle with low mood and suicidal ideation might struggle as well.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve actually finished most of the books I was rotating through, and am about to figure out the next batch to be on deck. The only one I didn’t finish yet that I’ve got a decent way into is Charlotte Booth’s Voices of the Nile. A lot of the info is familiar to me, but then there are titbits that aren’t, e.g. the discussion of same-sex relationships in ancient Egypt and the theories around the tomb of Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum.

I suspect that the other in-progress books I’m going to resume are Stephanie Burgis’ Wooing the Witch Queen, which I anticipate being fun but maybe a bit agonising for me with the mistaken identity thing and waiting for that to be found out, and Carwyn Graves’ Welsh Food Stories. I’m very curious about the latter, since I only really know bara brith (sort of like fruitcake), picau ar y maen (Welsh cakes) and cawl (soup).

What will you be reading next?

Probably volume three of Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, which just came out and is even now winging its way to me, and/or volume two of Lv He Qian Ye’s The Wife Comes First. I’m eager about both. There’s also an outside chance I’ll read volume three of Priest’s Guardian, which I also just got and completes that series.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2026

Posted June 30, 2026 by Nicky in General / 20 Comments

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is all about upcoming titles, and I must confess, as always I’m not very up on this, aside from the ARCs I get offered by Orbit or happen to see on Netgalley. Honestly, how do you all keep up?!

Still, I did some research and poked around, and checked my wishlist too for books I previously noted wanting, and thus found some books I’m interested in!

Mistakenly Saving the Villain, vol 3, by Feng Yu Nie.
This is supposed to be out today according to Seven Seas, making it technically ineligible for the list. However bookshop.org say it’s out tomorrow, so it counts. I just devoured volume two a couple weeks ago, and I’m very eager to continue the story: Yue Wuhuan is pretty unhinged, but Song Qingshi is pretty fascinated by him too, and weird and over-intense though the relationship might be, I’m very curious about how they end up and what the system intends for Song Qingshi in the wake of his choosing the wrong character to rescue. The fourth volume is also due out in the latter half of the year, hitting shelves in October.
The Feywild Job, by C.L. Polk.
Technically this seems to come out today as well, but I’m highlighting it because I thought it was next month, and no one can stop me, mwahaha. I’ve really enjoyed Polk’s books in the past, and this heist story sounds like a lot of fun. I like the cover, too!
The Reimagining of Thornwood House, by Jaleigh Johnson.
I don’t know a lot about this, but the idea of a house getting grumpy and walking off and needing to be coaxed back sounds like a lot of fun. It comes out 2nd July, so I guess I don’t have long to wait!
An Expert Witness, by Sue Black.
I only just learned about this one, but I’m excited! I’ve really enjoyed Sue Black’s previous works, because she pairs technical detail with a resolve never to lose sight of respect and humanity when handling the dead. It’s coming out on 2nd July.
The Wife Comes First, vol 3, by Lv Ye Qian He.
I haven’t read the second volume yet, so there’s just a chance there’ll be a dealbreaker there… but I flew through the first volume despite its flaws, and I imagine I’ll be keen to find out how all the court intrigue comes to a head in the third, by the time it comes out. I have volume two on my ‘on deck’ pile, after all! I love Jing Shao and his realisation that Mu Hanzhang was loyal to him to the end, and the way he’s seizing his chance to do better. This one’s coming out on 21st July.
Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 8, by Itaru Kinoshita.
I love this manga so much, it’s just the perfect palate cleanser for anything. My reviews have been going up recently, actually, but I’ve been waiting since just before Christmas when I originally devoured the first seven volumes (I have a huge backlog of graphic novel/manga reviews that I trickle out to avoid overwhelming the blog with those). I love that it’s basically a story about a zoo, only the animals are dinosaurs. I also really enjoy the fact that it has a dinosaur consultant and adds little fact files by him. This one’s due out 28th July, and I think I’ll preorder it on Kobo!
A Trade of Blood, by Robert Jackson Bennett.
This is the third book of the Shadow of the Leviathan series which I’ve been enjoying a lot. I actually have the ARC and need to get back to it, but I have to read it on my other device because (sigh) it couldn’t be sent to Kobo because it’s a PDF. I couldn’t resist requesting it anyway, though, and I’m so glad I’ve been able to dig in. The mystery sounds intriguing, and I imagine we’ll get more details toward a clearer picture of the world/the Empire… It’s due out in August.
Our Cut of Salt, by Deena Helm.
This one is a bit out of my comfort zone, coming out from Tor Nightfire on 22nd September. It’s a horror story, with three generations of a Palestinian family linked with a home in Haifa. It might actually be one that’s more for my wife, but something about it has kinda grabbed me. Maybe the setting? Anyway, I think I’ll be giving it a try!
The Scarlet Ball, by Nghi Vo.
I love Nghi Vo’s work, so I’m planning to read this even without knowing much about it. The set up (now I’ve actually read the blurb) sounds intriguing, too: the main character can literally take the face of a missing debutante to play her part — in exchange for what? How does that all work out? Well, unless I request the ARC I’ll have to wait until 6th October to find out.
As You Wake, Break the Shell, by Becky Chambers.
I didn’t know this was coming out but I’m definitely excited: I’ve enjoyed Chambers’ work so much in the past. I’m intrigued by the living ship/pilot link, too, as well as Chambers’ normal ability to make me care about the characters and relationships. It’s not due until 22nd October… big pout.

Excited to see what others highlight today! My wishlist is waiting for new finds.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Reading Order

Posted June 29, 2026 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

A new week, and a new Fantasy with Friends prompt! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about series reading order:

When reading a favorite fantasy series, which reading order would you recommend? For instance, when reading Narnia, do you think people should go by publication order or by chronological order? Or, if you like to recommend Tolkien, do you think readers should start with LotR or The Hobbit? Feel free to discuss any favorite fantasy series you have!

It feels like this question isn’t super relevant to my current faves, buuuut the prompt does help!

C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia: personally, I always go with chronological order, starting with The Magician’s Nephew and placing The Horse and His Boy immediately after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (since they overlap). I like starting at the beginning, and I feel like it gives you a solid footing for the following books. Still, there are solid reasons to go by publication order, and that’s the information you have available: if you read The Magician’s Nephew first, you’ll know more than the characters about the world of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I personally think it works both ways, and have always read it that way, but… I can see the strengths of the other way too.
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: definitely read The Hobbit first. It has important setup for The Lord of the Rings, and it’s a better transition one into the other if you start with it and then let Tolkien bridge you into the higher fantasy tone of The Lord of the Rings: you can track the tone changing from the first chapter into the flight to Rivendell. The other direction would be a really weird transition, and anyway you’d have missed the introduction of the Ring and Gollum. You still have to be prepared for the fact that the audience is a little different between the two books and that the tonal shift is coming, mind you: I’m also open to the two books just being for different audiences, and only reading one or the other (though personally I love the whole).
Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising: I rarely ever recommend doing this, but if you’re coming to it for the first time as an adult and you don’t have much patience with children’s literature, skip Over Sea, Under Stone. At least on your first read. I do think it has a great deal of merit and adds to the lore, but The Dark is Rising introduces the stakes a lot better and is less from a child’s point of view: the protagonist of The Dark is Rising is a human child as the book starts… but as he discovers, he’s also an Old One, and that changes his perspective a lot compared to the kids in Over Sea, Under Stone, who are just human. That said, I would suggest reading Over Sea, Under Stone before Greenwitch, if you do get into The Dark is Rising, because you need to know Simon, Jane and Barney and their relationship with Merriman before you can plunge into that.

As a kid, I’d have always said chronological order for anything, but I think publication order has a lot to be said for it because that order is pretty sure to give you the information you need in the order you need it… and I think authors’ recommended reading orders can be useful here too.

Mostly, I prefer it to be unambiguous: gimme series numbering and a recommended reading order next to the title page, please!

Tags: discussion, Fantasy with Friends

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 27, 2026 by Nicky in General / 26 Comments

Happy weekend! Here’s hoping the forecast spoke true and we’ll be getting some cooler weather here, because the heat is incredible. It is definitely too bloody hot (a song which is stuck in my cranium something fierce).

Books acquired this week

I wasn’t intending to get any books this week, but I definitely wasn’t going to say no when my wife had the opportunity to grab me volume two of The Wife Comes First, and I’d been looking for volume three of Guardian for a long time and panicking about the fact that almost nowhere had it…

I really want to get round to the next volume of The Wife Comes First sooner or later… and honestly I should start on Guardian before long, before I forget all the details of the world! The mythology is pretty complex, after all.

Posts from this week

As ever, there have been a lot of posts this week, so I’ll do a bit of a round-up. First, the reviews!

Graphic novel: Lady-Bird, by Fabrice Sapolsky and Dawn J. Starr (1/5 stars, “didn’t like it”)
Fantasy: Solo Leveling (light novel), vol 8, by Chugong (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Sci-fi/fantasy/romance: Clean Sweep, by Ilona Andrews (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Non-fiction: 20th Century Fashion in Detail, by Claire Wilcox and Valerie D. Mendes (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Poetry: Parallax, by Sinéad Morrissey (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Crime: The Last Escape, by E.C.R. Lorac (3/5 stars, “liked it”)

As ever, those don’t necessarily reflect this week’s reading, since I hold back reviews to try to get a diverse range over time.

Before we get into what I’ve been reading this week, here are the other posts I’ve made this week:

It’s been a lot for such a horribly hot week weather-wise! Unusually for people in the UK, my wife and I have a couple of portable A/C units, which have been lifesavers for us and the rabbits.

What I’m reading

I think last week I’d already fallen into my old habit of swapping between books after reading only a chapter or two, and rotating through that way. I’ve mostly kept that up this week, and I still think it’s working well for the way I’m feeling lately and is maybe a bit more natural to me than focusing on finishing a given book — unless the mood takes me, which it did a couple of times this week.

So without further ado, here are the books I finished reading this week:

I’m honestly impressed I finished everything, given general busyness and the heat — but my reading time was quite high this week, actually! Helped by one late night with a toothache after dental work (which fortunately settled down and was just because it was new, this time) where I couldn’t resist starting a new-to-me E.C.R. Lorac…

Anyway, this weekend I’m reading volume three of Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, have returned to Rachel Reid’s Game Changer, am knee-deep in Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile, and have started on Sophia Smith Galer’s How to Kill a Language. I’ll probably stick to those, though I have earmarked some library books that I really need to get round to, so it’s possible I’ll start on one of those.

Hope everyone has a good weekend — and to those in areas where it’s been really astoundingly hot, hope you’re doing alright and that the hot weather has ended or will end soon. Hang in there!

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

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 24, 2026 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Linking up with Taking on a World of Words again!

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Jean-Yves Mollier’s A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop, which was quite focused on the history of French bookselling — not something I really know a lot about, and though the trends are different to those in the UK that I’m (slightly) more familiar with, there was a lot of new information. A bit dry, but overall interesting!

What are you currently reading?

I’m rotating through several books at once, which is working really well for me. Most prominent in my mind at the moment are A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World, singNsong’s Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint vol 3, and E.C.R. Lorac’s The Last Escape. I’m enjoying all three. The chapter on Gay’s the Word discussing the police raids, and the following chapter on the vital role queer bookshops played in giving people information about AIDs really choked me up.

As for Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, I’m not far into the volume, but it’s fun to remember that it’s narrated by Dokja and does give a bit more of an insight into what he’s thinking than the manhwa.

Finally, I started The Last Escape on a bit of a whim. It’s actually chronologically the last book about Inspector Macdonald, but so far it doesn’t feel like it (even if he’s planning for his retirement). It’s very much of a piece with the other books set in Lunesdale, though.

What will you be reading next?

Probably The Wife Comes First vol 2, because my wife kindly grabbed that for me the very day after I finished the first volume, and I’m definitely enjoying it.

Other than that, I’m not sure: probably something from my 20 Books of Summer list, and/or a return to something I’ve had started for a while.

But, as ever… it depends on my whim.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Summer TBR

Posted June 23, 2026 by Nicky in General / 24 Comments

I am late to post today because I had a dentist appointment today (big sadness, but at least I should have a clean bill of dental health again), so I’ll make this quick! I recently posted my 20 Books of Summer list, but there are some others I’d love to get to…

The first five are non-fiction, and the second lot fiction!

It’s a bit of a random selection, but there’s a bunch of library books and recent purchases here, so I really ought to make time!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Fantasy with Friends: Magical Libraries

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

Monday again! And a new Fantasy with Friends post: the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about libraries in fantasy:

Fantasy books often feature magical libraries that have anything from floating platforms to books with characters that come to life. What are a few of your favorite fantastic libraries?

I’m quite a fan of the library in Genevieve Cogman’s series that starts with the book The Invisible Library. It’s less about the magic itself being magical, though, and the sheer variety it offers: books from all kinds of worlds, both high magic and high sci-fi, including variants of the same stories unique to some of the worlds.

I never actually managed to finish it (got distracted, even though I was enjoying it, so it ended up back on my TBR), but I’m also a fan of the idea of The Library of the Unwritten, where books unfinished by their authors end up in a library after their death.

I don’t remember a lot about the library in Garth Nix’s Lirael, but it was one of the reasons I really enjoyed the start of that book, as Lirael learned to take care of the library!

More generally, I think my favourite magical libraries are not so much full of magical conveniences, but crammed full of books on all kinds of topics, with fascinating and mysterious titles. A big space to explore, full of books of all kinds, some of which may be magical, but mostly just numerous. Several times in my life I’ve picked a local library clean of the books that interest me, so huge libraries that seem practically unlimited call to me.

Tags: discussion, Fantasy with Friends, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted June 20, 2026 by Nicky in General / 32 Comments

Happy weekend! I’ve been in a reading mood for the last couple of days, so I’m very much looking forward to a lazy day.

Books acquired this week

This week’s been a busy one! My wife and I went to Manchester last weekend to go to the art gallery (to see their WORN: the life within clothes exhibition) and, let’s be real, get some books. I was hoping I’d pick some up at Queer Lit, but I confess to having found the (lack of) organisation of the shelves a bit too annoying, so I didn’t manage to get anything at an indie, despite Independent Bookshop Week.

Still, I did find myself some books, and absolutely no one is surprised by that.

So first up, the fiction! I’m also including one book I got via this week’s Top Ten Tuesday wishlist sharing, kindly sent me by Emma from Words and Peace, which made me smile.

I love both Ilona Andrews and Cat Sebastian, so I’d been looking out for those, and I’ve been meaning to try the graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea for a while, so that was a nice find too.

I also picked up a little more poetry, since I’ve enjoyed Mary Oliver’s work recently:

I’ve read both of them already — not my favourites among her collections, but there’s always something lovely about her work.

Finally, I got some non-fiction, some of which I’d been anticipating for a while:

Overall a nice little haul, and I’ve started most of them already! Impulse buys turning into impulse reads has turned out to be a very good thing for my reading mood at the moment.

Posts from this week

Right! As ever, I’ve done a fair few posts this week, so let’s do a bit of a roundup. Reviews first:

Fantasy: Solo Leveling light novel vol 7, by Chugong (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Crime short stories: Puzzles of the Parish, ed. Martin Edwards (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
History: Queer Georgians, by Anthony Delaney (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Poetry: In the Hollow of the Wave, by Nina Mingya Powles (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Manga: Dinosaur Sanctuary, vol 5, by Itaru Kinoshita (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

As ever, most of those aren’t very recent reads, because even with my slower reading lately, I’ve got a huge backlog of reviews written but not yet posted… I’ll talk about what I’ve been reading this week below!

And now the other posts!

I’m getting off to a good start with 20 Books of Summer, too, with two of my chosen books finished!

What I’m reading

I’ve been reading a lot more this week, which is a relief! I’ve been reading a few books in tandem, as usual, but very actively, so I expect I’ll finish a bunch of them this week. Thinking about it, that’s how I used to read all the time — reading a chapter of one book and then swapping to another! All this focus on finishing books, whether for ARCs or just because I feel like I “ought” to for my stats or whatever, has maybe not been serving me super well at the moment. I think the variety is helping my attention span.

Anyway, first let’s talk about the books I did finish this week:

As you can see, it’s a bit more like my usual reading! I completely mainlined The Wife Comes First vol 1, and my wife is probably going to venture out and snag me volume 2 today, since it grabbed me.

The four books I’m currently rotating through most actively are Harry Tanner’s The Queer Thing about Sin, Feng Yu Nie’s Mistakenly Saving the Villain, A.J. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World and Jean-Yves Mollier’s A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop, and I’m kinda hoping I’ll finish all four of those this weekend. When I finish one of the non-fiction books, I’ll probably slot Charlotte Booth’s Lost Voices of the Nile into the rotation, while I think Robert Jackson Bennett’s A Trade in Blood might be next up in fiction…

I do also want to read a couple of poetry collections so the library can have them back, so I might fit them in somewhere, too. But it’ll depend on my whim in the moment: I’ve only just got back my urge to read after a few weeks of very little reading, I’m not going to spoil it now!

I hope everyone else has a lovely/restful/enjoyable weekend planned. ♡

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

WWW Wednesday

Posted June 17, 2026 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

Linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I finished was Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters, which was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I found the world-building a bit goofy: these people literally eat books, like… chew and swallow them. And that transmits the information into their brains somehow? But someone within the story refuses to call that magic, and other stuff frames it as biological? Yeah… no. That’s not how any of that works. If it’d just called it magic, I’d have got along with it a lot better — but then other stuff wouldn’t have worked so well.

On the other hand, the discussion of monstrousness and motherly love and family, all of that was pretty powerful and well done.

What are you currently reading?

I’ve started even more books at once, because it sparked joy in the moment, so I’ll mostly highlight those! I started two queer books and one about booksellers, and the three of them are additive in interesting ways: A.K. West’s How Queer Bookshops Changed the World, Jean-Yves Mollier’s A History of Booksellers and the Bookshop, and Harry Tanner’s The Queer Thing About Sin. The latter has a premise I’m very curious about, that acceptance of queer relationships is stronger when there’s higher levels of economic and political equality; I hope Tanner carries it through the book and reflects on it more, because I’d like to see more evidence than just ancient Greek city-states.

I also started on volume one of Lv Ye Qian He’s The Wife Comes First, which is leaning into court intrigue type stuff that I’m very curious about. Jing Shao definitely didn’t deserve Mu Hanzhang’s loyalty in his past life, and I’m wondering whether it’ll ever show us why Mu Hanzhang was so loyal. Either way, I’m enjoying Jing Shao’s eagerness to please Mu Hanzhang now that he understands how amazing he is.

What will you read next?

I got a couple of poetry collections by Mary Oliver at the weekend, and Fred Fordham’s graphic novel adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea, so those are high on my list! I also need to get round to some of my library books, like Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, because the library wants them back.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday