Category: General

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 18, 2017 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

The three ‘W’s are what are you reading now, what have you recently finished reading, and what are you going to read next, and you can find this week’s post at the host’s blog here if you want to check out other posts.

What are you currently reading?

Most actively (the key words, with the way I stack up a bunch of currently-reading books!), it’s Trouble and Her Friends, by Melissa Scott, and Angel of Death, by Gareth Williams. The former is queer cyberpunk, and I’m having a lot of fun with it — it’s a little slow to unfold, but I read 25% when I should’ve been sleeping, so I’m gonna say it’s hooked me. Angel of Death is fascinating in other ways, of course, because it’s about the history and science of smallpox. I am learning a lot of things I didn’t know about it!

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing was a cultural history of rabies, Rabid, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy. It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, because there was a lot of emphasis on the cultural stuff, like rabies’ relation to vampirism and werewolves. Still, there was some interesting stuff, especially about recent cases who actually recovered from rabies (which is normally considered 100% fatal in humans).

What will you read next?

I started The Gracekeepers, by Kirsty Logan, at the weekend, and I want to pick that back up and finish it. I also want to focus on my Kushiel’s Dart reread. I’m trying not to tempt myself too much beyond that! I’m intrigued by The Gracekeepers; I haven’t read much, so I haven’t got to grips with the setting yet.

What are you reading?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Stacking the Shelves

Posted October 14, 2017 by Nicky in General / 34 Comments

Good morning, folks! I’m finally better from my cough… at least mostly, though if you look at me wrong I might go off into a little coughing fit, alas. I’ve just ordered a bunch of background reading for my course, but it hasn’t all arrived yet, so I only have a small stack of books to share this week: a couple of ARCs and a novella.

Oh, and here’s the obligatory away-from-buns bunny picture:

Photo of my bunnies sat together. — Double Trouble.

Received to review:

I’ve already read Close Encounters with Humankind, which is pretty fascinating; I can’t remember the summary of Valiant Dust, so that one’s going to be a surprise…

Bought:

I’ve been curious about this since N.K. Jemisin mentioned it in her column, so I picked it up with what was left of an Amazon voucher after buying stuff related to my classes.

Read this week:

A bit better week for reading, this week! Here’s hoping I get back into top form soon…

Reviews posted this week:

–The Hammer and the Cross, by Robert Ferguson. A little dry and very detailed; a very good read for someone who’s really interested, though. 4/5 stars
–A Very British Murder, by Lucy Worsley. A fun book covering the evolution of crime fiction in the UK, and people’s love of it. 4/5 stars
–Machiavelli: A Man Misunderstood, by Michael White. Another good biography from White. 4/5 stars
–The Man Who Fell to Earth, by Walter Tevis. I didn’t love this, but the way it ended was perfect — it made so much sense with what we see in reality. Hence, 4/5 stars
–The Bear and the Nightingale, by Katherine Arden. This didn’t quite work for me, and I’m not sure why. I guess it felt rather predictable/typical in some ways. 3/5 stars
–How We Got To Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World, by Steven Johnson. Good points and a pretty entertaining read, but nothing earth-shatteringly surprising. 3/5 stars
–The Lost City of Z, by David Grann. Really, I want the book about the archaeology being done now, rather than about Victorian explorers, but it’s reasonably entertaining all the same. 3/5 stars

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 11, 2017 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

What are you currently reading?

A Sting in the Tale, by Dave Goulson. It’s a non-fiction/pop-science book about bees, and is part of a new project of mine to get less scared of insects by becoming curious about them. It worked for me when it comes to pathogens (starting with David Quammen’s Spillover), so I’m hopeful. So far I’m learning a lot of interesting facts — for instance, bumblebees have smelly feet — and I’m not grossed out or anxious. On the other hand, bees are relatively harmless anyway and aren’t a major fear of mine. I’ve got a book on ants lined up, and that might be more problematic. Ideally, I should find something on spiders…

I’m also reading a few other books, but most actively it’s Kushiel’s Dart, which I finally found the time to pick up again. I forgot how long it takes before Joscelin actually appears!

What have you recently finished reading?

I think the last thing I finished was a reread of Kerry Greenwood’s Away with the Fairies. It’s a blatant homage to Dorothy L. Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, in some ways, and it also features Phryne being terribly daring and heroic in rescuing her lover, Lin Chung, from pirates. These books make for great comfort reading, because you can pretty much be sure everything will be okay, and also I’ve read them before so I know how they turn out. And Phryne is awesome.

(I needed comfort reading because my cough got so bad I pulled muscles in my ribcage. I’m doing better now, before I had to bring out the big guns and reread The Goblin Emperor.)

What will you read next?

I’m going to focus on finishing Abaddon’s Gate, for a start. I also have a stack of library books to read while I’m visiting my parents, including some books in the 300s of the Dewey Decimal System for a Habitica challenge. I can’t remember the titles, but they’re about multiculturalism and immigration, so not my usual thing, but rather topical given the world at present and the political preoccupations of our time.

Other than that, I’m not sure. I might pick up Nine Coaches Waiting, since I’m about due for another scheduled dose of rereading Mary Stewart’s work.

What are you reading at the moment?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Stacking the Shelves

Posted October 7, 2017 by Nicky in General / 22 Comments

Good morning, folks! I’m not quite over the cold yet, since I have a horrible cough that won’t shift, but I’m doing better. And, I ended up with a whole stack of books from London/friends/etc. Woo!

Update on the me:

As you can see below, it still hasn’t been a good reading week. I’m just so tired. I have a few books on the go, but nothing’s sticking very well. Mostly I feel like reading non-fiction, but I’m mindful of the fact that most people are here for my fiction reviews, and don’t even read non-fiction, so I do need to keep up with the fiction content!

Although, maybe that’s the problem. I do view keeping my blog interesting as being a job, and reading ARCs as a job, sometimes. Maybe that’s taking the fun out of it a little — but on the other hand, I get fun back from running a blog people enjoy and engage with, so… Hm.

Anyway, other than that, you may have noticed that I’ve got my green lock showing my site is now secure! With the help of Lynn O’Connacht, who is very patient and hosts my blog for free, my site is now secured and fit for anything.

In other news, I’m away from the bunnies again, and you know what that means. Here is Hulk, showing everyone she’s a civilised lady and can sit at (well… under) the dinner table.

New books:

Some good non-fic picked up at the New Scientist Live event, and a bunch more fiction to keep me occupied. Hurrah!

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

–The Wimsey Family, by C.S. Scott-Giles & Dorothy L. Sayers. A little piece of, well, whimsy, covering the background of Lord Peter’s family in bits and bobs pieced together from letters and piffle. 4/5 stars
–Mask of Shadows, by Linsey Miller. Mostly, this felt a little bit too much like Throne of Glass and The Hunger Games, though the genderqueer protagonist was an interesting touch. 3/5 stars
–A Rare Book of Cunning Device, by Ben Aaronovitch. A fun audio-exclusive. Not essential to the broader plot of Peter Grant’s story, but a good aside and a perfect narrator. 4/5 stars
–Leonardo: The First Scientist, by Michael White. A readable and apparently well-sourced biography of a great thinker. 4/5 stars
–Drawing Breath: the Making and Unmaking of Tuberculosis, by Kathryn Lougheed. A lot of stuff I didn’t know about TB itself, and a wake-up call if you didn’t know that TB is very far from being unmade. 4/5 stars
–The Secret History of the World, by Jonathan Black. Not about what I thought it was about from other reviews, sadly. 1/5 stars
–The Carpet Makers, by Andreas Eschbach. A reread of a carefully crafted favourite. 5/5 stars

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 4, 2017 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

What are you currently reading?

A couple of things, as usual. For non-fiction, I’m reading The Uses of Enchantment, by Bruno Bettelheim. I know that his views on autism, etc, are very much criticised now, but this is about fairytales and how they help to develop a child’s brain. He’s very much a psychoanalyst, which I tend to take with a grain of salt, but he still has some interesting theories about the appeal of fairytales.

In terms of fiction, I’ve just started Peter S. Beagle’s Summerlong. I have to say, I’m raising my eyebrows a little at the fact that like In Calabria, he has an older man in a romance with a younger woman. It’s less creepy-feeling than in that book, but it still has a bit of that hmmmm to it. Especially in his attraction to Lioness, the even younger character who is really the centre of the story. Not that I expect older people to turn off their attraction to younger people as such, it’s just… since that comment from Jo on In Calabria, I can’t stop noticing.

What have you recently finished reading?

Not very much! The last thing I finished was Helen Pilcher’s Bring Back the King, which is about de-extinction efforts. It’s light-hearted (though not hilarious, as the cover-copy might have you believe) but informative, though I knew most of the info from reading Beth Shapiro’s How to Clone A Mammoth. Very similar info about the same range of species as that book, so unless you’re absolutely mad about T-rex and Elvis (yes, she discusses “de-extincting” Elvis), I think I’d skip it if you’ve already read that.

What will you be reading next?

I’ll probably read the two books just out from Tor.com by Jy Yang, The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven. The covers look beautiful, I’m intrigued by the summaries, and I received them to review last week. I also need to get back to reading Andy Weir’s Artemis, of course! And given that I’m still not quite well, and I’m at my parents’ house with my copies of the Phryne Fisher books, I’m tempted to dive into a reread of Away with the Fairies…

What are you reading?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Stacking the Shelves

Posted September 30, 2017 by Nicky in General / 21 Comments

Good morning, folks. I’m currently in London, about to attend the New Scientist Live event, and completely full of cold. Wife brought it home last week, but now I’m in the thick of it too. Bleh. So anyway, I might not reply to comments/other people’s posts until tomorrow, but I promise I’ll get to them, as always!

Books received to review:

Thank you Tor and Angry Robot! Exciting stuff.

Books bought:

Thank you, Mum! I’ve been wanting all these for ages.

Read this week:

Again, not the greatest reading week. It started okay, but then I got sick…

Reviews posted this week:

–The Warrior Princess, by K.M. Ashman. Disappointing in execution, but still pretty awesome to see someone dealing with Welsh history. I learnt something! 2/5 stars
–Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. It started out entertaining, but I got tired of the brand of humour, which mostly revolves around sex and bodily functions. 2/5 stars
–Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf. About the science of how we read. I have serious questions about some of the research described. 3/5 stars
–Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee. I couldn’t wrap my head around it as science fiction, but once I treated it as fantasy and just accepted the world, I loved it. 4/5 stars
–Neanderthals Rediscovered, by Dimitra Pappagianni and Michael A. Morse. Not as in-depth as I’d hoped, but interesting stuff. 3/5 stars
–Starlings, by Jo Walton. Unsurprisingly, I loved this collection of Jo’s short work. 4/5 stars
–The Planet in a Pebble, by Jan Zalasiewicz. Not as poetic as Richard Fortey’s work, but an enjoyable survey of the rock cycle. 3/5 stars

The cost of reading: books ARE expensive

Posted September 28, 2017 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Apropos of a twitter conversation, here is some data on the assertion that “books aren’t expensive”. Folks, please remember this is relative. Books may appear cheap to you, but they may not to someone else, and this depends on at least three factors.

Cost of books where you are (including availability of second-hand books)
Your income
How much you read

This post is intended to offer you some data on how the amount you read can make books pretty darn expensive for you.

I keep stats on my reading. For every book I read, I add how much it cost me, and get totals per month, per quarter and per year. So I enter £7.99 for a new paperback, £3 for a book that I got second-hand, and £0.00 for an ARC or library book, etc, etc. Two-thirds of my reading material, probably, is stuff I’ve bought, while another third is library books, ARCs or stuff I’ve borrowed or am rereading (which I don’t count again). To make it clearer, here’s an example: my reading material in the first week of August, and how much it cost.

You can see that Babylon cost me £9.99, for instance; I bought that in the UK. Catching Breath cost me £21.15 — I bought that in Amsterdam, so that’s a direct conversion from euros done on the day I bought it. In the UK you can get it for £12.99, by the way. Hengeworld cost me £2.00, because I had a second-hand copy, and Acadie cost me nada because Tor sent me an e-galley (thank you, Tor!).

All clear?

Here’s the very rough guide to how much the books I read in a quarter have cost me: £300+. So you can basically call my reading speed £100+ worth of books per month, not counting anything I get for free (a significant portion of what I consume). That means that just to keep up with my own reading speed, I need to spend £100 or more per month on new books — I’m sure you can agree that that’s too much for many people’s budgets.

I barely need to point out, too, that while books are pretty affordable in Britain, often under £10… if you live in a non-English-speaking country you can pay twice that or more for a single book. Or that many people have tiny incomes which certainly wouldn’t be able to keep up with a reading speed like mine. And that libraries are great, but may not have great stocks of the books you want to read (sorry, Leuven library, but your English-language selection isn’t expanding fast enough to keep up with me).

This isn’t a justification for piracy. It’s just noting that books are actually expensive and a luxury for some people. Just because books are easy and cheap for you to obtain doesn’t mean that holds true for everyone. Stick to the stuff that’s indisputably true — piracy deprives authors of earnings.

Tags: discussion, piracy

Stacking the Shelves

Posted September 23, 2017 by Nicky in General / 20 Comments

Good morning, folks! Here’s the second part of the great Calgary book haul, featuring all the fantasy books I got! Plus some more review copies, of course.

Bought:

Quite a few from my backlog of wishlist, there! Looks like it’s gonna be fun.

Received to review:

I’ve been meaning to read Annie On My Mind forever, so yay for getting that. Well, yay to all of them (and thank you to the publishers/publicists).

Read this week:

It hasn’t been a reading week, really, as you can see — I’ve been focusing on replaying Final Fantasy VIII with my wife, which is a different sort of fun!

Reviews posted this week:

–Harkworth Hall, by L.S. Johnson. I have a couple of minor quibbles, but I was pretty hooked all the same. 4/5 stars
–The Deeper Genome, by John Parrington. It starts off simple, but it does start delving into stuff I wasn’t very familiar with. Definitely worth reading. 4/5 stars
–The Ghoul King, by Guy Haley. Quinn intrigues me, even though he isn’t outwardly the best person. I need moooore. 4/5 stars
–The Button Box, by Lynn Knight. A lovely survey of women’s fashion through the medium of the family button box. 4/5 stars
–Defy, by Sara B. Larson. The main character is a girl disguised as a boy. Everyone seems to know her secret, though. Meh. 2/5 stars
–The Emerald Planet, by David Beerling. I didn’t expect to love this, but I really did — it’s fascinating stuff. 5/5 stars
–Assassin’s Apprentice, by Robin Hobb. This is a reread, and I’m relieved that I still loved it. 4/5 stars

WWW Wednesday

Posted September 20, 2017 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

What are you currently reading?

Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeannette Ng. I’m not far into it, but I’m quite intrigued: basically, Christian missionaries go to Fairyland to convert the Fae, and right now the book has a decidedly Gothic feel about it. I’m also reading Caliban’s War; the bits with Holden are getting a bit repetitive, since he basically blunders into trouble in the name of helping people over and over again. I like Avasarala, though.

What have you recently finished reading?

The Tiger’s Daughter, by K. Arsenault Rivera. I found it really appropriative and while the writing was pretty, it was painfully slow. The format, a letter written by one protagonist to the other, just got awkward — it described events at which both were present to the recipient. Whaaat? People wouldn’t actually do that, at least not at such length. It just felt too contrived for me.

What will you read next?

I really haven’t decided. I have a little shortlist I want to finish before the end of the month, so it might be my Kushiel’s Dart reread (finally) or getting onto the second book of my Robin Hobb reread.

What are you reading?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Stacking the Shelves

Posted September 16, 2017 by Nicky in General / 23 Comments

Hey everyone! I’m back! And now I have to actually account for my hauls, erk. I’m gonna split it up into two posts, because, um, yeah. So look out next week for my fantasy haul!

Received to review:

Quite a bunch, right? I was really excited about most of these, and I’m so glad I got approved for them!

Crime/mystery bought

I’ve been meaning to read these for a while. I have high hopes of the Daisy Dalrymple books being my new Phryne-like fix…

Sci-fi bought

I’ve been meaning to read all three of these entirely different novels for ages, so… here goes?

Non-fiction bought

Bit of a mix, as per usual! I was glad to find something like Imagining Head-Smashed-In when I visited Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, because I would like to read more about First Nations people, and this was at least praised by modern First Nations people.

LGBT bought

I read An Unsuitable Heir while I was away, and decided I really needed to read more by K.J. Charles. Here’s hoping they all match up in quality!

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

–Dead Until Dark, by Charlaine Harris. I enjoy Harris’ work for light reading, but just don’t get along with Sookie. 1/5 stars
–Outer Space, Inner Lands, by Ursula Le Guin. It’s Ursula Le Guin’s SF short fiction. ’nuff said. 5/5 stars
–Camelot’s Honour, by Sarah Zettel. A beloved reread that winds together the Arthurian story and the non-Arthurian bits of the Mabinogion. 4/5 stars
–One Renegade Cell, by Robert Weinberg. At one point, this was the state of the art in describing and understanding cancer. It’s still pretty helpful. 3/5 stars
–Magic Shifts, by Ilona Andrews. As usual, a fun entry to the series. 4/5 stars
–An Unsuitable Heir, by K.J. Charles. A lovely romance/mystery I enjoyed on a lot of levels. 4/5 stars
–Fowl Language: The Struggle is Real, by Brian Gordon. Collection of a fun comic. 4/5 stars

Category: General

What are you currently reading?

What have you recently finished reading?

What will you read next?

Received to review:

Bought:

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

Other posts:

What are you currently reading?

What have you recently finished reading?

What will you read next?

Update on the me:

New books:

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

Other posts:

What are you currently reading?

What have you recently finished reading?

What will you be reading next?

Books received to review:

Books bought:

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

Other posts:

Bought:

Received to review:

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

Other posts:

What are you currently reading?

What have you recently finished reading?

What will you read next?

Received to review:

Crime/mystery bought

Sci-fi bought

Non-fiction bought

LGBT bought

Read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

Other posts: