Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted November 30, 2024 by Nicky in General / 25 Comments

Hurrah, it’s Saturday! I’ve been spending the day finishing up my wife’s custom “advent calendar”, but it’s time to think about books now!

Books acquired this week

I managed to get down to the library this week, hurrah! It was cold later in the week, but there was one warmer day that was perfect at the start of the week.

Cover of The Scholar & The Last Fairy Door by H.G. Parry Cover of Fated Winds and Promising Seas by Rose Black Cover of Miss Beeton's Murder Agency by Josie Lloyd

I keep meaning to try H.G. Parry’s work, and I’m pretty sure I have a book by Rose Black already on my TBR. As for Miss Beeton’s Murder Agency, it looks like a fun seasonal mystery! I enjoyed reading a bunch of those around Christmas last year, so I thought I’d give this one a shot.

I did get a couple of new books to test out my new ereader with, as well. It’s my first colour one, so I wanted to pick a book with colour, and also a manga to try out on it (since one of the reasons to get a faster ereader was to spend more time reading manga).

Cover of The Apothecary Diaries volume 1, by Natsu Hyuuga Cover of Penguins and Other Sea Birds by Matt Sewell

I actually got a few of Sewell’s books, but I’m not reviewing them all here — it’d be very repetitive.

Posts from the last week

As usual, here’s the round-up!

I didn’t do TTT this week, so the only other post is my What Are You Reading Wednesday post.

What I’m reading

First of all, let’s have a peek at what I’ve finished in the last week which I plan to review here! Here’s a sneak peek:

Cover of Blind Spot by Maud Rowell Cover of Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells Cover of The Pumpkin Spice Café by Laurie Gilmore Cover of Penguins and Other Sea Birds by Matt Sewell

Cover of A Side Character's Love Story vol 1 by Akane Tamura Cover of A Side Character's Love Story vol 2 by Akane Tamura Cover of The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie Cover of A Side Character's Love Story vol 3 by Akane Tamura

I’ll be rereading more of A Side Character’s Love Story this weekend, and I think digging into Murder at the Ashmolean, by Jim Eldridge. I’d like to get round to more of The Spellshop, too.

And that’s me for the week! How’s everyone doing?

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, as usual!

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Review – Rose/House

Posted November 29, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Rose/House

Rose/House

by Arkady Martine

Genres: Mystery, Science Fiction
Pages: 128
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Basit Deniau’s houses were haunted to begin with.

A house embedded with an artificial intelligence is a common thing: a house that is an artificial intelligence, infused in every load-bearing beam and fine marble tile with a thinking creature that is not human? That is something else altogether. But now Deniau’s been dead a year, and Rose House is locked up tight, as commanded by the architect’s will: all his possessions and files and sketches are confined in its archives, and their only keeper is Rose House itself. Rose House, and one other.

Dr. Selene Gisil, one of Deniau’s former protégé, is permitted to come into Rose House once a year. She alone may open Rose House’s vaults, look at drawings and art, talk with Rose House’s animating intelligence all she likes. Until this week, Dr. Gisil was the only person whom Rose House spoke to.

But even an animate intelligence that haunts a house has some failsafes common to all AIs. For instance: all AIs must report the presence of a dead body to the nearest law enforcement agency.

There is a dead person in Rose House. The house says so. It is not Basit Deniau, and it is not Dr. Gisil. It is someone else. Rose House, having completed its duty of care and informed Detective Maritza Smith of the China Lake police precinct that there is in fact a dead person inside it, dead of unnatural causes—has shut up.

No one can get inside Rose House, except Dr. Gisil. Dr. Gisil was not in North America when Rose House called the China Lake precinct. But someone did. And someone died there. And someone may be there still.

I received a copy of this book for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I’ve been curious about Arkady Martine’s Rose/House for a while, but it wasn’t available as an ebook in the UK, so I set it aside for the future. When I spotted it for request on Netgalley, I admit I rather swooped on it! I think the description tends to suggest it’s a science fiction mystery, but I’d argue it comes out closer to horror than to mystery in many ways, playing with themes and scenes that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror novel.

All in all, it might be best not to cling too tightly to labels and let the story speak for itself, though. Certainly the AI at the centre of the story, Rose House, seems to be playing around: it allows Detective Maritza Smith into the house, under the conceit that she is not a person but “the precinct” — and Maritza plays along.

It’s all as unsettling as Rose House itself is described to be, with bizarre scenes like a dead body stuffed with rose petals, the descriptions of weird architecture, and the obvious hold that Basit Deniau has over Selene Gisil, despite his death. The setup does sound like it’s meant to be an “impossible crime”/locked room type mystery — but I think we’re given something else that plays with that concept. (Though I think there are elements of “fair play” mystery here; we’re told something important that we may not notice is important, but we have the clue.)

I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m glad I got to read it.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – A Side Character’s Love Story, vol 1

Posted November 28, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – A Side Character’s Love Story, vol 1

A Side Character's Love Story

by Akane Tamura

Genres: Manga, Romance
Pages: 160
Series: A Side Character's Love Story #1
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Growing up, Nobuko Tanaka was always a "side character" standing off in the corner. Now in her 20s, she's fallen in love for the first time. While she isn't any good at being assertive, she will muster her courage bit by bit as she tries her best to close the distance between herself and her crush -- because even side characters fall in love. If you're tired of the same old romantic protagonists, this modest, refreshing love story is for you.

Akane Tamura’s A Side Character’s Love Story is a really cute series with a hecking slow burn. The main character feels herself to be nothing but a side character — but as the manga opens, she starts on the very first steps of a romance of her own, a story that’s just hers. This is a reread for me; now that I’m following the series as each new volume comes out (after bingeing the first ~14 volumes originally), I was starting to get hazy about some characters’ stories, so it felt like a good time to revisit.

As the volume starts, Nobuko is working part-time in a convenience store while finishing up her studies. She has a massive crush on a co-worker Irie Hiroki, who realises slowly that he’s interested in her too. And that’s about as far as we get in this volume!

One thing I’d forgotten somewhat was how painfully awkward Nobuko (and Hiroki!) can be. Such self-doubt and agonising! Some of it is just being young and having a crush for the first time, because it’s new to both of them; sometimes it’s a really accurate portrayal of Nobuko having anxiety (though this is never explicitly discussed as such, it’s all too recognisable). That smooths out later in the story, because the manga also follows Nobuko and Hiroki maturing and navigating various milestones, buuuut it’s very prominent here.

And for those less gifted at reading visuals: the art is simple and easy to follow, and the important characters have distinct enough designs to be able to follow who’s who.

Rating: 3/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted November 27, 2024 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

Aaand it’s Wednesday!

Cover of A Side Character's Love Story vol 1 by Akane TamuraWhat have you recently finished reading?

It’s still a bit of a bad time for reading for me, but I did get provoked into being more enthusiastic by the arrival of a new gadget: my first colour ereader! So I read Penguins and Other Sea Birds, by Matt Sewell, which has colour illustrations — you know, just to test out the capabilities… It was cute, but I found that he exaggerated some of the weird shapes and features of birds, and the results are a bit visually confusing at times compared to looking at an actual photo.

The crested auklet image was shockingly accurate, though.

One of the reasons for me to get a new 7″ ereader was for manga, so I’ve also been indulging in a reread of A Side Character’s Love Story, since I have started to forget some of the characters from earlier volumes now I’m reading the new ones as they come out. I’ve only reread the first volume so far.

Cover of The Secret Adversary by Agatha ChristieWhat are you currently reading?​

Nothing very actively, despite my best intentions. I’m most of the way through Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary; I read that a bit a day via Serial Reader, but I might get the last issues delivered all at once and finish that up. It’s cutting me off at odd places at the moment, e.g. right in the middle of a character’s big reveals.

Cover of The Apothecary Diaries volume 1, by Natsu HyuugaWhat will you read next?

More of A Side Character’s Love Story, for sure. Other than that… I’m not sure. I’m tempted to give Natsu Hyuuga’s The Apothecary Diaries a shot, and I’m sure I have some other manga and graphic novels saved to lists to check out at some point.

It might also be a way of catching up a bit with my reading goal for the year. I was probably too ambitious, since I need to read 75 more books by the end of the year to meet it… but still, it’d be nice to get a bit closer.

How’s everyone else doing?

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Review – The Pumpkin Spice Café

Posted November 26, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Pumpkin Spice Café

The Pumpkin Spice Café

by Laurie Gilmore

Genres: Romance
Pages: 357
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

When Jeanie’s aunt gifts her the beloved Pumpkin Spice Café in the small town of Dream Harbour, Jeanie jumps at the chance for a fresh start away from her very dull desk job.

Logan is a local farmer who avoids Dream Harbour’s gossip at all costs. But Jeanie’s arrival disrupts Logan’s routine and he wants nothing to do with the irritatingly upbeat new girl, except that he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her.

Will Jeanie’s happy-go-lucky attitude win over the grumpy-but-gorgeous Logan, or has this city girl found the one person in town who won’t fall for her charm, or her pumpkin spice lattes…

Laurie Gilmore’s The Pumpkin Spice Café just… isn’t very good? The characters feel flat, even though they’re given quirks and identifying features: the way they see each other doesn’t match up at all with how they’re thinking and feeling and describing themselves, but not in a way that feels like “whoa, yeah, this person has self-esteem issues”. Jeanie acts neurotic and terrified of everything (and her internal monologue tells us that she is), and Logan reads “perky and cute”. It feels like two paper cutouts being pressed together, “Now kiss!”

The insta-love doesn’t help.

It mostly feels like someone wanting to write a small town romance and then making really, really sure that we know we’re in a small, quirky town. It’s small! And quirky! Don’t you know that it’s small and quirky? Look at how small and quirky it is!

There are several sex scenes, which I completely skimmed because they didn’t really advance characterisation much, and I did not believe at all in the chemistry between them, because I kept being told how much chemistry there was.

Some reviews are saying it’s a Hallmark movie in book form, and yeah, I see that.

Rating: 1/5

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Review – Feeding the Monster

Posted November 25, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Feeding the Monster

Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold On Us

by Anna Bogutskaya

Genres: Horror, Non-fiction
Pages: 288
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. All monsters need feeding.

Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what’s wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it. In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

I’m not a horror fan, myself, but four years studying English literature plus a lot of innate curiosity means I was interested to read reflections on horror as a genre anyway, when I spotted Anna Bogutskaya’s Feeding the Monster in the library.

I was a little worried it would reference a lot of horror films that I know nothing about and thus be impossible to follow; though it does reference a lot of horror films, it usually gives enough context to follow the point. It’s not just a list of horror films that fit a certain theme, but a dissection of why certain themes are attractive (and horrifying, of course, at the same time): the chapter on cannibalism in particular, and the way it discussed the potential romanticism and eroticism of cannibalism, was very good.

There’s a lot of focus on women in horror: it’s fairly common to consider horror inherently misogynistic, but it’s rarely that simple, and Bogutskaya discusses that quite a bit — along with Black, queer and trans horror, too, though there’s less space devoted to this.

It probably is a better read if you’re more of a horror fan than I am, and know a bit more about the horror films being referenced. It gives you more of a chance to come up with counterpoints or enhance the argument for yourself with your own examples. Still, I found it an interesting read all the same.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – The British Museum

Posted November 24, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – The British Museum

The British Museum: Storehouse of Civilizations

by James Hamilton

Genres: History
Pages: 224
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

James Hamilton explores the establishment of the Museum in the 1750s (from the bequest to the nation of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane); the chosen site of its location; the cultural context in which it came into being; the subsequent development, expansion and diversification of the Museum, both as a collection and as a building, from the early 19th to the 21st century; the controversy occasioned by some of its acquisitions; and the legacy and influence of the Museum nationally and globally.

A product and symbol of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the British Museum is as iconic an expression of that cultural tendency as Johnson's Dictionary, the French Encyclopedie and Linnaean plant classification. Its collections embody the raw material of empiricism - the bringing together of things to enable the widest intellectual experiment to take place.

A concise history of one of the world's greatest and most comprehensive museum collections, from its founding in 1753.

James Hamilton’s The British Museum: Storehouse of Civilizations definitely isn’t the place to go for a critique of the British Museum’s collection practices. It does briefly mention some of the controversies, but mostly it’s a paean to the vision of the whole endeavour, fascinated with how the institution has developed.

And… to be fair, I found it equally fascinating: I didn’t expect to be so interested in the phases of building of the museum, but it really tracks with the way the collections increased, the splitting off of various things like the Natural History Museum and eventually the British Library. Hamilton manages to avoid it sounding too dry, and there are lots of colour photographs and additions which add well to the text (even if I don’t, personally, usually find them very enlightening).

A surprisingly quick read overall, and fascinating. It explicitly discusses (and reproduces) some of the founding tenets and principles, including the ones which are cited in arguments about refusing to return objects etc, so it’s also an interesting primer for discussion of repatriation and decolonisation, even if Hamilton doesn’t dig into that in this book.

Rating: 4/5

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted November 23, 2024 by Nicky in General / 23 Comments

Hurrah for the weekend!

I’m a little behind on comments/blog visits, but I’m finally starting to get back on track with my studies, so I’m calling this week a win. Looking forward to spending time today visiting other blogs, replying to comments, etc, etc.

Books acquired this week

There was no library trip this week owing to the wintery weather: first it was too cold for me to cycle without gloves, and then once the gloves arrived, sadly everything’s covered in ice. It’s supposed to warm up a bit this weekend, so we’ll see how that goes.

Nonetheless, I did get some new books! I discovered the Inklings series, from 404 Ink. They’re on a very random range of topics, in a way that delights me, so I’ve snagged quite a few — they’ll serve as quick reads to maybe start catching up with my reading goal for this year.

Cover of The End by Katie Goh Cover of Now Go by Karl Thomas Smith Cover of Blind Spot by Maud Rowell

Cover of They Came to Slay by Thom James Carter Cover of Machine Readable Me by Zara Rahman Cover of The Loki Variations by Karl Johnson

And I did also get a couple more books from my wife, namely these:

Cover of The New University by James Coe Cover of Stonehenge by Francis Pryor Cover of Breakfast Cereal by Kathryn Cornell Dolan

So as you see, it’s been a bookish week, and I’ve inhaled many of them already! (The Inklings books are quite short.)

Posts from this week

First up, the roundup of reviews posted this week:

And other posts:

What I’m reading

Well, as usual let’s start with a sneak peek at what I’ve finished reading this week…

Cover of All the Violet Tiaras, by Jean Menzies Cover of Breakfast Cereal by Kathryn Cornell Dolan Cover of Stonehenge by Francis Pryor Cover of Agatha Christie, by Lucy Worsley

Cover of The New University by James Coe Cover of The Loki Variations by Karl Johnson Cover of Now Go by Karl Thomas Smith Cover of The End by Katie Goh

As for what I’m reading over the weekend, I’m just finishing up with another of the Inklings books, Blind Spot, and then I want to finish Carolyn Wells’ Murder in the Bookshop and Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop. I also want to get back to Amal El-Mohtar’s The River Has Roots.

I need to read 80 more books by the end of the year to reach my stretch reading goal, and it’s looking very far away and unlikely… but we’ll see how it goes.

How’s everyone else doing? Reading anything good?

Linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, as usual!

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Review – Cold Snap

Posted November 22, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Cold Snap

Cold Snap

by Lindy Ryan

Genres: Horror
Pages: 144
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

A grieving mother and son hope to survive Christmas in a remote mountain cabin, in this chilling novella of dread, isolation and sinister spirits lurking in the frozen woods. Perfect for fans of The Only Good Indians, The Shining and The Babadook.

Two weeks ago, Christine Sinclaire’s husband slipped off the roof while hanging Christmas lights and fell to his death on the front lawn. Desperate to escape her guilt and her grief, Christine packs up her fifteen-year-old son and the family cat and flees to the cabin they’d reserved deep in the remote Pennsylvania Wilds to wait out the holidays.

It isn’t long before Christine begins to hear strange noises coming from the forest. When she spots a horned figure watching from between frozen branches, Christine assumes it’s just a forest animal—a moose, maybe, since the property manager warned her about them, said they’d stomp a body so deep into the snow nobody’d find it ’til spring. But moose don’t walk upright like the shadowy figure does. They don’t call Christine’s name with her dead husband’s voice.

A haunting examination of the horrors of grief and the hunger of guilt, perfect for readers of Stephen King, Christina Henry, and Chuck Wendig.

Lindy Ryan’s Cold Snap is a horror novella that doesn’t really give many answers, revolving around a shocked and grieving mother (Christine) and her attempt to connect with her equally shocked son (Billy) after her husband’s death. They go away to a remote cabin for Christmas, as her husband (Derek) had originally planned, but Christine is hearing voices, seeing constant intrusive visions of Derek’s death.

There is a creepy atmosphere to the story, helped along by the sense of unreality Christine falls. As a portrayal of PTSD and its repetitive patterns is really well done, in my opinion, and that might be the best part.

The reason I didn’t rate it higher is that I didn’t really feel the creepiness of the actual spirit/monster/whatever it is. I rather liked the final page, though it leaves things very ambiguous, but I think Christine’s fragmented experiences actually sapped the sense of threat. It’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be real; sometimes that can enhance the weirdness, but here it was just hard to tell what was happening.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Murder at the British Museum

Posted November 21, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Murder at the British Museum

Murder at the British Museum

by Jim Eldridge

Genres: Crime, Historical Fiction, Mystery
Pages: 320
Series: Museum Mysteries #2
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

1894. A well-respected academic is found dead in a gentlemen's convenience cubicle at the British Museum, the stall locked from the inside. Professor Lance Pickering had been due to give a talk promoting the museum's new 'Age of King Arthur' exhibition when he was stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Having forged a strong reputation working alongside the inimitable Inspector Abberline on the Jack the Ripper case, Daniel Wilson is called in to solve the mystery of the locked cubicle murder, and he brings his expertise and archaeologist Abigail Fenton with him.

But it isn't long before the museum becomes the site of another fatality and the pair face mounting pressure to deliver results. With enquiries compounded by persistent journalists, local vandals and a fanatical society, Wilson and Fenton face a race against time to salvage the reputation of the museum and catch a murderer desperate for revenge.

Murder at the British Museum follows on from the first book in Jim Eldridge’s series of mysteries based in museums, following the characters Daniel Wilson (retired cop, now private investigator) and Abigail Fenton (archaeologist, now also a private investigator) as they tackle another murder in a museum. There’s a lot of tension in this book between the private investigators and the police, since Daniel’s now working alongside people he knew in the force, but it isn’t just one-dimensional: Inspector Feather is friendly and helpful, and unlike in the previous book, the narrative follows the police as well part of the time, which was interesting.

Overall, I found it more engaging than the previous book, with Abigail’s character feeling a touch more consistent. It’s unfortunate that for plot reasons she had to do something pretty stupid a couple of times, but there’s a couple of interesting scenes between her and Daniel (for instance her gently telling him that he mustn’t act like she’s in danger everywhere she goes, and must accept that she’ll gauge this for herself).

It’s not a series I’m going to read for the characters, I think, but it worked better for me on that front this time.

I’ll spare you any quibbles and thoughts on the subject of Arthurian scholarship, particularly as it was all from a historical rather than literary point of view (since I mostly studied it from a literary point of view). It was good enough for fiction, though I’d have expected a bit better of Abigail than to think Malory was the originator of a lot of it (she should have pointed to the Vulgate Cycle). I did think it was an interesting motive and a good use of actual scholarly arguments to set up the reason for murder.

Rating: 3/5

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