Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted January 20, 2024 by Nicky in General / 33 Comments

After last week, this one’s been nice and quiet. I’ve had a little more time to read than usual since I’ve been out of my usual routine… though at the same time, I did have my eye injury limiting things a bit, and I promise I helped out with stuff like washing dishes and so on! So I haven’t read as much as I might’ve liked — but when do I ever get to do that?

As usual, I’m linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, this weekend.

Books acquired this week:

After the acquisitions of the last few weeks, this has been a quiet one. I’m sure my British Library Crime Classic subscription book of the month is waiting for me at home, but I haven’t been home to pick it up yet… so this week it’s just the most recent in Juliet E. McKenna’s Green Man series, which was on sale for 99p. I haven’t actually read any of this series yet: I really have to hop to it!

I’m pretty sure it’ll be a good time when I do get around to reading it, thanks to Imyril’s reviews. That’s why I keep picking up the ebooks when I see them on sale…

Posts from this week:

This week I’ve continued posting reviews daily, slowly trying to catch up on my backlog. So here goes the roundup!

Fantasy romance: Blood Moon, by M.J. O’Shea (1/5 stars)
Historical non-fiction: The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes, by Kate Strasdin (4/5 stars)
Video game tie-in: Encyclopaedia Eorzea volume II, by Square Enix (4/5 stars)
Fantasy horror novella: The House of Drought, by Dennis Mombauer (2/5 stars)
Fantasy graphic novel: Cold Iron, by Andy Diggle & team (3/5 stars)
Popular science: The Science of Sin, by Jack Lewis (2/5 stars)

As you see, I’m trying out adding an indication of genre in case it helps people decide whether they’re interested in checking something out!

And other posts:

What I’m reading:

As I draft this on Friday night, I’ve just finished up Cat Jarman’s The Bone Chests, so I’m not sure what I’ll focus on for the weekend. I’m feeling an itch to read more non-fiction, so I might try Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking On Paper, or possibly Bettany Hughes’ The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I want to do a bit of catching up on my reading goal as well, so I’m eyeing some novellas.

I have done some reading this week, though, so here’s a little sneak peek of reviews to come in the next weeks/months…

Hope everyone else has had a good week! Anything exciting in your reading plans for the weekend?

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – The Science of Sin

Posted January 19, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

The Science of Sin: Why we do the things we know we shouldn't

by Jack Lewis

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
It can often seem that we are utterly surrounded by temptation, from the ease of online shopping and the stream of targeted advertising encouraging us to greedily acquire yet more stuff, to the coffee, cake and fast-food shops that line our streets, beckoning us in to over-indulge on all the wrong things. It can feel like a constant battle to stay away from the temptations we know we shouldn't give in to. Where exactly do these urges come from? If we know we shouldn't do something, for the sake of our health, our pockets or our reputation, why is it often so very hard to do the right thing? Anyone who has ever wondered why they never seem to be able to stick to their diet, anyone to whom the world seems more vain and self-obsessed than ever, anyone who can't understand why love-cheats pursue their extra-marital affairs, anyone who struggles to resist the lure of the comfy sofa, or anyone who makes themselves bitter through endless comparison with other people - this book is for you.

The Science of Sin brings together the latest findings from neuroscience research to shed light on the universally fascinating subject of temptation - where it comes from, how to resist it and why we all tend to succumb from time to time. With each chapter inspired by one of the seven deadly sins, neurobiologist Jack Lewis illuminates the neural battles between temptation and restraint that take place within our brains, suggesting strategies to help us better manage our most troublesome impulses with the explicit goal of improving our health, our happiness and our productivity - helping us to say `no!' more often, especially when it really counts.

The Science of Sin takes on a lot of religious baggage, for all that Jack Lewis, its author, says that he’s an atheist. To some extent that’s inevitable given his background, and his choice to shape the book around the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, looking for neurological and evolutionary explanations for the origins of each — both their pitfalls and their utility.

The problem is that it inevitably becomes very moralising. He does try to point out when certain neurological things might not be someone’s choice, but he seems to have more sympathy for paedophiles than for fat people, and is very certain that being fat is almost totally a choice people make (when in fact there are many contributing causes, including sheer poverty, where good food choices are not always available), and a moral one that impacts badly on society and on everyone around them. Fatness is also unequivocally bad for you, in Lewis’ view, where the real picture is more mixed (fat people, for instance, have lower 30-day mortality from bacterial pneumonia and have better survival rates and reduced immune depletion when living with HIV) and thinness is no guarantor of health of any kind.

(Important note: this is not something I’m interested in debating in the comments on this blog. I’ve studied some of the science of nutrition in relation to immunity as part of my MSc, but you’re best off heading to the literature with an open mind and a careful eye for bias — your own and that of the papers you find.)

In almost every chapter, he finds a way to reference narcissism, blame fat people, suggest fat people are narcissistic, and so on. And again, he treats these as moral issues, failures that people should rectify.

In some cases, he isn’t wrong, but he’s replacing religious moralising about it with a kind of secular moralising about it that sits badly with any effort to be objective. Combine that with his reliance on scans like fMRI to tell us about what’s going on in someone’s brain, and a lot of his conclusions are questionable: you can get apparently significant results from the brain of a dead salmon, with fMRI, an issue that he very briefly references before waving it away and saying that fMRI is the tool we have, so he’s going to use it.

For me, there was a kind of entertainment value in watching him build up his argument, but I was aware of the one-sided nature of his search for appropriate sources, and not appreciative of his moralising.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Jack Lewis, non-fiction, science

Review – Cold Iron

Posted January 18, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Cold Iron

by Triona Farrell, Tom Muller, Andy Diggle, Nick Brokenshire

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 140
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
On the rural Isle of Man, aspiring singer-songwriter Kay Farragher dreams of escaping her humdrum life. But she’s about to get more than she bargained for – and some bargains are not to be trusted.

Celtic folklore and modern moxie collide as an ancient pact between worlds is broken. The sinister forces of Faerie have slipped their shackles, and the Black Dog walks abroad this night…

Andy Diggle et al’s Cold Iron is pretty fun: it’s set on the Isle of Man, and draws from fairytales and folktales. It’s perhaps not too surprising that it sees creatures from Faerie intruding upon our world, and that a trip to Faerie is eventually indicated, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.

I liked the art, and I liked Kay, her practical approach to realising that actually, her grandmother was right after all — and her fierceness in fighting for those she cares about, and those she feels a responsibility to.

It wasn’t too surprising in terms of where the plot went, given the givens, but I had fun, and I also quite appreciated that it included a short story (in prose rather than the same comic format) at the end with a little bit more closure.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: Andy Diggle, book reviews, books, comics, Nick Brokenshire, SF/F, Tom Muller, Triona Farrell

Review – The House of Drought

Posted January 17, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

House of Drought

by Dennis Mombauer

Genres: Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 117
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
On the island of Sri Lanka, at a colonial mansion between the forest and the paddy fields, a caretaker arrives with four children in tow after pledging to keep them safe. When violent thugs storm the house demanding that Ushu repay his debt, young Jasmit and the other children hide in an upstairs bathroom where a running tap opens a gateway to escape. But the Dry House is not the only force at work in the place where the forest and the estate meet—something else stirs in the trees, something ancient, something that demands retribution.

The Sap Mother bides her time, watching and learning from the house’s inhabitants. She burrows beneath the foundations of the Dry House, hungry for atonement. Pulled between these warring powers, Jasmit must choose between saving those trapped in the mansion’s bulging stomachs and preparing the house for when the Mother emerges again.

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.

This horror novella didn’t entirely work for me, though I appreciated a number of things about it (the setting, the tension, the fact that it didn’t give the reader too many answers too quickly). The structure kind of annoyed me, with the order of events jerking around. It’s hard to describe, but first you get the frame story, the “present day” if you will. Then you jump back in time to the crisis point of other characters’ story… then forward just a little to how those characters got into that situation. Then forward back to the present day, and then a new set of characters.

It feels like the story tried very hard to come full circle, bring things together and find a way to end the story — but it felt like it missed a step. How did a certain character figure things out? Why is she so eager to save people she doesn’t know?

It’s an interesting novella but I didn’t find it wholly successful.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Dennis Mombauer, horror, SF/F

WWW Wednesday

Posted January 17, 2024 by Nicky in General / 10 Comments

It’s Wednesday again, somehow, so time to answer the threes Ws:

What are you currently reading?
What have you recently finished reading?
What are you reading next?

And linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What are you currently reading?

Most actively, it’s Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good. I picked it up and read 100 pages at once almost by accident, quickly fascinated by Nick and Andy and their relationship, or what their relationship could be like if they were having one. (Which, at page 100, they are not.)

I’d love to curl up with it and finish it today.

What have you recently finished reading?

Yesterday I finished up with Digging Up Britain, by Mike Pitts, which I’d been stalled with for a while — not for any reason on the book’s part, just it was a little slower than my brain was looking for at the time. It discusses some fascinating sites in British archaeology; nothing came as too great a surprise to me, having grown up watching Time Team and thus always hooked into this kind of thing in the news etc, but there were a couple of surprises.

I also finished volume two of The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù), which was fun. SQQ is so clueless, though. Very curious how things are gonna get rounded out in volume three (since if I understand correctly, volume four is short stories rather than a continuation of the plot).

What are you reading next?

I’m planning to pick up Rebecca Fraimow’s The Iron Children, which looks like a short read. I’m also very tempted to go right ahead and pick up volume three of The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, too!

What are you currently reading?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Encyclopaedia Eorzea Volume II

Posted January 16, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Encyclopaedia Eorzea volume II

by Square Enix

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 303
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Dedicated to those for whom the pursuit of knowledge is a never-ending journey.

In the mere two years since the release of our first official lore book, the world of FINAL FANTASY XIV has grown to encompass not only the untraversed corners of Eorzea, but the far-reaching lands of an entire new continent to the east. With new horizons come new discoveries, and so it is with great pleasure that we bring you the second volume of Square Enix’s best-selling Encyclopædia Eorzea, containing 300 pages of newly compiled information on the realms we proudly call our second home.

The Encyclopaedia Eorzea books are amazing companions to the game, showing off some of the depth of the background lore, sneaking in some images showing how the designs were developed, showing off the weapons from a given expansion, etc.

Volume II covers up to the end of Stormblood, the third expansion, and includes a plot summary for all of those events — which was pretty handy when I realised I had no idea what had become of a particular character amongst all of that. There are recaps on specific characters linked to various regions, background on the history of the regions, details on the tribes (such as the Namazu), etc. Pretty good resource if you’re really into the lore of the game!

As ever with this kind of thing, it’s probably not of much interest if you don’t play the game, though if you’re curious about it, then you might take a peek to get an idea of the depth of lore and world-building out there to explore.

It also comes with an item code, providing you with a chance to own Matoya’s Hat for your character to wear. NB: it isn’t dyeable; it can be kept in your armoire and doesn’t need to go into your glamour chest. Yes, my code’s been claimed.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Final Fantasy XIV

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Goals for 2024

Posted January 16, 2024 by Nicky in General / 26 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic from That Artsy Reader Girl is about goals for 2024. I always think a lot about goals, given I work for two goal-tracking apps (and it used to be three!), so I’ve already given this some thought. Here we go!

I’d like to push myself to read plenty this year. If it doesn’t work out, that’s fine — it’s the effort that matters. So provisionally I’m aiming to read 400 books this year, with fallbacks to 365, 300, and “anything you can” if things go wrong.
I’d like to slowly decrease my TBR pile this year. It’s huge, and I like it that way, but it’s perhaps a bit much. I’m just trying to steadily read more than I acquire, and I have a Beeminder goal for the purpose! (Short version: that means I pay a little fine if I overindulge and buy more books than I actually read. It’s not for everyone, I know, but it works for me!)
I’d like to read longer books this year. There are loads of really great short books, but sometimes I find myself turning to them because I know I’ll be done with them sooner. That’s the dark side of goals to read as many books as possible in a year, so I’ve paired my goals with the aim of averaging a few more pages per book. Just 230 pages per book, so it’s not a big increase, but many books I love (like the British Library Crime Classics) fall around that length. I can mix in shorter novellas, longer fantasy doorstoppers, non-fiction, etc… all that matters is stretching myself a little bit and not falling too prey to “I should finish books as quickly as possible, so I should choose short books”.
I’d like to read some of those books that I’ve been waiting to read “someday”. Maybe even [that book you personally want me to read], Mum/Lisa/Adam/etc. Maybe! Things like Gideon the Ninth and Republic of Thieves.
I want to thoughtfully review most of the books I read. I already do, but it can be tempting with short books or manga not to take the time to reflect too much. I want to keep those one-line reviews that I only post to StoryGraph or Litsy to a minimum. Sometimes it’s the right thing to do, of course, so I’m not going to say I’ll never do it.
I want to finish the series I start. Because I tend to wait until later books are out in a series, catching up sometimes feels really daunting. Plus, I worry that people will get bored if my blog just churns out the reviews of each book in a series (see how widely I split up the Shady Hollow reviews, even though I read the books practically all in the same weekend).
I want to spend more time talking about books! I want to participate a bit more on Litsy and especially on other people’s blogs. I had difficulty keeping up with everything in 2022-2023, but it feels like a good time to start fresh, meet new people, and spend more time on it.
I want to keep up with the books I receive to review via Netgalley. Once upon a time I’d reviewed 80% of the books I received, but I’ve slipped down to 67%. It’s time to get back to it!
I want to keep reading plenty of non-fiction. This one probably isn’t hard, since I’ve stocked up on a lot of exciting new non-fiction recently, but I don’t see a lot of reviews out there for non-fiction, so it’s not always easy to know about what’s coming up. Regular trips to the bookshop are what keeps me in the loop for non-fiction.
Follow more blogs. That’s related to the last one! I’d love to follow more people reviewing non-fiction. I know you must be out there, I’ve seen the non-fiction readers challenge etc. So it’s time to explore! I’d also love to find more classic crime aficionados and… well, everybody!

So that’s me and my somewhat disorganised, no-priority-order list. How about everyone else?

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

Posted January 15, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

by Kate Strasdin

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 320
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
In 1838, a young woman was given a diary on her wedding day. Collecting snippets of fabric from a range of garments - some her own, others donated by family and friends - she carefully annotated each one, creating a unique record of their lives. Her name was Mrs Anne Sykes.

Nearly two hundred years later, the diary fell into the hands of Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian and museum curator. Using her expertise, Strasdin spent the next six years unravelling the secrets contained within the album's pages.

Her findings are remarkable. Piece by piece, she charts Anne's journey from the mills of Lancashire to the port of Singapore before tracing her return to England in later years. Fragments of cloth become windows into Victorian life: Pirates in Borneo, the complicated etiquette of mourning, poisonous dyes, the British Empire in full swing, rioting over working conditions and the terrible human cost of Britain's cotton industry.

This is life writing that celebrates ordinary people: not the grandees of traditional written histories, but the hidden figures, the participants in everyday life. Through the evidence of waistcoats, ball gowns and mourning outfits, Strasdin lays bare the whole of human experience in the most intimate of mediums: the clothes we choose to wear.

Kate Strasdin’s The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes takes a real object as her starting point in order to unravel the life of the original owner of the object, and through that, a picture of the world she lived in, the experiences she was likely to have had, and the things that shaped the lives of the average woman in her position. Strasdin came into the possession of a rare item: a journal in which the owner pasted scraps of cloth, representing the clothes of various of her loved ones and acquaintances, men and women alike (though mostly women).

She did a lot of research to find out who the owner of this book might be, pinning it down to a Mrs Anne Sykes, and discovering her origins and who her family were. Each chapter discusses the clothes both in the context of Anne Sykes’ life, but also the lives of other people at the time — even servants, as one rare item included is a scrap from Anne’s cook’s Sunday best.

I find this kind of thing fascinating, and Anne luckily had a quite interesting life, travelling with her merchant husband and seeing more of the world than many of her period. She lived in Singapore and Shanghai, as well as in the UK, and the scraps of her clothes show us how little she assimilated, though there is the intriguing inclusion of a scrap of a pirate flag.

It’s a little slow at times, but I think worthwhile; there are some full colour plates to give you a better idea of the scraps included, and of Anne’s careful labelling. It works well to give a picture of the life of a young woman married in 1838, whose apparently adoring husband gave her this journal to begin to memorialise their lives together in.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Kate Strasdin, non-fiction

Review – Blood Moon

Posted January 14, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Blood Moon

by M.J. O'Shea

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 184
Rating:

Synopsis:
"The summer we turned eighteen, I kissed Noah Harper -- by the light of the moon, sitting on the dock, I kissed him. And he kissed me back. I swear.

But the next morning, he ended our friendship and walked away. I haven't seen him since. Not for three long years.

At least not until last night. Last night he was sitting on our dock like nothing had changed. He was sweet and apologetic and more gorgeous than ever. I wanted to believe everything could go back to how it always was. But something's different about Noah. Something isn't quite right.

I have to know... what secret is Noah Harper hiding?"

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 always (eventually) read my Netgalley ARCs, so here we are: finally, I’m reviewing M.J. O’Shea’s Blood Moon. It’s a fairly young-feeling book, focusing on two teenage main characters and their romance, and the supernatural weirdness that eclipsed it and threatened to break the two of them apart. Obviously, ultimately it doesn’t, and Love Will Prevail, given the genre.

It’s all a bit too easy, though. There are few consequences for anything, and the main characters make choices that seem at odds with initial choices (for instance, Zack’s family seems to be important to him — but then he quickly decides he’ll run away with Noah and hardly ever seems to think of them again). There’s something very immature about the narration, which may be intentional (given the age of the protagonist), but which makes everything feel a little shallow.

The romance in and of itself is cute, but I wasn’t sold on any of it for those reasons.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, M.J. O'Shea, romance, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted January 13, 2024 by Nicky in General / 48 Comments

Greetings! It’s been a rough week for me that featured an urgent trip to the eye casualty unit. I’m recovering pretty well given the givens, and escaped with just a corneal abrasion and multiple antibiotics to apply every couple of hours, but I’m a tad limited on how long I can use screens without eye strain right now.

Biscuit Bun is really very sorry for causing all this…

As ever, linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

Books acquired this week:

I may have had a book-buying spree to help make me feel better, even though it’s only just been Christmas and there’s already plenty on my TBR heap…

Bit of a mix, as usual! I’m excited about The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which Waterstones had on sale a biiit before the release date. I was lucky: I walked in just as one of the booksellers put this on the shelf.

I also received a few of books to review:

If you saw my Top Ten Tuesday post, you’ll have noticed this means I actually got several of the books I’m most looking forward to in the first half of 2024, which is really nice!

Posts from this week:

I didn’t post as many reviews this week due to it being a really bad week, but there were plenty of posts to recap, all the same!

Dragons’ Teeth and Thunderstones, by Ken McNamara (2/5 stars)
Tickets for the Ark, by Rebecca Nesbit (3/5 stars)
Twilight Falls, by Juneau Black (4/5 stars)
Clean Room vol 3 – Waiting for the Stars to Fall, by Gail Simone et al (3/5 stars)
The Governess Affair, by Courtney Milan (5/5 stars)
The Impossible Impostor, by Deanna Raybourn (2/5 stars)

And other posts:

What I’m reading:

It’s been mostly graphic novels so far this week, which were short and easy while I was stressed, but I did also finish (and love) A City on Mars, by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith. Over the weekend I hope to get stuck into some of my new non-fic reading, and polish off a novel or two.

Assuming my eye holds up, anyway… I’ll skip the preview of reviews to come because I’m not on my usual computer and I need to take a break from my screen now.

How’s everyone else doing? A better week than mine, I hope!

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup