Review – Checkmate to Murder

Posted July 16, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Checkmate to Murder by E.C.R. LoracCheckmate to Murder, E.C.R. Lorac

Something about the setting and set-up of this reminded me of a previous book of Lorac’s that I’ve read (Bats in the Belfry, I think), but it’s more of an atmosphere thing than a repeat of the plot or something like that. I actually guessed what had happened in the end fairly early on, just from the way certain things were emphasised and leaned on, but I enjoyed the ride of how it gets unravelled and the culprit caught.

E.C.R. Lorac’s books always have a pleasant quality I find it hard to put my finger on. Part of it is competence, and the fact that I can trust her to work out the story in a satisfactory way. Part of it is that she doesn’t usually dwell on the characters who are awful, but on the decent and hardworking people who are trying to put things right, or adjust to the awfulness of whatever crime has been committed. Her detective is always so conscientious and decent — such a complete fantasy, but one I enjoy.

Rating: 4/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted July 15, 2021 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Real quick, this week:

Cover of The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia PostrelWhat are you currently reading?​

A few books at once, as usual! But I’m in a hurry, so I’ll stick to saying that I’ve just started The Fabric of Civilization, by Virginia Postrel, and I’m finding it fascinating. The first chapters go into specific elements of fabric (thread, dye, etc) describing their origins and development.

I’ve also started a reread of The Paradise War, by Stephen Lawhead. It seems almost impossible that the suck fairy hasn’t visited this book I loved as a teen, but it was so formative to my tastes that I’m giving it another go.

What have you recently finished reading?​

The last thing I finished was Magic Strikes, which was a reread, and remains a heck of a lot of fun. I overestimated how much the arena scenes featured in the book, though!

What will you be reading next?

Should be Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho, since it’s coming up as a book club read. But, as always, I can’t promise I won’t be tempted by shinies, especially with my wife currently reading K.J. Charles’ Will Darling books, which I have not yet started…

So… what are you reading?

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Review – Ancestors

Posted July 14, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Cover of Ancestors by Alice RobertsAncestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials, Alice Roberts

To get my nitpicking out of the way, the subtitle is really inaccurate. There are a lot (a lot) more than seven burials discussed here: I wouldn’t be surprised if it managed to get up to seven burials per chapter, though I wasn’t counting. It makes sense, in a way: many prehistoric remains are fragmentary, and they can tell us more in aggregate — which does lead me to my other peeve with this book, which is that many of the examples were actually not even British. Sure, each chapter discussed British remains as well, but there’s inevitably a lot of discussion of other burials, including quite a bit of detail about places like Shanidar.

I guess what I had hoped for was a book that really focused in on seven specific exemplary burials, and was quite exhaustive about those, discussing all the different factors we know about that specific individual, that specific grave. At least, that’s what I expected with the subtitle, at least. So, it isn’t that. There is quite a bit of detail about some of the burials, including some fascinating ones I didn’t know about, but it is really much more of a general survey of prehistoric burials, mostly in Britain, but using burials in Europe and further afield to help contextualise them. Which also makes sense, but is not how the title sounded.

Despite those peeves taking up a lot of my writing space so far, I did really enjoy the book. There are some burials here which really intrigue me, like the full chariot burials, complete with horses. Roberts mentions some ideas that really fascinate me, like the idea that maybe offerings to the water were actually funerary offerings, not offerings to abstract deities. She suggests that some of the “missing” dead (we would expect to find more prehistoric remains than we do) could have been cremated and scattered on water, with offerings thrown in after them — or even that bodies could have been placed on rafts with their belongings, and then the offerings ended up in the water when the rafts deteriorated.

It’s an interesting idea, at least, and the book had a few such titbits. Although I knew a little about most of the burials she discusses, if not all, there was definitely some new material in here and stuff that surprised and fascinated me. Worth the read!

Oh, and I’ll just bet the section on interpreting sex/gender in burials reaaaally chapped some people’s hide. Ahaha.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Raybearer

Posted July 13, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Raybearer by Jordan IfuekoRaybearer, Jordan Ifueko

I found this book a little frustrating: I got into it immediately, and then there was a timeskip which kind of knocked me out of things again, and I didn’t find my feet again until the last third or so of the book. There were parts where I raced through it, and then a middle section that I just kind of plodded through. I did enjoy the bonds between Tarisai and the others, particularly the bond between Tarisai and Dayo; the fact that it was so strong and yet determinedly non-sexual and non-romantic was great.

It’s definitely YA, and it feels very young, but there is some ambiguity there in some of the characters and relationships, which gives it a bit more depth than it might otherwise have.

I’d be interested enough to read the second book: the world at least feels interesting, and there’s a good sense that there’s a lot more out there (something which always does it for me with fantasy settings). There’s a lot of enjoyable detail that shows this isn’t your standard medieval-Europe inspired fantasy, too.

Rating-wise, I feel torn — easily four stars for the parts I tore through, but a meh for the middle part. I guess I’ll compromise on 3 — but it’s a 3 that’s close to 4 in some respects.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs

Posted July 12, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa RandallDark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Lisa Randall

Welp. This book is a lot of dark matter, and not much dinosaurs. Which is more or less what I expected, of course: the title is a really obvious gimmick. And yet, I think I’d have enjoyed it more if it had just been billed honestly. Dark matter itself is fascinating — why do we need to drag the dinosaurs into it?

Well, the author’s contention is that dark matter may explain the alleged periodicity of Earth impacts by meteorites (a theory which I believe is actually in question and has always been a bit of a niche theory — at least in the pop science I’ve read before). She takes a great deal of time explaining the solar system and the formation of the universe, then a bit of time explaining meteorites, then finally gets round to explaining dark matter. By this point, two thirds of the book are done, and she finally introduces her own theory. Finally, in the very last chapter, we finally hear why she’s linking dark matter and dinosaurs.

It’s not badly explained or uninteresting, it’s just very badly titled. I was pretty sure there would not be much by way of dinosaur content, but you do have to live up to this kind of title a bit better than that, to avoid confusion. In the end, it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for — too much time spent on the “this is how the universe came about” which I’ve read eleventy-three different times, and at least twice this very year. Randall doesn’t have the charisma to really carry that off, for me.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Plain Bad Heroines

Posted July 11, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Cover of Plain Bad Heroines by emily m. danforthPlain Bad Heroines, emily m. danforth

In some ways, I guess it’s a surprise I picked this up, since it relies heavily on horror tropes and on the reader recognising horror tropes and horror movies and sly little references. That’s never really been my thing, though one or two authors have tempted me into that realm, or interesting concepts, etc. Anyway, the blurb tempted me in despite my total wussiness, and actually, I can’t say I was ever really creeped out.

It follows three women in the present as they make a movie about events of the past, when a girls’ school seemed cursed and some girls died in weird and unpleasant ways. It starts to seem like maybe the curse is real, because weird things keep happening around these three women now in the present. Or is it just the movie getting under their skins?

The book plays with that ambiguity throughout, and it feels like it’s building toward something explosive and genuinely frightening — there is a real tension and weirdness to it, but for me it never quite came off. The revelations that happen actually diminish the climax of it: now you know what’s going on, it seems much more mundane, even when weird stuff is still happening. It didn’t hold onto enough of the unknowable weirdness to really be unsettling. In the end, you get some answers, and for me at least, it was too many answers. It never managed to reach the fever pitch it was trying to build — I didn’t get even a little bit unsettled.

One thing that did work is the charge between three of the female characters — and the love between two of the characters in the past/flashback portions of the book. Those relationships work very well, and the way those relationships are far from idyllic, but sometimes capture moments of bliss, really works out for me.

Rating-wise, I feel like 2 is pretty fair. I didn’t DNF it, so there was stuff that kept me hanging on… but it was 600+ pages of waiting for it to live up to the promises it was making, and for me, it didn’t.

Rating: 2/5

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Weekly Roundup

Posted July 10, 2021 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

Happy Saturday! I’m in the middle of watching the Wales v Argentina rugby game, with a British and Irish Lions game to follow later. So much rugby. <3 And books! It’s my day off, so it’s a good day for reading — and I haven’t been doing much of that this week!

New books:

Cover of Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

I’ve had my eye on this one for a while. It’s actually releasing in hardback in the UK… but Bookshop.org have some paperback editions from a different press, and I snapped one up when I saw it was less than £10!

Received to review:

Cover of Index, A History of the by Dennis Duncan Cover of The Bone Wars by Erin Evan

I was pretty fascinating by a book about working on dictionaries recently (by Kory Stamper), so a book about indices is more exciting to me than it sounds. And The Bone Wars sounds like a lot of fun.

Read this week:

Cover of Ancestors by Alice Roberts

Not much reading this week, as I said… alas.

Reviewed this week:

So that’s everything from me this week! How’re your shelves looking, folks?

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Review – Reinventing the Wheel

Posted July 9, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Reinventing the Wheel by Francis and Bronwen PercivalReinventing the Wheel, Bronwen and Francis Percival

I thought this would be a great companion to The Cheesemonger’s [safdf], though probably more academic and less rich in anecdote. It was probably equally as rich in anecdote, and though the authors’ passion is clear, it somehow didn’t come through nearly as well because other parts of the book felt so dry. It also doesn’t help that they’re very judgemental about what constitutes real cheese, how cheese should be made, how cheese should taste, and yes, also how you should buy and enjoy cheese.

I’m sure the experience they describe as being the only way to eat “proper” “real” cheese is very enjoyable, if expensive and time-consuming; it’s the way they present it as the only way, and as a moral choice, that somewhat bugs me, because it blames consumers and producers for problems introduced by a capitalist system in which profit is more important than most anything else. I’m not sure that if everyone did try to live the way they say cheese should be made, bought and eaten whether that would actually work.

Possibly they’re right, but being judged for enjoying Mexicana Cheese or Applewood or whatever I bought from the supermarket just gets a little wearing.

In any case, it’s a good overview of how pasteurisation and anti-microbial measures have nearly killed the old ways of making cheese, and how that can in many ways be a bad thing. They discuss the fact that the balanced microbial communities in milk that hasn’t been pasteurised — at least in the past — tended to keep each other in balance and avoid some of the spoilage problems that modern cheese is prey to.

Their passion is clear, like I said, but it didn’t make me want to go and eat cheese like Palmer’s book did.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Magic Bites

Posted July 8, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of Magic Bites by Ilona AndrewsMagic Bites, Ilona Andrews

I read this relatively recently already, but sometimes you just want to turn to familiar books — and I couldn’t get back into the book I was up to in my last read through the series, just starting cold from the first page. So I went back to the beginning, which is a) a very good place to start (sorry, couldn’t resist) and b) has the start of the relationship between Kate and Curran, which is always entertaining.

I didn’t giggle as much at this one as I remember, but there were some great moments (here, kitty, kitty) and Kate’s smart mouth remains a joy to me. I love the way the books build up the hints about who she is and what she’s hiding, and that she and Curran are not obviously star-crossed lovers right from the start — you genuinely don’t know if they’re going to end up hating each other or loving each other, and both feel possible (though the former admittedly feels a little more likely).

One thing that did annoy me a lot on this readthrough was that Kate figures things out, after some healthy hints around her (really, she is slow on this one), and then Curran immediately jumps to a conclusion about who the bad guy must be. He decides she’s wrong altogether when he’s wrong about who he assumed was the problem. Dude, you’re the one who jumped to conclusions, not Kate!

Anyway, it’s a bag of fun and remains so, with lots of hints of what’s to come. Kate is pretty epic, and it’s a fun fast read for me. Maybe it’s not the best book in the world, but… the fascinating setting drew me in and the character arcs have kept me. One day I’ll actually catch up to the most recently published volume.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – After the Dragons

Posted July 7, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Cover of After the Dragons by Cynthia ZhangAfter the Dragons, Cynthia Zhang

Received to review via Netgalley; publication date 19th August 2021

I seem to have picked this up mostly on a whim and for the promise of dragons, because I didn’t know much about it going in. Which was quite nice, actually: I wasn’t looking for the love story, wasn’t expecting the discussions of chronic illness, responsibility, family, etc. I just knew there were dragons, and I wasn’t disappointed there!

If you’re looking for Western-style dragons, of course, you might find this disappointing. So too if you’re wanting huge dragons that rule the skies. The dragons of this alternate world are small, stunted by pollution, and used and abused by humans for fights and as pets. Kai cares deeply about dragons, carefully taking them in and splicing their broken wings, disinfecting their cuts, and trying to bring them back to health. Eli is in Beijing to study and do research, but his supervisor drags him out to the dragon fights — which is where he meets Kai. They’re instantly antagonistic, not dramatically so, but because Eli wants to help and heal, and Kai refuses to be pitied.

The love story that develops is a quiet one, wrapped around Kai’s concern for the dragons and Eli’s exploration of some of his family roots. It feels a very tender story: there are no huge dramatic events, but a normal and healthy relationship that’s trying to find room for both parties, and find a balance.

As a warning, the ending is not a “Happy Ever After” but a “Happy For Now”; much can happen, given Kai’s illness and the plans he makes. The future isn’t wrapped up neatly in a bow — but nonetheless the story is one of hope.

Rating: 5/5

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