Update from the Department of Being Burned To The Socket

Posted February 21, 2021 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

Hey everyone!

You may have noticed lately that I’ve been a bit absent from the blog. I’ve been thinking through how I feel about reviewing (and blogging and tracking my reading) because I’ve been doing it faithfully for literally half my life. My estimate is that in that time, I might have missed reviewing about 10 books… most of which are recent misses. That’s not a streak I’m excited to see broken!

But as I’ve ramped up to full time at work — which has been a long trek, because I’m self-employed and it’s been a matter of finding people I trust to work with, and work that I enjoy doing (spoiler: I did not enjoy doing transcription) — and as I’ve been studying for my MSc, I’ve had less and less leisure time. At first, I was trying to cram in as much as possible to that leisure time by setting myself targets, making lists, trying to do all the things I did before in half the time.

Needless to say, that was a bad idea. Much as I’ve enjoyed reading, reviewing, doing blog posts, crocheting, playing video games, learning languages, doing online courses… and all the other things I tried to strictly schedule in, once you’re doing it like that it’s work too. I was never getting any time off.

So recently I’ve been slimming everything down, and one of the things I cut out was the obligation to get reviews written on time. Which has meant they haven’t been written at all, or sometimes that when they’re written, I haven’t gone ahead and posted them.

I don’t think I’m going to abandon this blog and reviewing the books I read. But I will be changing things up a bit: I don’t know if folks noticed recently that, with fiction books at least, I did more work on recapping what the book is about — I was trying to write the kind of review that I see being popular elsewhere, and maybe give readers a bit more information on the book rather than my impressions. But I’ve never been that kind of reviewer, and it doesn’t come naturally to me. I prefer to be short and sweet! So I will go back to whatever feels natural for the book I’m describing, rather than trying to recapitulate the summary in an interesting way.

In the end, what I need to go back to is reviews being for me. Those are the reviews most people followed me for, anyway! I need to stop worrying about networking and getting visits and yes, getting ARCs. I think all of this will be more enjoyable for you guys if I’m enjoying it too.

So! What this means practically is just one thing: I’ll be catching up soon, and that might mean a spate of reviews here and there whenever I have energy, as I try to get back up to speed. It might also mean that now and then I won’t review a book, especially if it’s the umpteenth time… or if I do, I might only post it on Litsy or Goodreads. Otherwise, should be business as usual here!

The past year has been exhausting for everyone, so by the way, I fully understand if folks lurk, don’t comment back if I visit, don’t post for months and then post a bit, don’t review, review a lot… whatever’s getting you through. Reminder that this is a hobby for most of us and it should be fun!

Lots of love,
Nicky / The Bibliophibian

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Review – A World Beneath the Sands

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

A World Beneath the Sands, Toby Wilkinson

A World Beneath the Sands is a book not about Egyptology, for the most part, but about Egyptologists — and not just the highlights (Champollion, Petrie, Howard Carter) but some of the less-known names as well, including some of the women who facilitated the study of Ancient Egypt. Broadly speaking, it should have been my thing, but in execution, it just… wasn’t. It was rather slow, and just… not very exciting.

It was mostly about political manoeuvring and the various European countries that jockeyed over control of Egypt, and the doing of archaeology a distant second. The details of digs and finds were barely described, mostly just listed off before moving onto the next list of finds.

In principle, a history of the archaeologists, scholars and looters who shaped our understanding of the history of Ancient Egypt really should have been fascinating, but I found it really dry and unnecessarily verbose. I’m hoping it’s just because I didn’t enjoy the topic as much as expected, because I have another of Wilkinson’s books (The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt), and I’m hoping to enjoy that a lot!

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, Toby Wilkinson

Review – The Biscuit

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

The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence, Lizzie Collingham

When I mention that I’ve been reading a history of biscuits, people’s usual response is confusion about why that would take a whole book or be particularly interesting. The answer is that Collingham discusses the social, economic and political circumstances surrounding the development of biscuits, and though the subtitle calls it a “British indulgence“, it discusses other countries too and the colonial uses of biscuits (yes, really — they were thought to be useful in ‘civilising’ places like India).

This was exactly what I was hoping for: a microhistory on a really narrow topic that used that topic to reflect on larger issues. You might not automatically think of looking at the Industrial Revolution through the role of biscuits, or realise the extent to which naval voyages of exploration relied on ship’s biscuit, or appreciate the fact that the original biscuits were twice-baked bread made a couple of times a year in communities that couldn’t afford to bake fresh bread every day… but all those different topics can open out when you start digging in.

You don’t just get to learn about when they started making Jammie Dodgers, or that the company was notoriously cheapskate and used plums for the “raspberry” jam in them because it was cheaper than raspberries… that’s certainly one of the things I learned, but I also learned that the custom of following savoury food with a sweet dessert has come down in a very long tradition from when the stomach was thought to putrefy food, and Arab ideas that sugar was ideal to help seal off the stomach from harmful vapours caused by that process.

In the end, it’s a history of biscuits and it comes back to that pretty swiftly when it strays away, but using the biscuit as a home base, it can tell you an awful lot.

In addition, it also contains some recipes between chapters, some of them traditional and others from modern sources. I haven’t tried any, since I’m not the baker of the family and I’m also very lazy, but it’s a nice touch and we’ll probably keep my copy in order to give them a try someday.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Lizzie Collingham, non-fiction

Review – You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack

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

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Tom Gauld

I expected to really really love this, because I generally enjoy Tom Gauld’s humour and style, and most of the Snooty Bookshop postcard collection are great (if niche, and thus sometimes difficult to place with appropriate recipients on Postcrossing)… but actually, I found that it all got a bit samey after a while, and some of them just weren’t that funny or worth noting.

I’m still glad I got it, because there are some great ones, including the one that gives the collection its title. But at the same time, I probably wouldn’t recommend it… you can follow Tom Gauld on Twitter to see many of his cartoons there, and that’s usually more fun — you get to see them one at a time, as they come out, and then the less amusing ones fare better because you’re not reading a whole book of them.

It’s also a matter of taste, of course, and maybe it’s best read a little bit at a time anyway!

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Tom Gauld

Review – Borrowed Time

Posted February 6, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Borrowed Time: The Science of How and Why We Age, Sue Armstrong

I’ve read one of Sue Armstrong’s books before, on the role of the p53 gene in cancer, so despite aging and the science thereof not really being my thing, I thought I’d give it a try. And it was, in fact, riveting. I knew a little about some of the experiments — I read a paper on sirtuins and resveratrol for my final exam of my BSc, so that gave me some extra context — but much of the detail was new to me, and Armstrong explains things beautifully and keeps things very clear.

The answer to the question of how and why we age is, of course, “lots of ways and lots of reasons”, and the science isn’t all the way yet on understanding exact mechanisms and unpicking the many small effects that can add up over a lifetime. Armstrong avoids giving any false certainty, but makes it clear how people in the know expect things to go, and what they’re cautious about. Unlike some writers, she doesn’t intrude a lot into the narrative (we don’t have to hear stories about her neighbour’s sister’s dog’s brother, which some science writers lean on a bit too heavily), or when she does it feels relevant and useful to understand where she stands.

For a field with so many different puzzle-pieces, Armstrong really brings it together well, and I actually found myself reading this all in one day, in great big chunks. Now that’s good science writing!

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, non-fiction, science, Sue Armstrong

Review – The End of Everything

Posted February 6, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The End of Everything, Katie Mack

The End of Everything is about all the potential ways the universe can end. Katie Mack describes the various scenarios and why they’re likely or unlikely, the evidence for them, and what looking into these possibilities can teach us about the universe, even if they all turn out to be wrong. She has a fairly breezy style, but some of the actual physics is pretty hard to understand, so it’s to her credit that it feels comparatively light while also making what she describes clear enough.

Unfortunately, for me, physics is one of those topics that I don’t dislike because it’s hard — though I do find it to be difficult — as because it leaves me very much wondering what the point of everything is. Even biology will leave me feeling that way once I dig too deep, and this isn’t a dig at Mack at all… but it definitely made it harder for me to enjoy this book, because it does deal with those really big topics, and where some people can take joy in all the unknowns and the deep weirdness that we manage to exist at all, it really gets under my skin and makes me feel very small and pointless. I can’t really recommend that as an experience, but if entropy doesn’t get you down and a cold empty universe doesn’t bother you, then this will be much more to your taste!

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Katie Mack, non-fiction, science

Review – Genuine Fakes

Posted February 4, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff, Lynda Pyne

I didn’t really expect this book to be so riveting, but it really was. The central idea is a bit shaky, because Lynda Pyne’s definition of “genuine fakes” is very, very elastic: one example is lab-created diamonds, another is the Spanish Forger’s faked medieval illustrations, another is the faked Archaeoraptor fossil… The things that make each item “genuine” or “fake” are pretty flexible. The reasoning is most solid when it comes to art like the Spanish Forger’s work, which has now become desirable in and of itself. The reasoning for the Archaeoraptor fossil is basically “well, it’s made up of real fossils!” Yeah, who cares, those fossils have been ripped from their original correct context in a desperate attempt to deceive people and get more money. That’s not a genuine fake, that’s just a fake.

And then there’s a bit about wildlife documentaries and how they’re kind of fake (sometimes, depending on how they’re filmed) and kind of not, and the point kind of dissipated somewhere in there for a while in favour of just explaining how much money it takes to create a documentary like Blue Planet II.

That all said, though, even if Pyne’s examples don’t all hang together, I enjoyed her dissection of each item and the things it has to tell us. I didn’t know anything about the Spanish Forger before, and that was maybe my favourite thing to learn about. Interesting stuff here, just… not really very organised.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Lynda Pyne, non-fiction, science

Review – A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem

Posted January 28, 2021 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem, Manda Collins

A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem is a light mystery-romance, where the romance feels like the more important element of the two. Kate Bascomb is a reporter, the owner of a newspaper she took over after her husband died, and she’s determined to champion women and shine a light on things women are kept sheltered from in England of 1865. Andrew Eversham is a detective inspector, and her investigative reporting endangers his career as she quickly finds a witness his team entirely neglected to speak to, with crucial evidence about a string of murders.

Naturally, the two get drawn together personally, particularly after the killings start getting very close to Kate, who discovers a body while on a visit to a friend’s country home. The murders were confined to London at first, but suddenly they seem to have followed her… and thus so does Eversham. The sparks of attraction between them are very obvious, and this was the shakiest part of the book for me: they leapt from lust to love in mere pages, with very little provocation. I’d expected a bit more will-they-won’t-they, but it was remarkably straightforward. At least they mostly managed to communicate like adults, which can be a big bugbear for me.

I thought it was light and frothy and fairly inconsequential, and for the most part, I was fine with that. Kate and her friend Caro were fun, and I appreciated the friendship between Kate and Val, as well — I was very relieved when there was no sign of sexual interest or jealousy on either of them’s part, and their quasi-sibling relationship was rather fun. Much of the setting and characters are sketched in fairly lightly; historical fiction this is not, if that’s what you’re hoping for… and the mystery was fairly light too.

When I try to sum it all up, it all seems pretty thin and like I’m damning it with faint prize, but it was a genuinely fun reading experience, and a nice way to spend my day, picking it up here and there to read a chapter whenever I could. It’s unlikely to stick in my head, but I’d happily read another Manda Collins book or even another book in this series.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Manda Collins, mystery, romance

WWW Wednesday

Posted January 28, 2021 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

Greetings, folks! It’s still Wednesday until I’ve slept, right?

What are you currently reading?

Fiction: Abaddon’s Gate, by James S.A. Corey. I’m now nearing the end of my reread of this one, and the next one (Cibola Burn, I think?) will be entirely new to me, so that’s going to be interesting.

Non-fiction: I picked up Genuine Fakes, by Lynda Pynes yesterday; it’s an interesting book; a bit scattershot in its approach (a fake fossil made up of four genuine fossils is not [yet?] a genuine fossil in anything like the same way as a piece of art by the Spanish Forger has become a collectable item in its own right), but engaging. Funny how some of my most random book choices turn out to be the most engaging, while A World Beneath the Sands (Toby Wilkinson) is a bit of a grind, despite being one of my usual interests.

What have you recently finished reading?

A Lady’s Guide to Mischief and Mayhem, by Manda Collins. Frothy and light, not too consequential, and relatively predictable… which makes it exactly what I wanted to read right now. Bit like the Veronica Speedwell books in some ways, though the heroine is a reporter rather than a scientist.

What will you be reading next?

As ever, it’s anyone’s guess. The Mask of Mirrors (Alyc Helms and Marie Brennan writing as M.A. Carrick) has arrived, so that’s a possibility… but The Animals at Lockwood Manor is on my five-book shortlist — which I haven’t touched for weeks and weeks, argh, clearly it needs a refresh — and is actually starting to pique my interest. Also I’m kind of in a non-fiction mood, and there’s a couple of books I got for Christmas that might tempt me there.

What are you reading, folks?

Tags: Alyc Helms, books, James S.A. Corey, Jane Healey, Lynda Pynes, M.A. Carrick, Manda Collins, Marie Brennan, Toby Wilkinson, WWW Wednesday