Tag: books

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 29, 2025 by Nicky in General / 1 Comment

What have you recently finished reading?

Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After, which… I think would’ve meant a lot to me 10-15 years ago. Though it would probably have also been more viscerally upsetting 10-15 years ago, since the main character gets private details exposed in school which is reminiscent to me of someone finding private stuff of mine and outing me to the entire school as a lesbian (not a term I use for myself, but close enough to true to kick off several years of intense bullying). It was very teenage, in a way that doesn’t speak to me much now, but I think I’m glad I gave it a shot. I need to mull over how to properly review it.

What are you currently reading?

A lot of books at once, as I try to finish off my Book Spin Bingo card! Let’s see… the last thing I was reading was Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent, which is pretty fun. I have some theories about where things are going, and I kind of hope I’m wrong, just so it can surprise me.

I’m also still partway through volume three of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, which is still cute and silly. I’ve also started on: Anna Bright’s The Hedge Witch of Foxhall, which I’m still kind of dubious about; Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man, which I’m enjoying but in which the mystery so far is not that mysterious apart from one element; aaand Fonda Lee and Shannon Lee’s Breath of the Dragon, which is enjoyable enough but not totally wowing me right now.

What will you be reading next?

Volume one of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, also for my Book Spin Bingo card! I’d wanted to finish Disabled Tyrant first, but I had a couple of days of not reading much, so it won’t work out if I want to finish off the bingo card.

I also want to read a couple of manga and comics I’ve identified for a comics bingo card, but that might have to wait for November. Sadly, there are only so many reading hours in the day, for some weird reason.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – The Troublesome Guest of Sotomura Detective Agency

Posted October 28, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Troublesome Guest of Sotomura Detective Agency

by Kusama Sakae

Genres: Manga, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 265
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Matsuda Kei is a private investigator who specializes in quirky cases centered on his local neighborhood around the shopping arcade. He's recently taken on a new roommate (and lover) named Kamiko who is unemployed, ruthlessly horny, and was actually a classmate from his past.

While the two work together to solve cases, they carry on in what starts as a strictly physical relationship... until Matsuda finds that this temporary situation he has entered with Kamiko might be turning into something more.

Sakae Kusama’s The Troublesome Guest of Sotomura Detective Agency is a one-shot manga which features a private investigator (Matsuda Kei) and a former classmate (Kamiko) who ends up running into him as part of a case. Kamiko starts freeloading on Matsuda, and it becomes obvious that they were both intrigued by each other back in school, but Matsuda judged Kamiko for his dating habits and Kamiko felt unfairly judged.

They start off in a super casual sexual relationship and have lots and lots of sex, which I think comes somewhat at the expense of developing a relationship between them. There are glimpses of it, for example when Matsuda decides to figure out what happened to Kamiko’s childhood dog in order to set his mind at rest about it, but mostly it’s just a lot of sex.

Still, when I think about it, both definitely had redeeming characteristics: Matsuda might be grumpy all the time, but he helps people out, and Kamiko begins to care about Matsuda and apply himself to doing the same work (and really throws his heart into it when Matsuda’s in trouble).

I wasn’t a huge fan of the art, but the story (the detective stuff but also Kamiko’s horndog ways) kinda reminded me a bit of Dee and Ryo in FAKE — it’s not the same story by any means, far from it, and doesn’t go as deep into either character’s background or thoughts, but that did give me a nostalgic smile.

Not for me, ultimately, but that’s mostly a personal taste thing.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Kusama Satae, manga, mystery, romance

Review – Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems

Posted October 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems

by Simon Armitage

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 89

Synopsis:
Growing up in Marsden among the hills of West Yorkshire, Simon Armitage has always associated his early poetic experiences with the night-time view from his bedroom window, those 'private, moonstruck observations' and the clockwork comings and goings in the village providing rich subject matter for his first poems. Decades on, that window continues to operate as both framework and focal point for the writing, the vastness of the surrounding moors always at his shoulder and forming a constant psychological backdrop, no matter how much time has elapsed and how distant those experiences.

Magnetic Field brings together Armitage's Marsden poems, from his very first pamphlet to new work from a forthcoming collection. It offers personal insight into a preoccupation that shows no signs of fading, and his perspective on a locality he describes as 'transcendent and transgressive', a genuinely unique region forming a frontier territory between many different worlds. Magnetic Field also invites questions about the forging of identity, the precariousness of memory, and our attachment to certain places and the forces they exert.

I remember liking some of Simon Armitage’s poems, so I was surprised that I didn’t really connect with or enjoy a single one in this collection! It’s deeply rooted in place, being a collection of his poems about his childhood home, and it’s not a picture I connect with myself, so perhaps that’s part of it… though really, I didn’t get a sense of warmth or place from it at all.

Maybe I misremembered and I’m just not a fan of Armitage’s work — I’m not totally giving up, I think I remember one of his other collections, so I’ll see if the library has it and I’ll give that a shot, but… sadly, it might just not be my thing.

It is a nice collection though, with some black-and-white images added and an introduction explaining why a collection of poems about Marsden, and what the place has meant to him.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, poetry, Simon Armitage

Review – Bitch

Posted October 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal

by Lucy Cooke

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 400
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
What does it mean to be female? Mother, carer, the weaker sex? Think again.

In the last few decades a revolution has been brewing in zoology and evolutionary biology. Lucy Cooke introduces us to a riotous cast of animals, and the scientists studying them, that are redefining the female of the species.

Meet the female lemurs of Madagascar, our ancient primate cousins that dominate the males of their species physically and politically. Or female albatross couples, hooking up together to raise their chicks in Hawaii. Or the meerkat mothers of the Kalahari Desert – the most murderous mammals on the planet.

The bitches in Bitch overturn outdated binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology and behaviour. Lucy Cooke's brilliant new book will change how you think – about sex, sexual identity and sexuality in animals and also the very forces that shape evolution.

Lucy Cooke’s Bitch aims to re-examine things that are taken for biological truths (like the idea that eggs are more costly so female animals evolved to be choosy while sperm is “cheap” and male animals are always profligate with it) in order to debunk the idea that female animals are less evolved than male animals.

She digs into this through a wide range of examples, but it’s worth noting that she really takes until the last chapter to wrestle with the fact that a male/female binary is an overly reductive and in fact unhelpful way of viewing the world. Each example, until the last chapter, is predicated on the idea that there are female animals and male animals, and some of those female animals are a bit more masculinised than we thought, or the sex roles are a bit more fluid or just plain different than we thought. It’s only in the last chapter that she reckons with species that have more than two recognised sexes (humans also have more than two phenotypic sexes, but because intersex individuals are comparatively rare and viewed as simply aberrant, we don’t really talk about that and this is never acknowledged) and the fact that the variation between sexes is actually often less than the variation between any given pair of individuals (including individuals considered to be of the same sex).

Which is to say, she doesn’t really properly reckon with it at all, since it comes in as an afterthought. As far as she goes, there are some interesting examples that overturn and complicate scientists’ expectations.

It might be a good one to sneak in some more complicated biology on people who think that genes or hormones or genitalia are the be-all and end-all of sex, but have some space between their ears for new concepts.

Personally, I learned about some new-to-me examples, and learned about some scientists who are doing interesting work, but it wasn’t overall that surprising or new to me.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Lucy Cooke, non-fiction, science

Review – Pagans

Posted October 26, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Pagans

by James Alistair Henry

Genres: Alternate History, Crime, Mystery
Pages: 321
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Two cops. One killer. Hundreds of gods.

21st Century London. The Norman conquest never happened. The ancient tribes of Britain remain undefeated. But murders still have to be solved.

The small, mostly unimportant, island of Britain is inhabited by an uneasy alliance of tribes - the dominant Saxon East, the beleaguered Celtic West, and an independent Nordic Scotland - and tensions are increasing by the second. Supermarket warpaint sales are at an all-time high, mead abuse shortens the lives of thousands, and social media is abuzz with conspiracy theories suggesting the High Table's putting GPS trackers in the honeycakes.

Amid this febrile atmosphere, the capital is set to play host to the Unification Summit, which aims to join together the various tribes into one 'united kingdom'. But when a Celtic diplomat is found brutally murdered, his body nailed to an ancient oak, the fragile peace is threatened. Captain Aedith Mercia, daughter of a powerful Saxon leader, must join forces with Celtic Tribal Detective Inspector Drustan to solve the murder - and stop political unrest spilling onto the streets.

But is this an isolated incident? Or are Aedith and Drustan facing a serial killer with a decades-old grudge? To find out, they must delve into their own murky pasts and tackle forces that go deeper than they ever could have imagined.

Set in a world that's far from our own and yet captivatingly familiar, Pagans explores contemporary themes of religious conflict, nationalism, prejudice... and the delicate internal politics of the office coffee round. Gripping and darkly funny, Pagans keeps you guessing until the very end.

James Henry Alistair’s Pagans is set in an interesting world in which the Norman invasion of 1066 never happened, and Britain is divided into Norse, Saxon and indigenous British contingents which don’t get along super great. Britain’s also a bit of a backwater, with geopolitics all flipped around from what we know — clearly a lot more than the Battle of Hastings did and didn’t happen/work out the way we know it. That’s never explored at great length, and is actually just the backdrop for a mystery.

This works… okay. I had so many questions, including a lot of them about the marginal (nearly unknown) nature of Christians in the story, given that the Norse, Saxons and native British, or at the very least subgroups thereof, all converted to Christianity at some point in their histories, without any need for the Normans to invade. It doesn’t make sense.

If you set that aside, and accept the idea of a modern Britain that’s Saxon, Norse and indigenous British (with heavy marginalisation for “the Indij”), there are some fun details about how this works and how people experience the world, some of which are semi-reasonable to consider having grown out of Saxon, Norse and British beliefs. If you accept the context, the mystery that plays out against it is a fun one, playing the groups against one another (while having them work together in the form of the police) and leading up to quite the climax.

I actually enjoyed Aedith and Drustan’s characters, and the supporting cast; as a mystery, and with them as the cops, it’s quite fun. I could never take it quite seriously, and some of the obvious flips from reality to do with marginalisation are a bit ham-handed, but I sat back and let it take me where it wanted to go, and it was an interesting ride.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: alternate history, book reviews, books, crime, James Alistair Henry, mystery

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted October 25, 2025 by Nicky in General / 24 Comments

Here we are again, huh?

Books acquired this week

N/a! Not even a library trip.

Posts from this week

As usual, here’s a roundup of the stuff I’ve posted this week:

Fantasy manhwa: Solo Leveling, vol 6, by Dubu (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy novella: A Magical Girl Retires, by Park Seolyeon (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Crime short stories: Blood on the Tracks, ed. Martin Edwards (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Non-fiction: The Hero, by Lee Child (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Non-fiction: Valkyrie, by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Graphic novel: Fence: Redemption, by C.S. Pacat & Johanna the Mad (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy: Before the Coffee Gets Cold, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)

And of course a What Are You Reading Wednesday post.

What I’m reading

It’s been a fairly busy week reading-wise, though mostly with graphic novels. Let’s take a look at the books I’ve finished which I plan to review on here…

As for what I’m reading this weekend… I reaaaally have to focus on any books left on my Book Spin Bingo card for October, if I want to get a blackout! My first focus is probably volume three of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, and then Emily Tesh’s The Incandescent. But, as ever, we’ll see what happens!

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

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Posted October 24, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Before The Coffee Gets Cold

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 213
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, see their sister one last time, and meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold...

I had suspected that Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold wouldn’t be entirely my thing, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I didn’t love it. It made decent light reading for the car, and I wanted to give it a try since I know other people have really loved it. Mostly, the style (or possibly the translation) didn’t quite work for me — there was quite a bit of reiteration and stating the obvious.

That said, I did enjoy the way it set up time travel with some really heavy constraints, and then played within them to show that you don’t have to change history with time travel to get what you need out of it. The stories are a little sentimental, but more or less in a way I expected, so there’s that. And I did like the story about the guy with Alzheimer’s, and how his wife decided to handle it.

In the end it isn’t deeply profound and life-changing — at least, I didn’t find it to be so — but it was pleasant, and I’m glad I gave it a shot. I might even read the other books at some point, if the library has the ebooks and I feel like they might fit in somewhere.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, SF/F, Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Review – Fence, vol 6

Posted October 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Fence: Redemption

by C.S. Pacat, Johanna the Mad, Joanna LaFuente

Genres: Graphic Novels, Romance
Pages: 112
Series: Fence #6
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
A mysterious new fencer arrives at Halverton in the newest chapter of the GLAAD Media Award-nominated sports comic, perfect for fans of Heartstopper.

THE COMPETITION HAS BEEN RESET… EN GARDE!

Return to the thrilling world of high-stakes, competitive fencing, with a brand new story featuring the beloved cast of characters from the original hit series. Are Seiji and Jesse really through? The rumors around Halverton, the prestigious fencing training camp, have spread like wildfire, but it’s not long before a mystery fencer arrives–one who may finally pose a threat to the #1 spot. Will Seiji’s unquenchable quest for rivalry take Nicholas’ place? Where will his loyalty lie? And, when Seiji gets an up close and personal look into Nicholas’ past and determination against adversity while preparing for the difficult road ahead and the State Championships, he’ll have to confront a tempting thought… are they on… a date? New York Times and USA Today best-selling author C. S. Pacat (Dark Rise, Nightwing) and acclaimed cartoonist Johanna the Mad (Wynd) continue their winning streak with this on-point entry in the GLAAD Media Award-nominated series! Collects Fence: Redemption #1-4.

The sixth volume of C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad’s Fence is a self-contained arc in which they visit another fencing school to practice intensively, and several people have dates (but Aiden doesn’t). There’s a lot of great stuff, like Bobby and Dante (though Dante’s absent for most of the book), Harvard learning to assert himself a bit more, and Seiji and Nicholas getting closer.

It does however emphasise that Nicholas has got this good at fencing in little over three months, which… I take back what I said about the fact that he doesn’t magically improve overnight. This is nuts. Fencing isn’t heritable.

Anyway, it’s a cute volume, and I would really like a lot more of it, please and thank you.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, C.S. Pacat, comics, graphic novels, Joanna LaFuente, Johanna the Mad, romance

Review – Valkyrie

Posted October 22, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Valkyrie: The Women of the Viking World

by Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 280
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Valkyries: the female supernatural beings that choose who dies and who lives on the battlefield. They protect some, but guide spears, arrows and sword blades into the bodies of others. Viking myths about valkyries attempt to elevate the banality of war - to make the pain and suffering, the lost limbs and deformities, the piles of lifeless bodies of young men, glorious and worthwhile. Rather than their death being futile, it is their destiny and good fortune, determined by divine beings. The women in these stories take full part in the power struggles and upheavals in their communities, for better or worse.

Drawing on the latest historical and archaeological evidence, Valkyrie introduces readers to the dramatic and fascinating texts recorded in medieval Iceland, a culture able to imagine women in all kinds of roles carrying power, not just in this world, but pulling the strings in the other-world, too. In the process, this fascinating book uncovers the reality behind the myths and legends to reveal the dynamic, diverse lives of Viking women.

Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir’s Valkyrie attempts to give us a pretty comprehensive picture of the position of women in Norse society (I don’t say “Viking”, because “Vikings” are the ones who went out trading and plundering, and this is a more complete picture than that), using evidence from archaeology, from any written sources we have, and especially from the sagas.

It may sound weird to take evidence from sagas, but there are two reasons this is justified. First, as anyone who has studied the Icelandic sagas knows, they contain detail which has been verified. Oral histories passed down through generations have, in many different societies worldwide, proven astonishingly accurate in general, and archaeological evidence has verified things previously considered fanciful (like the fact that the Vikings made it to North America, now a matter of historical fact).

That said, such sources need handling with care, and the author does that pretty well, always explaining what seems a reasonable inference and what isn’t. She leans on the sagas a lot, though, and that can get pretty repetitive (especially if you’ve read them).

Overall, I found I didn’t learn a lot, but I did start with a fairly high degree of knowledge. I think it might be a bit dry for a lot of readers, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff discussed, albeit sometimes crushing to one’s hopes of bands of Viking warrior women.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir, non-fiction

WWW Wednesday

Posted October 22, 2025 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I’ve been digging into more of the comics offering I can get via my library’s subscription to Comics Plus, so there’s been a lot of graphic novels in the last couple of days! The last thing I finished, just now, was volume one of Iyanu: Child of Wonder, by Roye Okupe. I loved the backstory and notes probably more than the story itself, sadly.

Other than that, I finished Kim M. Watt’s Baking Bad, which is kinda cute and cosy, and didn’t quite work for me — not so badly that I wouldn’t try reading more by Watt, but the mystery felt a bit obvious and… I don’t know, I need to think it over properly before writing my review, but I really wanted to like it because a friend got it for me and they love it, but I never quite got into it.

What are you currently reading?

My non-fiction reads are Eating to Extinction (Dan Saladino) and The Posthumous Papers of the Manuscripts Club (Christopher de Hamel). I’m enjoying both, and they’re both very much by people who love what they’re writing about, which is always pleasing.

I’m also in the midst of volume three of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish (Xue Shan Fei Hu), and loving Prince Jing’s dedication to his unexpected family, and Li Yu’s usual haplessness.

What will you be reading next?

I’m not sure, but I need to get my skates on with my BookSpinBingo card books if I want to get a blackout again this month! I’m not sure which I want to start on next, though; maybe Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man, as I’ve let it languish unread faaar too long.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday