Tag: books

Review – Penguins and Other Sea Birds

Posted January 27, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – Penguins and Other Sea Birds

Penguins and Other Sea Birds

by Matt Sewell

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 128
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Description
Did you know...

The GalĂĄpagos Penguin's speckled markings make each of them as unique as a snowflake?
The Emperor Penguin weighs the same as a Labrador retriever?
The Adélie Penguin takes its name from the sweetheart of a Napoleonic naval captain turned explorer?

From tiny fairy penguins to the regal emperor penguin, street artist and ornithologist, Matt Sewell, illustrates one of the world’s favourite birds in this follow-up to Owls, Our Garden Birds, Our Songbirds and Our Woodland Birds.

I think the major reason to pick up Matt Sewell’s Penguins and Other Sea Birds is really for the art: though it does contain facts about each bird, each bird only gets a short paragraph. There is some neat info included, like the fact that certain birds (male crested auklets, if you’re curious) smell uncannily like tangerines — but it’s mostly just titbits.

The art is cute, though sometimes I think he does choose to emphasise odd features of the animals, probably to give the images more character. So it’s not a great resource for recognising the birds that you might be likely to be able to spot for yourself in the wild.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – Star Collector, vol 1

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

Review – Star Collector, vol 1

Star Collector

by Sophie Schönhammer, Anna Backhausen

Genres: Manga, Romance
Pages: 200
Series: Star Collector #1
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

Fynn's favorite activities are skipping class, smoking, and lying around. So when he's told it's time to shape up and try doing something else for a change, he has no idea where to even start.

Then, on a nighttime walk around his neighborhood, he sees a stranger with a telescope up on a hill: his name is Niko, and he loves to watch the stars. Intrigued, Flynn decides to find out more about this nerdy boy and what could be so interesting about the night sky that he loves so much.

The first volume of Sophie Schönhammer and Anna Backhausen’s Star Collector has cute art and some glimmers of compelling characters — I love that Fynn’s ex is friendly to both of them, not perfectly over the whole situation, but doing her best to be a good and supportive friend.

However, it feels rushed. Fynn’s interest in Niko, and then his apparent wish to come out to everybody before it’s even clear that he’s not just on the rebound or having a temporary fascination… There’s something that does ring true in the crush, but it doesn’t convince as a basis for a stable relationship. And maybe it’s meant to be that way, and volume two will reveal that…

There’s a lot of potential here, though, either way.

Rating: 2/5

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted January 25, 2025 by Nicky in General / 31 Comments

Good morning folks! I’ve been enjoying a few days of being a bit less constantly online and doing some extra reading, as planned, and I have a few more days of that before I’m home. I love being in FFXIV at all hours — but this is fun too, and means I’ve been able to settle down for quality reading time. That hasn’t translated into finishing loads of books, but more reading some longer ones.

Books acquired this week:

…None! Would you believe it? My family never would, but it’s true. I popped into the library to return some books, but I didn’t browse since it was only the small branch library and I don’t know my way around that super well, and we were pressed for time.

Posts from this week:

I’ve been posting as normal, so I do have stuff to share here!

And of course I posted What Are You Reading Wednesday, as usual, but skipped the TTT prompt for the week since these posts have my recent hauls covered.

What I’m reading:

As usual, let’s start with a sneak peek at the books I’ve finished reading this week which I’ll be reviewing soon!

Cover of Mr Pottermack's Oversight by R. Austin Freeman Cover of A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation vol 9 by Misaki and Momochi Cover of Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water, by Amorina Kingdon Cover of The Immune Mind by Dr Monty Lyman Cover of Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards

Not as many as I’d kind of hoped, but they were actually pretty substantial reads (aside from A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation).

As for what I’m reading this weekend, I’m partway through Sheeplands: How Sheep Shaped Wales and the World (Alan Marshall), which is a bit disappointing in that I have questions about the research — Homer didn’t scribe anything into anything, and if you can’t manage to realise that “Homer” is probably a bit of a fiction and that the works attributed to him were likely originally oral works, I don’t know what to do for you.

I’m less sceptical of my fiction read: The Teller of Small Fortunes (Julie Leong) is proving an excellent match for my mood.

Hope everyone else is having a good weekend! Even though I’m a bit more unplugged this weekend, I’m looking forward to visiting blogs as usual, later today — or maybe tomorrow.

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 – No. 17

Posted January 24, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – No. 17

No. 17

by J. Jefferson Farjeon

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 224
Series: Ben the Tramp #1
Rating: one-star
Synopsis:

The first book featuring Ben, the lovable, humorous ex-sailor and down-at-heels rascal who can't help running into trouble.

Ben is back home from the Merchant Navy, penniless as usual and looking for digs in fog-bound London. Taking shelter in an abandoned old house, he stumbles across a dead body - and scarpers. Running into a detective, Gilbert Fordyce, the reluctant Ben is persuaded to return to the house and investigate the mystery of the corpse - which promptly disappears The vacant No.17 is the rendezvous for a gang of villains, and the cowardly Ben finds himself in the thick of thieves with no way of escape.

Ben's first adventure, No.17, began life in the 1920s as an internationally successful stage play and was immortalised on film by the legendary Alfred Hitchcock. Its author, J. Jefferson Farjeon, wrote more than 60 crime thrillers, eight featuring Ben the tramp, his most popular character.

I was really not a fan of Joseph Jefferson Farjeon’s No. 17, alas. I read it via Serial Reader, and that’s pretty much the only reason I was able to stick with it, because it came in bitesize chunks, one section a day. The reason for this is… the main character, Ben the Tramp, a former sailor down on his luck who is an absolute total coward whose dialogue is rendered phonetically.

The book would be a quarter of the length if Ben didn’t spend every scene making no sense to anyone, trying to run away, interrupting, etc, etc. Even once Fordyce arrives, giving another steady character to drive the story, he spends so much time getting Ben to explain things, arguing with Ben, and being interrupted by Ben, that it takes forever to get anywhere.

Add that to a bit of insta-love as a minor sideplot, and it’s just unbearable. I did enjoy some of Farjeon’s other work (the books republished by the British Library Crime Classics series), but Ben the Tramp is definitely not for me.

Rating: 1/5

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Review – Selfish Genes to Social Beings

Posted January 23, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Selfish Genes to Social Beings

Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life

by Jonathan Silvertown

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 256
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation?

Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosis between organisms, to genes that band together, to the dawn of life itself. Cooperation has enabled life to thrive and become complex. Without it, life would never have begun.

I wasn’t a big fan of Jonathan Silvertown’s Selfish Genes to Social Beings. Ultimately, it’s as the subtitle (“A Cooperative History of Life”) suggests, rather than focusing on the question of how cooperation arises from “selfish” genes, or trying to dissect the evolution of altruism. It’s probably best read keeping that in mind.

Even so, I found it slow, and sometimes strangely organised. It works back through time… more or less. Sometimes it’s more like it’s working back through scale, finding fresh simulated surprise as smaller and smaller living things turn out to cooperate (a fact which should not be a surprise, since we know our own individual genes must cooperate). Sometimes the examples didn’t really contribute to a narrative, and I found the pop-culture references (like references to songs) cringey, like Silvertown was trying to add readability through pasting in some song lyrics.

Whiiiich is the other problem: I couldn’t put my finger on why, exactly, but I constantly found my attention wandering before the end of a paragraph — or sometimes, the end of a sentence. It’s not that I can’t focus on this kind of thing, because I love reading non-fiction. It’s also not that I know it all already (though I did), because I can happily read popular science about my pet subjects even when it contains absolutely nothing new. What’s required is usually just enthusiasm and a will to put across one’s own point of view.

I did find some of his later chapters more interesting, since his discussion of the RNA World hypothesis went deeper into it than my previous reading, but I still found this a very slow read and, ultimately, not for me. The stuff about kin selection has been discussed ad nauseam in many other books, and I didn’t feel that anything particularly fresh was added to the discussion.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Agatha Christie

Posted January 22, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

by Lucy Worsley

Genres: Biography, Non-fiction
Pages: 498
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? As Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern'. She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.

So why - despite all the evidence to the contrary - did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?
She was born in 1890 into a world which had its own rules about what women could and couldn't do. Lucy Worsley's biography is not just of an internationally renowned bestselling writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley's biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realise what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was - truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Lucy Worsley’s Agatha Christie tries to examine Agatha Christie and her work with affection and respect, but without taking her own words about herself too seriously. She considered herself to be basically an unworking lady, a homemaker in our terms, a wife. She wrote compulsively and prolifically, without ever admitting that she was a serious writer. Given that her work has enduring appeal, and a certain amount of influence, it’s worth examining her life a bit. Not just the things people know about her (the famous disappearance), though Worsley covers that too, but her whole life and all the relationships that influenced her.

I have to say that I didn’t really know much about Agatha Christie herself, other than that she’d dispensed medications during the war, and the disappearance. I knew more about her work, but didn’t have that much experience with it (I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd when I studied crime fiction during my first degree, and at some point read my way through the books featuring Miss Marple, but remember little about them). It was a surprise to meet (through Worsley) a woman who generally had a gift for being happy — at least as she grew older and met her second husband.

As you’d expect from her work, which I’ve now been reading via Serial Reader in the last couple of months, she wasn’t always a nice woman. She could be pretty racist and anti-Semitic, she wasn’t a great mother to her own daughter, she could be an awful snob, and regardless of how sympathetic you feel toward her reasons, it’s possible she tried to frame her first husband for her murder. Worsley doesn’t endorse that view, and there simply isn’t real evidence either way, but it’s something people have believed to some degree or another since it happened, something which rings tantalisingly true for a woman who specialised in writing murder mysteries and thrillers.

Overall, Worsley does a fairly good job of giving us Agatha Christie as a whole person, a woman who was wronged, a woman with faults, a woman who could demonstrate a wealth of generosity. Contradictory and flawed, as we all are.

Rating: 4/5

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WWW Wednesday

Posted January 22, 2025 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

Wednesday, huh? Time flies.

Cover of Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water, by Amorina KingdonWhat have you recently finished reading?

This morning I just finished up Sing Like Fish, by Amorina Kingdon, which is an exploration of how sound is experienced underwater by creatures actually adapted for it. It was fascinating: because we sometimes think as humans that the world underwater is very quiet (though I think people are more aware of whalesong etc now than when it was dubbed “the silent world”), we’re not aware of a whole panoply of sounds made by fish, marine mammals, etc.

​Cover of A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose SutherlandWhat are you currently reading?

I’m partway through a couple of things, but I don’t really have a single “main read” now that I’ve finished Sing Like Fish; they’re all kind of on the backburner. I need to return to A Sweet Sting of Salt, by Rose Sutherland, I think — it’s quite… I guess “literary” in tone, and I wasn’t in the mood, but I don’t want to stall on it for too long because I do like it.

I also want to return to my definitely stalled read of The Spellshop. Luckily I brought both of those with me on my trip away from home, so maybe with a bit less going on in terms of video games, etc, I’ll make some real progress.

I’m also partway through reading The Leavenworth Case (Anna Katharine Green) via Serial Reader. It’s such a classic, I’m kinda surprised I never picked it up before. It’s more an interesting read than one I’m enjoying, in that it’s very of-it’s-time in gender roles etc etc, but it’s fun to actually experience a book this influential at first hand.

Cover of The Witness for the Dead by Katherine AddisonWhat will you be reading next?

I don’t know exactly! I brought 15 books with me for a week away, plus my ereader, so I have choices. Right now I’m feeling very called to a reread of The Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones (Katherine Addison), ready for the third (final?) book, which I have as an ARC.

Non-fiction-wise, I’m feeling pretty tempted by The Immune Mind (Monty Lyman), since I’m currently studying immunology. I feel a little leery of books where the author’s title of Dr is on the cover, to be honest — I find it sometimes means the author’s throwing around a qualification that has nothing to do with the subject in order to boost their credibility — but this was reviewed positively by a science magazine I read, so… we’ll see.

How’s everyone else doing? Reading anything good?

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Review – My Happy Marriage, vol 1

Posted January 21, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – My Happy Marriage, vol 1

My Happy Marriage

by Akumi Agitogi

Genres: Fantasy, Light Novels, Romance
Pages: 180
Series: My Happy Marriage #1
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

IS THIS MARRIAGE A BLESSING? OR A CURSE? Born talentless to a noble family famous for their supernatural abilities, Miyo Saimori is forced into an existence of servitude by her abusive stepmother. When Miyo finally comes of marriageable age, though, her hopes of being whisked away to a better life crumble after she discovers her fiancé’s identity: Kiyoka Kudou, a commander apparently so cold and cruel that his previous would-be brides all fled within three days of their engagements. With no home to return to, Miyo resigns herself to her fate-and soon finds that her pale and beautiful husband-to-be is anything but the monster she expected. As they slowly open their hearts to each other, both realize the other may be their chance at finding true love and happiness.

Akumi Agitogi’s My Happy Marriage basically begins as a Cinderella-type story: since her parents’ arranged marriage ended with her mother’s death, and her lack of magic powers was revealed, Miyo has become a servant in her own home, abused by her mother and sisters. It becomes convenient for her father to marry her off, so she’s sent to Kiyoka Kudou as a potential bride. Living with him, she slowly begins to wish she could stay, while knowing she’s not really a suitable bride.

Her shyness and anxiety is pretty well-done, as is Kiyoka’s slow realisation that he’s becoming fond of her — his coldness at first is revealed to be shyness, lack of understanding of how to handle other people (or at least women), and tiredness of being forced to play the marriage game. I think the pace is a little quick, but it’s lovely to see them both come out of their shells, and I did believe in Miyo’s quick attachment to one of the few people to ever treat her kindly.

The fantasy backdrop is interesting too, with gifts running in families which help to combat Grotesqueries, creatures made of human fears and superstitions. Kiyoka is a high-ranking soldier who handles Grotesqueries, and the hereditary nature of the powers provide some political/social motivation to Miyo’s family and other interested parties.

I’m interested to see where it goes, particularly as I think it’s being hinted that Miyo does have some kind of gift.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – A Side Character’s Love Story, vol 7

Posted January 20, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – A Side Character’s Love Story, vol 7

A Side Character's Love Story

by Akane Tamura

Genres: Manga, Romance
Pages: 161
Series: A Side Character's Love Story #7
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

An incident at the park one evening prompts Tanaka and Irie to consider what it might be like to kiss the person they care for, with their nervous imaginings enough to distract them during their daily routines. It isn't easy to be yourself when you like someone, but the distance between them is closing a little more each day...

When I first read volume 7 of A Side Character’s Love Story, I was a teeny bit impatient with Nobuko’s hesitance and self-doubt — in part because it’s so darn recognisable, and (as the reader) it’s clear that Hiroki is going to be patient with all of it. There were some moments in this volume in particular that just made me cringe a bit…

And then there were also some super sweet moments, particularly as Hiroki and Nobuko take a bit of a step forward. Seven volumes in, they’ve finally kissed!

Another thing I’m appreciating through this reread is that there’s a full cast around them, and they have remarkably separate lives from each other. I wish we saw a little more of that, because sometimes it seems like Nobuko probably hides in her apartment whenever she’s not working or with Hiroki, and every so often we get glimpses of e.g. her friendship with Fumi that really help to round things out. In this volume we also see a little more of Hiroki’s life outside of work and their relationship, albeit only a glimpse.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Loki Variations

Posted January 19, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Loki Variations

The Loki Variations: The Man, The Myth, The Mischief

by Karl Johnson

Genres: Non-fiction
Pages: 96
Series: Inklings
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Loki, ever the shapeshifter, has never been more adaptable across pop culture. Whether it’s deep in the stories from Norse mythology, the countless offshoots and intepretations across media, or even the prolific Loki that has come to dominate our screens via the Marvel Cinematic Universe, each serves its own purpose and offers a new layer to the character we’ve come to know so well.

By exploring contemporary variations of Loki from Norse god to anti-hero trickster in four distinct categories – the God of Knots, Mischief, Outcasts and Stories – we can better understand the power of myth, queer theory, fandom, ritual, pop culture itself
and more.

Johnson invites readers to journey with him as he unpicks his own evolving relationship with Loki, and to ask: Who is your Loki?

And what is their glorious purpose?

Karl Johnson’s The Loki Variations digs into the character of Loki — not specifically the Norse god in his original form, nor Loki just as portrayed by Tom Hiddleston, but Loki as an overall concept. Pretty much what it says on the tin, in fact: he’s looking at the varied ways people have portrayed and enjoyed Loki’s character, and what he’s meant to people.

It’s nice to read something that takes pop culture seriously, because — regardless of how ephemeral or unimportant it can seem — it’s a great reflection of what’s on people’s minds. Johnson talks specifically about Loki’s queerness, which is linked to how difficult he can be to pin down: he’s not your typical Asgardian (in any incarnation), he’s not exclusively bad or exclusively good; he slides past definitions adroitly.

(A sudden thought: given the red hair and general inclination to mischief over evil, I wonder if Good Omens’ Crowley as portrayed by David Tennant is technically a bit of a variation on Loki himself. In some ways, no, but something of Loki’s instinct for self-preservation, adaptability, and unwillingness to be pinned down and defined does ring true for Crowley as well.)

Anyway, it’s a slim book and doesn’t go into enormous depth, but it’s written with a love for Loki and an appreciation for popular culture that I very much enjoyed.

Rating: 4/5

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