Tag: books

Review – The Genetic Lottery

Posted November 9, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Genetic Lottery

by Kathryn Paige Harden

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 312
Rating:

Synopsis:
A provocative and timely case for how the science of genetics can help create a more just and equal society

In recent years, scientists like Kathryn Paige Harden have shown that DNA makes us different, in our personalities and in our health—and in ways that matter for educational and economic success in our current society.

In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces readers to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.

Reclaiming genetic science from the legacy of eugenics, this groundbreaking book offers a bold new vision of society where everyone thrives, regardless of how one fares in the genetic lottery.

Kathryn Paige Harden means very well in The Genetic Lottery. I do think she genuinely intends to both demonstrate that there’s a genetic component to intelligence, and to suggest ways by which this can be taken into account to make society more equal.

However, I found her writing style highly tedious, and sometimes just pointless: the whole analogy of restaurants and ingredients for explaining genome-wide association studies was just silly. She could’ve explained GWAS better by just… explaining GWAS. There were whole sections that just made my eyes glaze over, and she was very uneven about how she chose to explain things.

Overall, I did think she managed to demonstrate that intelligence has a heritable component, but I didn’t feel convinced that she had good suggestions for how to make society more equal using that information. It’s a shame because she’s not wrong that we could do more to help create a more equitable society — a lot more — but… this ain’t it.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Kathryn Paige Harden, non-fiction, science

Review – The Duke at Hazard

Posted November 9, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

The Duke at Hazard

by KJ Charles

Genres: Historical Fiction, Romance
Pages: 336
Series: The Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune #3
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
The Duke of Severn is one of the greatest men in Britain.

He's also short, quiet, and unimpressive. And now he's been robbed, after indulging in one rash night with a strange man who stole the heirloom Severn ring from his finger. The Duke has to get it back, and he can't let anyone know how he lost it. So when his cousin bets that he couldn't survive without his privilege and title, the Duke grasps the opportunity to hunt down his ring-incognito.

Life as an ordinary person is terrifying... until the anonymous Duke meets Daizell Charnage, a disgraced gentleman, and hires him to help. Racing across the country in search of the thief, the Duke and Daizell fall into scrapes, into trouble-and in love.

I don’t why it took me so long to get round to reading The Duke at Hazard, because I pretty much always love KJ Charles’ work — I think it’s mostly that my expectations are always so high now, I get a little nervous that it won’t stand up… and/or I try to save it for “the right moment”. Anyway, I’m glad I stopped hesitating about/saving The Duke at Hazard, though I wish I’d read The Gentle Art of Fortune-Hunting again first, since there are cameo appearances it’d have been nice to fully appreciate. It’s not necessary, though, and I enjoyed this very much.

Cassian’s a sweetheart. He needs a backbone (which he develops) and the strength to speak up about his own preferences, and fit himself inside the role of the Duke of Severn (or fit the role inside of him), but he genuinely adores Daizell and always means to do well by him. And Daizell… has been dealt a bad hand, isn’t entirely a gentleman, but deserves so much more than he’s had so far. Together, they both get chances to prove themselves, and it’s lovely — even if the inevitable misunderstanding part was unavoidably awful, and Daizell’s absolutely right that Cassian owed him more of the truth.

My favourite part was probably Cassian’s enthusiasm about churches etc, and Daizell finding them interesting because of Cassian’s joy in it all. Now that’s a love language I know well!

The supporting characters are quite fun too, like Miss Beaumont and Leo, and Cassian’s character shines through there as well. I especially love the affection between him and his family, though: it would be easy to villainise them for the ways they messed the poor guy up, but it’s clear they did it with the best of intentions, and with true affection for him.

I love the way it all works out as the people Cassian cares for — and has stuck his neck out for — each bring a piece of the puzzle to get the truth out there. It’s all very satisfying.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, historical fiction, KJ Charles, romance

Review – Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur

Posted November 8, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur

by Ian McDonald

Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 128
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
Tif Tamim wants nothing more than to be a dinosaur buckaroo. An orphan in search of a place to rest his head and a job to weigh down his pockets, Tif has bounced from circus to circus, yearning for a chance to ride a prehistoric beauty under the sparkling lights of a big-top.

To become a buckaroo, Tif needs to learn the tools of the trade, yet few dino maestros want to take a scrawny nobody from nowhere under their wing. But when Tif frees a dino from an abusive owner and braves the roving gangs of the formerly-American west to bring the dino to safety, he catches someone’s eye. And boy, how those eyes dazzle Tif from the back of a bucking carnotaur.

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 was a shoo-in for picking up Ian McDonald’s Boy, With Accidental Dinosaur, because… well… dinosaurs! There’s a whole world here built around the rodeo culture that grows up when dinosaurs can be brought through from the past, and it’s not always clear how important it is in general, whether dinosaurs are used outside the rodeo circuits, and even exactly how the rodeo world works. It feels like there’s a lot of potential that isn’t used, and there’s no reckoning with stuff that seems like it should be important (like a dinosaur getting sent back to the past after being shot with bullets which obviously shouldn’t be present in the past).

Mostly, it’s a sort of coming of age story for the main character, Latif, but even that seems a bit unfocused. I felt like I couldn’t see where the story was going, and once finished, I couldn’t see that we’d got much of anywhere at all. It felt like the author playing with the world more than creating a satisfying story.

There are some neat details and ideas, like the ocarinas/whistling used to communicate with the dinosaurs, and hints at the world outside the rodeo and the levels of technology around… but for me it didn’t come together.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Ian McDonald, SF/F

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted November 8, 2025 by Nicky in General / 25 Comments

Happy weekend!

Books acquired this week

N/a! I’m working on reading some of the books I’ve got this year and haven’t started yet, and some backlog books, so I can meet my reading targets. If there’s something really tempting I’ll get it, there’s no book ban or anything, but I’m pretty happy with my current lineup.

Posts from this week

And now for the usual roundup! I haven’t started posting extra reviews yet, but I should pick a couple of days a week to do so, or figure out how to bundle some together, because the backlog of reviews to post is getting a liiiiittle bit out of hand. They’re all written, I just don’t want to spam y’all.

Anyway, here are the reviews I did post!

Non-fiction: History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, by Robert Bartlett (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Classic crime short stories: Continental Crimes, ed. Martin Edwards (2/5 stars, “it was okay”)
Poetry: The Cinder Path, by Andrew Motion (3/5 stars, “liked it”)
Horror: The Forgotten Dead, by Jordan L. Hawk (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)
Fantasy romance manga: The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter, vol 5, by Kazuki Irodori (4/5 stars, “really liked it”)

And the non-review posts:

What I’m reading

My reading’s been a bit calmer this week, ahaha, but there’s still plenty! Here’s the usual sneak peek of books I plan to review on the blog soon:

As for this weekend’s plans… the final volume of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, probably. I keep saying that, but I do really want to get to it! Other than that, who knows?

[ETA: I just want to be clear, posting that I’ve read The Genetic Lottery does not constitute a recommendation. I would rate it 1/5, “didn’t like it”. I posted my review earlier than intended if you want to check that out!]

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 – The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter (manga), vol 5

Posted November 7, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter

by Kazuki Irodori, Yatsuki Wakutsu

Genres: Fantasy, Manga, Romance
Pages: 176
Series: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter (manga) #5
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Tasked with investigating the church, this intrepid bean counter must somehow survive not just the potential political intrigue going on behind the scenes, but also the very air around him! Since magic itself is toxic to Kondou, stepping into a place so inundated could be considered a death sentence...! What's worse, his dashing knight captain, Aresh, gets called away to deal with a dangerous magical beast...

The fifth volume of Kazuki Irodori’s manga adaptation of The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter (originally a light novel by Yatsuki Wakutsu) is quite fun. Aresh is actually absent for most of the story, though we do see some glimpses of him and what he’s up to (slightly more than in the original light novel, though it doesn’t add new information as such), but we get a very extremely adorable scene where Seiichirou reads his letters… and hugs one tight.

It doesn’t quite get up to the end of volume two of the light novels, so the story has some ways to go, but for those only following via the manga, it does take a step forward, with Seiichirou beginning to accept his feelings for Aresh and understand his position properly.

Aresh’s controlling behaviour is also less of an issue in this volume than some of the others, since they’re apart. Still, that is a potential issue with this series, even if I found it seemed a bit less obtrusive in the light novels. It’s a pretty intrinsic part of the story.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, Kazuki Irodori, manga, romance, SF/F, Yatsuki Wakutsu

Review – The Forgotten Dead

Posted November 6, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Forgotten Dead

by Jordan L. Hawk

Genres: Horror, Romance
Pages: 178
Series: OutFoxing the Paranormal #1
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
Parapsychologist Dr. Nigel Taylor doesn’t work with psychic mediums. Until, that is, a round of budget cuts threatens his job and an eccentric old woman offers him a great deal of grant money. The only catch: he must investigate a haunted house with a man she believes to have a true gift.

Oscar Fox, founder of the ghost-hunting team OutFoxing the Paranormal, has spent his life ignoring the same sort of hallucinations that sent his grandmother to an insane asylum. When he agrees to work with the prestigious—and sexy—Dr. Taylor, he knows he’ll have to keep his visions under wraps, so his team can get a desperately needed pay day.

Soon after Nigel, Oscar, and the OtP team arrive at the house, the questions begin to pile up. Why is there a blood stain in the upstairs hallway? What tragedy took place in the basement? And who is the spirit lurking in the closet of a child’s bedroom?

One thing is certain: if Oscar can’t accept the truth about his psychic abilities, and Nigel can’t face the demons of his past, they’ll join the forgotten souls of the house…forever.

On re-reading this, I found I’d never posted my original review here! So here it is now.

I found The Forgotten Dead genuinely a bit creepy — not necessarily the ghost story, in fact, but the backstory, the way the ghosts of the story became ghosts. The human motivations, however twisted they were, which led to the haunting and created the whole situation in the first place.

The group set up here is cool. It doesn’t go much beyond it: this is clearly the setup for a series, so the characters are a bit sketched in, no doubt to develop further later. Likewise, the beginnings of the romance are just that: beginnings. Nigel and Oscar forge a connection, and there’s obvious potential for them to be a couple (and given the books Hawk normally writes, it’s obvious that’s where it’s going), but we’re by no means at our destination. I’m a little nonplussed at reviews complaining about insta-love, because I don’t see that there. Oscar’s clearly a kind guy who feels drawn to Nigel and — in a highly charged emotional situation where they’re in physical danger — forms a bit of an infatuation. The same happens for Nigel, who is also lonely and badly in need of the affection and closeness. I don’t think Hawk tries to make out that they are instantly soulmates, or anything like that.

I’m looking forward to more of this group, and especially to knowing more about the group’s sponsor. Obviously she has motivations of her own, and there’ll be more information about that to come. Likewise, I hope we learn more about each member of the group: this book showed us Nigel’s past, and some of Oscar’s, and I’m sure there’s more to see there — but I hope for more of the supporting characters, too.

Rating: 4/5 (“really liked it”)

Tags: book reviews, books, horror, Jordan L. Hawk, romance

Review – The Cinder Path

Posted November 5, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

The Cinder Path

by Andrew Motion

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 58
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Andrew Motion's new collection (his first since Public Property in 2002) offers a ground-breaking variety of lyrics, love poems and elegies, in which private domains of feeling infer other lives and a shared humanity - exploring how people cope with threats to and in the world around them, as soldiers, lovers, artists, writers and citizens. The conversational tone and formal variety of these poems both shapes and diversifies their response to loss and its inevitabilities.

Here are poems about the last surviving veteran of the trenches; poems which work with found materials drawn from the contiguous worlds of prose; poems which elicit the parallel lives glimpsed in paintings, or the other lives of birds, trees and weather (as of an ordinariness just out of reach). An unemphatic evenness of handling, in the detailing of ordinary destinies, alternates with capacious panoramas of longing and summation, and the collection ends with a remarkable group of directly autobiographical poems about the life and times of the poet's father.

I did not remember liking Andrew Motion’s poetry — actually I was pretty certain I didn’t — and yet I did actually enjoy this collection somewhat! It’s not a favourite, but there were some nice turns of phrase and a couple of poems that I liked, enough to suggest that I might try more of Motion’s work.

There were some that I didn’t like, as is pretty inevitable; I didn’t think ‘The Feather Pole’ was much of a poem, for example, and there were others I didn’t “get”, which is also inevitable unless I really sit down and settle into taking a poem apart and understanding it that way.

But I did enjoy it more than I expected to, so the experiment’s a success!

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)

Tags: Andrew Motion, book reviews, books, poetry

WWW Wednesday

Posted November 5, 2025 by Nicky in General / 4 Comments

What have you recently finished reading?

I finished up with The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, by Brigitte Knightley, just last night. I wasn’t aware when I first added it to my wishlist that it was serial-numbers-filed-off fanfic, and I’m not sure whether or not I’d have picked it up if I knew. Maybe! I don’t have strong feelings about that kind of thing, though it does ick me out if the marketing relies on that nudge-nudge-wink-wink connection. I don’t know if it did for this book, since I just heard about it through other bloggers.

Anyway, there were aspects of this that were fun, but it got very purple prose-y around the romance, and I didn’t find the romance that convincing. The banter didn’t paper over the fact that I just didn’t like either character.

What are you currently reading?

Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery, which means very well, but a) is making me absolutely glaze over and b) has been critiqued in various ways because the solutions it tries to offer aren’t very convincing. I’ve not read far enough to grapple with b), and I’m not sure if I’m actually going to — I’m not sure if the good intent justifies all these words, especially when a ridiculous number of them were used to come up with a poor analogy to explain genome-wide association studies without actually illuminating much that couldn’t have been better explained by just explaining GWAS.

What will you be reading next?

As ever, no hard and fast rules. There are basically three likely targets: the fourth volume of The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, the second volume of Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, or Kaite Welsh’s The Wages of Sin. I’m probably most likely to start on The Disabled Tyrant’s Beloved Pet Fish, since that wraps up that series… but the others are tempting too.

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Review – Continental Crimes

Posted November 4, 2025 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Continental Crimes

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 352
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
A man is forbidden to uncover the secret of the tower in a fairy-tale castle by the Rhine. A headless corpse is found in a secret garden in Paris--belonging to the city's chief of police. And a drowned man is fished from the sea off the Italian Riviera, leaving the carabinieri to wonder why his socialite friends at the Villa Almirante are so unconcerned by his death.

These are three of the scenarios in this new collection of vintage crime stories. Detective stories from the golden age and beyond have used European settings--cosmopolitan cities, rural idylls and crumbling chateaux--to explore timeless themes of revenge, deception, murder and haunting.

Including lesser-known stories by Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, J. Jefferson Farjeon and other classic writers, this collection reveals many hidden gems of British crime.

Continental Crimes is a collection of classic/Golden/Silver Age crime stories from British writers but set in Europe, and is edited as usual by Martin Edwards. It actually contains a Christie story, which is rare for the series (though Parker Pyne is a fairly meh detective), along with a non-Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle… but. I’m afraid it got a bit boring, and e.g. the Reggie Fortune story chosen was almost incoherent and had an absolutely infuriating number of random exclamations from Reggie (“my aunt!” etc etc).

It’s a fun idea for a collection, and they weren’t all duds, but the overall effect is fairly uninspiring. Despite the convincing line-up of authors, the stories just don’t sparkle, so it feels pretty stodgy.

Might be better reading one at a time/spacing them out, or just dipping in for the ones that sound interesting.

Rating: 2/5 (“it was okay”)

Tags: book reviews, books, British Library Crime Classics, crime, Martin Edwards, mystery

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Randomly Grabbed

Posted November 4, 2025 by Nicky in General / 34 Comments

I thought this week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme would be kinda fun, and maybe a good prompt to get round to reading some books I’ve been neglecting, so… here we go. The prompt is the ten books you find from randomly grabbing books from your shelves — let’s see what I find on my shelves!

Love, Theoretically, by Ali Hazelwood. I haven’t read this one yet. I’ve enjoyed a couple of Hazelwood’s books/stories, so I’m looking forward to getting around to it, though I have to be in the right mood to pick something described as a romcom. I get embarrassment squick really easily!
A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, by Becky Chambers. The second book in the Monk & Robot duology. I didn’t love these as much as Chambers’ other work, but there’s always something kind about her work that I’m drawn to.
The Book Eaters, by Sunyi Dean. Ah, definitely one I’ve been neglecting. I passed it up for review because I wasn’t quite sure about it, but ended up buying it a couple of years ago in Topping & Company in Edinburgh (an excellent indie bookshop).
A Mourning Wedding, by Carola Dunn. This is fairly deep into the Daisy Dalrymple series, and probably one of the furthest along I’ve read, though I haven’t got to it yet in my reread (preparatory to actually finishing the series). By this point things are a little repetitive, to be honest, and it’s possibly time for me to let go of this series.
Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. I’ve been meaning to read this for ages — it digs into what is an absolute scandal of scientists manipulating public opinion with unfounded claims. I think this one is only getting more relevant, not less, though the examples will be out of date.
Hot Earl Summer, by Erica Ridley. This is in the Wild Wynchesters series, and I’m a liiiittle behind. I should really catch up, because I’ve absolutely loved the books. This one sounds a bit over the top and bonkers, but hopefully it’ll be fun anyway.
Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 8, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Ahhh, my beloved. This volume finishes off the story and contains the extras as well. There’s some really lovely stuff, though I can’t say it’s my favourite volume because it is a bit scattered, given it’s about a third of the main story plus disconnected extras. Still, a wonderful series.
The Shards of Heaven, by Michael Livingston. Hm, I’ve forgotten everything I might have ever known about this one. Looking at the summary, I’m curious how it turns out, mixing magic and the fallout from the assassination of Julius Caesar. Might have to be in the right mood for it, though, since it’s a series and I can be quite slow with reading the next book sometimes.
Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities, by Bettany Hughes. It’s… been a while since I picked this one up. I want to learn more about this part of the world, especially beyond just Byzantium (which I have read about in the past), but this book’s daunting me, I must admit.
Archivist Wasp, by Nicole Kornher-Stace. I’d almost forgotten about this one, but I’ve been meaning to read it forever. The ghost-hunting, post-apocalyptic setup sounds fascinating.

And there we go! I almost wanted to keep going and pull a few more random choices…

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday