Tag: books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Involving Food

Posted September 3, 2024 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

This week’s prompt is “Books Involving Food (That are Not Cookbooks)”, which… I’m sure I know a lot of books which incidentally mention food, but I’m not sure how many will stand out for me. Let’s see…

Heaven Official’s Blessing (vol 4), by MXTX. This one springs to mind because I just read it, and because (alas) all the food Xie Lian cooks is awful, if not deadly. Only he and Hua Cheng can stand it, and in volume four, it gets used as a weapon… I’ll pass on the Love for All Seasons stew, and the Incorruptible Chastity Meatballs.
Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. It’s been a long while since I read this, but all the descriptions of baking stuck in my head! It’s so full of good food for a vampire novel.
Chocolat, by Joanne Harris. I need to give this a reread, it’s been ages, but I always did enjoy it. And of course, it always makes me crave chocolate. (Oh no!)
Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree. Okay, it mostly involves coffee, but it does feature the tasty, tasty snacks made by Thimble.
The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System (vol 1), by MXTX. The original Luo Binghe shows his harem favour by cooking for them… but the Luo Binghe that Shen Yuan meets after his transmigration will pretty much only cook for him. Unlike Xie Lian in MXTX’s other book, mentioned above, Luo Binghe really can cook. I have no idea if I’d like congee, but it makes me tempted to find out.
Cold Clay, by Juneau Black. Food keeps getting mentioned again and again, and it all sounds so tasty. Though in this book it is slightly macabre to think that Joe’s been making apple pies using apples from the orchard where his murdered wife was secretly buried.
The Biscuit: The History of a Very British Indulgence, by Lizzie Collingham. Time for some non-fiction! This one discusses biscuits, of course, but in a way that also tells us about a broader swathe of history too.
White Bread: A Social History of the Store-bought Loaf, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain. A whole history about bread? And not just any bread, but just… store-bought loaves? Yep. And it’s fascinating, and in many ways it’s a book about class.
A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles, by Ned Palmer. I found this one totally fascinating — and it helps that I really do love cheese.
Ice Cream: A Global History, by Laura B. Weiss. I love the Edible series in general, but I’ll stick to highlighting just one. My main complaint was that it wasn’t actually very global.

Yay, I did it! I read a surprising number of books about food for someone who isn’t interested in food, per se. I’m not a cook or any kind of gourmet, but food can be such a strong indicator of culture, it’s a fascinating way to look at society and history.

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – They Were Here Before Us

Posted September 2, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

They Were Here Before Us: Stories from Our First Million Years

by Ran Barkai, Eyal Halfon

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 208
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
An epic and highly readable investigation into our very earliest ancestors, focusing on the land corridor thorough which humans passed from Africa to Europe and the evidence left behind of their lives and deaths, struggles and beliefs.

This is not a book about archaeological sites. We shall come across flint tools, bones, skulls, surprising structures, and layers of earth that we can date to different periods—but they are not the heart of the matter. This book is about us, human beings, and about our place in the world. About what we have done, where we came from, which other humans used to be here, why they are no longer with us, and how and why our lives have changed. It’s also about where we went wrong. What did early humans do because they had no choice and what is the price we paying for this now?

Taking as the focus ten sites in Israel, the land corridor through which the human species passed on its journey from Africa to Europe, the story ranges far and wide from France, Spain, Turkey and Georgia to Morocco and South Africa, North America, Columbia and Peru. The authors follow the footsteps of our ancestors, describing the tools they used, the animals they hunted and the monuments they built. Fascinating revelations include:

- The earliest evidence of human use of fire;
- The meaning of cave art and the transformative effect of touching rock;
- The woman for whom 90 tortoises were sacrificed;
- What happened in the Levant following the disappearance of elephants;
- The monumental tower built at the lowest place on earth;
- Why we should envy modern hunter-gatherers – and much more ...

This provocative and panoramic book shows readers what they can learn from their ancestors, and how the unwavering ability of prehistoric people to survive and thrive can continue into the present.

There isn’t much in Eyal Halfon and Ran Barkai’s They Were Here Before Us that will come as much of a surprise if you’re already familiar with the stories of humanity’s origin, though they do mention a few new-to-me theories and go into some of the history of how things were discovered which I didn’t know. The broad strokes are familiar, but they write very clearly and explain things well. At times there’s a touch of the travelogue, because they describe visiting various of the sites as part of giving their context, but it’s not the main point of the narrative.

They do some imaginative reconstruction in the course of this, trying to figure out why people might have put a swan’s wing here or built a tower there, but I felt like they didn’t go wild: they presented these ideas as theories, as a way of understanding the data, and it’s pretty clear when they’re guessing and when they’re stating a fact.

The book doesn’t have numbered references, but it does have a solid bibliography including both books and papers, most of which look reasonably well-related to the topic to my eye (though this isn’t my field).

I found it enjoyable, and the translation (by Eylon Levy) is very readable.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Eyal Halfon, history, non-fiction, Ran Barkai, science

Review – The Last Days of the Dinosaurs

Posted September 1, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World

by Riley Black

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
In The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, Riley Black walks readers through what happened in the days, the years, the centuries, and the million years after the impact, tracking the sweeping disruptions that overtook this one spot, and imagining what might have been happening elsewhere on the globe. Life’s losses were sharp and deeply-felt, but the hope carried by the beings that survived sets the stage for the world as we know it now.

Picture yourself in the Cretaceous period. It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hell Creek of ancient Montana 66 million years ago. A Triceratops horridus ambles along the edge of the forest. In a matter of hours, everything here will be wiped away. Lush verdure will be replaced with fire. Tyrannosaurus rex will be toppled from their throne, along with every other species of non-avian dinosaur no matter their size, diet, or disposition. They just don’t know it yet.

The cause of this disaster was identified decades ago. An asteroid some seven miles across slammed into the Earth, leaving a geologic wound over 50 miles in diameter. In the terrible mass extinction that followed, more than half of known species vanished seemingly overnight. But this worst single day in the history of life on Earth was as critical for us as it was for the dinosaurs, as it allowed for evolutionary opportunities that were closed for the previous 100 million years.

Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is not entirely about dinosaurs — in fact, a large chunk of it is about what came after the dinosaurs, the period of renewal in which the avian dinosaurs and mammals recovered from the Chicxulub impact and dinosaurs didn’t.

The main body of the text is an imaginative reconstruction, based on the data we have, choosing examples from particular species to illustrate how the impact (and aftermath) affected different kinds of animals, and how some may have survived. It’s followed by an appendix which discusses some of the scientific evidence behind the reconstruction. None of this is footnoted or explicitly linked in any way to a specific source, unfortunately (though it accords with my knowledge as far as that goes).

So as a casual read for laypeople, this is fine — Black’s writing is clear and her enthusiasm for the subject spills out at all turns, but for those who read a claim and then want to see what it’s based on, this would be pretty frustrating.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Brian Switek, non-fiction, Riley Black, science

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted August 31, 2024 by Nicky in General / 17 Comments

It’s been a pretty normal week, as things go, which is nice after feeling pretty busy and frazzled of late! It’s been a quieter week reading-wise, but that’s fine.

Books acquired this week

Without further ado, let’s finish off looking at my birthday haul (part one was last week, if folks are curious). As usual, it’s a mixture. Here’s the rest of the fiction…

A bit of romance, a bit of murder — as you do (at least around here).

And here’s the rest of the non-fic:

As ever, quite the mix. 🙂

Posts from this week

Aaand here’s the roundup of reviews posted:

History non-fiction: Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox, by Victoria Finlay (3/5 stars)
SF/F comic: Dominion vol 3: The Fist of God, by Thomas Fenton et al (2/5 stars)
SF/F cosy romance: Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea, by Rebecca Thorne (3/5 stars)
Chinese light novel, fantasy/romance/mystery with a dash of horror: Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 2, by MXTX (4/5 stars)

What I’m reading

As I mentioned, it’s been a quieter week reading-wise, but it’s been nice. I’m deep into Heaven Official’s Blessing, of course, and not taking long between volumes as it’s really designed as one continuous story (it was a webnovel). I also started using an app called Serial Reader again, which means I’ve been reading some Agatha Christie, small segments at a time. I’ve read a lot less Christie than you’d imagine, given my love for Golden Age crime. I’m now onto The Murder on the Links.

In any case, here are the books I’ve read this week which I’ll be reviewing on the blog sooner or later…

And th-th-that’s all folks! I hope everyone’s had a good week.

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

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Heaven Official’s Blessing, vol 2

Posted August 30, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Heaven Official's Blessing

by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù

Genres: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Romance
Pages: 438
Series: Heaven Official's Blessing / Tian Guan Ci Fu #2
Rating: four-stars

Synopsis:
THE TOUCH OF A HAND, A ROLL OF THE DICE

Xie Lian has confirmed that the bewitching youth San Lang is actually Hua Cheng, one of the Four Calamities and a supreme ghost despised by all heavenly officials. Still, he has trouble matching the terror of his companion’s reputation with the charming, clever, and protective young man he’s come to know.

When a distress signal leads Xie Lian into Ghost City, a bustling metropolis containing all the horrors and delights of the dead, he sees Hua Cheng in his element—and his true form—for the first time. But despite their chemistry and care for one another, there are missions to fulfill and secrets to uncover, and Xie Lian’s centuries of troubled history are never far behind.

The second volume of Heaven Official’s Blessing finishes up with arc 1 and begins arc 2: I can see why some readers complain that the volumes are split in weird places, but I think it’d end up with ridiculously chunky volumes and then really skinny ones if it was split by arcs or something, and I bet you people wouldn’t like that either. Still, I agree it feels weird that it’s basically one continuous story, and you can’t stop and feel satisfied at the end of a volume; that’s kind of unavoidable, given it was a webnovel first.

As with the first volume, I’m sure that there are critiques of the translation, but it’s pretty internally consistent and it’s definitely readable, and not significantly better/worse than the translation of The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, for example. I believe the translators are different, but something of the underlying style does seem to come through — though at times I could do without it (stop yelling, Qi Rong).

The end of arc 1 gives us a visit to Hua Cheng’s domain, followed by some answers about Xie Lian’s past in the form of confronting Qi Rong, his cousin, with Hua Cheng figuring out what happened during an infamous and bloody event, and manipulating matters so that Xie Lian can no longer claim all the blame for himself. There are some really nice character/relationship moments there, and then act 2 begins, which seems to be all a long flashback to Xie Lian’s life before godhood (going into his first ascension afterwards, in book 3).

All in all I’m really enjoying it. There’s a lot more detail and complexity than in SVSSS, which makes sense since there are eight books in total. I fear how MXTX is going to torture Xie Lian and Hua Chung… but I’m all-in.

Rating: 4/5

Tags: book reviews, books, horror, Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù, mystery, romance, SF/F

Review – Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea

Posted August 30, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea

by Rebecca Thorne

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 336
Series: Tomes and Tea #1
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
All Reyna and Kianthe want is to open a bookshop that serves tea. Worn wooden floors, plants on every table, firelight drifting between the rafters… all complemented by love and good company. Thing is, Reyna works as one of the Queen’s private guards, and Kianthe is the most powerful mage in existence. Leaving their lives isn’t so easy.

But after an assassin takes Reyna hostage, she decides she’s thoroughly done risking her life for a self-centered queen. Meanwhile, Kianthe has been waiting for a chance to flee responsibility–all the better that her girlfriend is on board. Together, they settle in Tawney, a town nestled in the icy tundra of dragon country, and open the shop of their dreams.

What follows is a cozy tale of mishaps, mysteries, and a murderous queen throwing the realm’s biggest temper tantrum. In a story brimming with hurt/comfort and quiet fireside conversations, these two women will discover just what they mean to each other… and the world.

Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea is unashamedly inspired by Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, tapping into the same “stone-cold badass decides to settle down and serve hot drinks” vein. Reyna is one of the queen’s elite bodyguards, but after a serious incident in which she nearly gets killed in the process of protecting her queen — a queen who is clearly psychopathic — she decides to listen to her girlfriend’s suggestions and run off to run a bookshop/teashop somewhere the queen won’t find them for a while.

This is all somewhat stymied by her girlfriend Kianthe being the most important mage in her country, if not the world, and also as a result effectively a foreign diplomat. Needless to say, they can’t settle into total obscurity: Reyna’s battle prowess is quickly obvious, as is Kianthe’s ability as a mage.

Because of the psychopathic queen and the action scenes, this doesn’t quite fit into the same niche as Legends & Lattes, to my mind. Reyna hasn’t really put down her sword so much as decided to stop serving that queen, which is really not the same. It also feels a lot “younger”, perhaps because things are very black-and-white: the queen is obviously a monster, from a line of monsters; Reyna’s old partner in the guard is a bit slimy and definitely after her body; Kianthe is at times a bit of a sullen teenager about her power and how it marks her out without making people care for her as a person (and even obscuring who she is as a person). It doesn’t reckon very well with Reyna’s probable trauma or even with Kianthe’s anxiety (though we see her having panic attacks, it doesn’t feel like they get addressed very seriously).

It also focuses a bit more on the romance aspect, and a lot less on the practicalities of putting together a shop and drawing in customers, compared to Legends & Lattes. All in all, it feels like some of the themes and framings of YA, and it left things feeling less complex. That’s not a bad thing if that’s what you’re interested in reading, to be clear — but it could be disappointing for those who really just want another Legends & Lattes, and I found it a mite unsatisfying.

There is an ongoing plot as well which will clearly continue through at least another book, so there’s that as well. That’s an opportunity for some of the things I’ve mentioned to change/develop, and I’m curious enough about the characters and world to read it.

Overall, I had a fun time, without falling in love with it.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, Rebecca Thorne, romance, SF/F

WWW Wednesday

Posted August 28, 2024 by Nicky in General / 0 Comments

Here we go, as usual!

What have you recently finished reading?

The last thing I finished was Karl Widerquist’s book from the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series, Universal Basic Income. I’m personally fairly convinced about the benefits of UBI, but I wanted to read more about its history, studies, etc. It’s a little dissatisfying that there’s so little actual large-scale proof, but that’s not the book’s fault, and I did learn about the Alaska dividend, which is a fascinating concept.

What are you currently reading?

Several things at once, as ever! I’ve picked up the app Serial Reader again, and I’m using it to read Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles — for a fan of the Golden Age of crime fiction, you’d be shocked by how little Christie I’ve read. I’m only a few ‘issues’ into it so far, so not much to say about it yet. It’s very classic for the period, though I’m not a Poirot fan in general.

I’m also in the closing chapters of Heaven Official’s Blessing volume 3. In some ways I’d love to do nothing but read this series, I’m adoring Xie Lian and Hua Cheng… but at the same time, I keep reminding myself that I get fidgety if I try to do that, and it’s good for me to have other books to focus on too. I’m also trying to keep pace with my wife’s reading, and this buddy read system is a lot of fun when we do it.

What will you read next?

I should return to reading Christina Baehr’s Wormwood Abbey, which I temporarily stalled on — not because I don’t like it, but just because I was focusing on Heaven Official’s Blessing and kind of busy with work stuff.

I should also start another non-fiction book, because I always like having one on the go; I suspect I’ll pick up my new Object Lessons book, Space Rover.

And what about you?

Tags: books, WWW Wednesday

Top Ten Tuesday: Posts That Reveal Me

Posted August 27, 2024 by Nicky in General / 8 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is for posts that give you the best glimpse of me. Let’s give it a shot…

Guilty Pleasures. To quote this post, “fuck that noise”. I don’t believe in ’em. I went all the way back to 2015 looking at my discussion posts, found this one, and agree with every word of it still. No such thing as a guilty pleasure.
Spoilers! Also an old post, and still true: I like spoilers. I have read all sorts of stuff about the later sections of Heaven Official’s Blessing, and it really adds to the experience for me.
Why reread? This is a topic that’s come up over and over again: I like to reread books I enjoy, and re-experience them. There’s another more recent post, and it’s not even the only one…
On giving up, but positively and Discussion: Putting the Joy Back Into It. Both of these are about reading/blogging habits I wanted to stop in order to stop feeling a sense of obligation around blogging. I can’t say I’ve always stuck to these resolutions, but it is something that’s important to me in reading and blogging: I’m not doing it as a job, I’m doing it for fun.
Discussion: Real Life. How much should you talk about your real life on your blog? I guess that depends on you, but I’m fairly open about mine (while keeping it mostly about the books).
Why haven’t you read ___ yet? And here you will learn that I’m contrary, and if everyone wants me to read something, I… probably won’t.
Review: Return of the Black Death: The World’s Greatest Serial Killer, by Susan Scott & Christopher J. Duncan. The book is arrant nonsense. My reaction to it is probably pretty telling about the kind of person I am.
Top Ten Tuesday: Reading Memories. This is a recent one — but what better way to know me than through my most salient memories of reading?
Top Ten Tuesday: Authors I’ve Read The Most By. You can know me by the books I love…
Top Ten Tuesday: Things I’d Have At My Bookish Party. My idea of a “party” is pretty telling, I think.

That was harder than I thought, because these days I mostly post reviews, Top Ten Tuesday, WWW Wednesday and Stacking the Shelves/Sunday Post. But I think you can still get a solid idea of who I am and who I’ve been!

Tags: books, discussion

Review – Dominion vol 3: The Fist of God

Posted August 26, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Dominion: The Fist of God

by Thomas Fenton, Jamal Igle, Steven Cummings

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 50
Series: Dominion #3
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
A gripping supernatural thriller of biblical proportions...quite literally. When detective Jason Ash arrives on the scene of a particularly strange murder in the suburbs of New Orleans, little does he know that he is about to take on the case of a lifetime. As dead people begin to come back to life, revealing that they hail from a realm where angels fight for power, it becomes clear that an epic battle between good and evil is at play, one threatening the very future of humanity.

This third volume, Dominion: The Fist of God, pulls Thomas Fenton’s comic to an abrupt end. There’s been some development up to now, but it feels like this third act is rushed more than ever: having barely accepted his powers in the previous book, and not really yet understanding them or ready to cope with them, Jason Ash gets a lot shoved onto his shoulders all at once. Nothing less than saving the whole world will do!

I think there’s some interesting setup in the story between the Legion and the Dominion and whoever the Thorn are exactly, but the character design of all the angels is way, way too similar, and it gets really hard to tell who is who and what side they might be on. Combine that with the rushed story, and it feels like half the detail gets left out.

Someone on Amazon did make the comment in their review that this is really the middle of a story: the beginning lies back in the mists of time, alluded to as Jason learns a little more about what’s going on, and the end is in the unknowable future. Jason’s been caught up in a story that began long ago, and will continue; we just see him joining his place in it. That makes a certain amount of sense to me, but I still think there are a lot of gaps in the implementation here.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: book reviews, books, comics, Jamal Igle, SF/F, Steven Cummings, Thomas Fenton

Review – Colour

Posted August 26, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 3 Comments

Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox

by Victoria Finlay

Genres: History, Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 494
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Discover the tantalizing true stories behind your favorite colors.

For example: Cleopatra used saffron—a source of the color yellow—for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.

Victoria Finlay’s Colour: Travels through the Paintbox is an examination of dyes and pigments, rather than colour per se — there’s a bit of discussion of why we perceive colours the way we do, but not in depth. It’s more about how various pigments are mined or made, and it’s also part travelogue and part-memoir. The fact that Finlay couldn’t get coffee in Beirut because of Hafez al-Assad’s funeral is neither here nor there, as with the fact that she wore a broken boot to climb in and had to keep tying it together with string. The book could probably do without a great deal of this flavouring, since it slows it all down.

But, viewed as Finlay’s account of a personal quest to discover the origins of a handful of colours — neither exhaustive nor greatly in depth, in many ways — there’s definitely a lot of interest here: random facts, suggestive examples of tradition that may tell us something about how things used to be done, and an idea of how things are done now. Sometimes Finlay’s choices were more about some kind of personally satisfying quest than about really understanding a colour: were her quests for visas really about the colour, or about being able to say she’d visited a mine in Afghanistan?

I guess I feel a bit cynical about some of her motivations because I’m not the type who must necessarily go and see a thing to say I understand it. When she tried to pick saffron, that was an experience worth having to understand the process — but did she need to travel so far? Does one have to see the “original” place where indigo grew to understand indigo?

It’s very readable and full of anecdotes and imagination, to the point where I couldn’t really say it’s a good read to learn about colour. It’s a good read to understand someone else’s journey to personally discover the origins of a handful of pigments and dyes. It does have a bibliography and full footnotes, too, but primarily it’s about how Finlay feels about colour, and the stories she discovered (and liked enough to recount). That can be very enjoyable, it’s just worth bearing in mind.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, history, non-fiction, science, Victoria Finlay