Tag: books

WWW Wednesday

Posted January 24, 2024 by Nicky in General / 6 Comments

It’s Wednesday, so time to address the three Ws:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What have you recently finished reading?
  • What are you reading next?

And linking up with Taking on a World of Words.

What are you currently reading?

Cover of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland AllenI’m deep into The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen — I think I’ll finish it today. It’s proved to be exactly the kind of microhistory I enjoy, rambling through the years to look at the ways people have started to express themselves on paper, from matter-of-fact accounting to diaries like Pepys and Anne Frank’s. It’s not a quick read, but it’s an absorbing one. I loved the glimpses of Leonardo da Vinci’s methods, including the cranky complaints of modern scholars about his awful handwriting.

What have you recently finished reading?

Cover of Permafrost by Alastair ReynoldsThe last thing I finished was Alastair Reynolds’ Permafrost, a hard SF time travel novella. I’m still not quite sure if the time paradoxes all sorted themselves out — I thought that there was one obvious one that would absolutely mess with the timeline, at the end, but sometimes I think I’m just not clever enough for time travel stories. It was still a fascinating structure, anyway.

What will you read next?

Cover of Sailor's Delight by Rose LernerI should turn back to one of the books I’ve started but am currently neglecting — Sailor’s Delight by Rose Lerner, perhaps, or Cat Sebastian’s We Could Be So Good. I really liked both of them so far, my reading journey is just powered by whims, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for so much yearning/such clueless guys.

I do also want to read volume three of The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, while the first two are fresh in my mind. I’m terrible sometimes about leaving a series unfinished for so long I have to start over to finish it. I did say I want to finish more book series this year!

How about you? Any reading plans? Just read something amazing?

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Review – Heartstopper Volume Five

Posted January 23, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Heartstopper Volume Five

Heartstopper vol. 5

by Alice Oseman

Genres: Graphic Novels, Romance
Pages: 336
Series: Heartstopper #5
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Nick and Charlie are in love. They’ve finally said those three little words, and Charlie has almost persuaded his mum to let him sleep over at Nick’s. He wants to take their relationship to the next level ... but can he find the confidence he needs?

And with Nick going off to uni next year, is everything about to change?

Volume 4 of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper proved a bit too heavy for me, but that’s largely not the focus of volume 5 (fortunately). Not that it was a bad story, or a topic that was handled badly, or anything like that, but it just wasn’t what I needed at the time. Volume 5 starts the healing process, and features plenty of Nick and Charlie just getting to be teenagers, and do normal teenage things — including have sex.

It also features a bit of development for Charlie’s sister, which I think is referencing Solitaire? I know nothing about that novel, so seeing how Tori gets on isn’t something I’m super invested in, but on the other hand, it’s nice sometimes to see Nick and Charlie separate, especially given the next step that’s coming for them: long distance, as Nick goes to university…

As ever the art is cute, and the relationship between Nick and Charlie is adorable.

It’s worth noting that though this installment doesn’t go heavily into Charlie’s eating disorder issues, but that hasn’t been forgotten and at times it shadows how Charlie reacts to things and how he manages.

Rating: 4/5

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Top Ten Tuesday: When I Get A Round Tuit

Posted January 23, 2024 by Nicky in General / 38 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is all about the books you meant to read in 2023, and didn’t get to. There are books I’ve been neglecting much longer than that, but let’s hope I get a round tuit this year…

Cover of System Collapse by Martha Wells Cover of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon Cover of Cassiel's Servant by Jacqueline Carey Cover of Ink Blood Sister Scribe by Emma Törzs Cover of Witch King by Martha Wells

  1. System Collapse, by Martha Wells. I feel worst about the ARCs I neglect, and extra-bad about this one. I really want to read it! I love Murderbot! But here we are, and it’s well into January, and still…
  2. Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon. This was an ARC as well, and I bought a hardback in November, but I still haven’t so much as opened it. I’m sorry… I’m in a non-fiction mood at the moment (more than usual, I mean), so I might yet pick it up in January!
  3. Cassiel’s Servant, by Jacqueline Carey. Another ARC I neglected, in part because I meant to finish rereading Kushiel’s Avatar first, and I still haven’t managed that. I still love you, Joscelin.
  4. Ink Blood Sister Scribe, by Emma Törzs. I had this in ARC and also bought a copy (I like to do that when I’m late with reviewing an eARC), and still haven’t done more than read the first couple of pages. Rare magic books, how could I not love the idea of this one?
  5. Witch King, by Martha Wells. Look, I’m wincing as hard as you are. Yes, this was an eARC as well. And I bought a copy on release day. In my defence, it did come out during my exams! But I’m letting Martha Wells down hard, I know.
  6. Lost in the Moment and Found, by Seanan McGuire. I didn’t get to this one because I needed to catch up on the series first, and hadn’t realised I was several books behind, but I can at least report I’m nearly there! I read Where the Drowned Girls Go over the weekend.
  7. In The Lives of Puppets, by TJ Klune. Once more, I own a copy as well as having received an eARC. I really enjoyed The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door (though I’m aware of some of the criticisms of Klune’s work), and I’m looking forward to giving this a shot.
  8. Someone from the Past, by Margot Bennett. This one’s not an ARC! I had a tradition of reading the book I got from my British Library Crime Classics subscription right away, for the first part of the year… and then got a bit discombobulated when I got the Christmas anthology in October. I want to catch up and get back to it, so Someone from the Past is high on my list.
  9. Big Ben Strikes Eleven, by David Magarshack. Same here — I think this was the November book, and the Bennett was the December book? So I’d like to get round to both of them soon and get back to reading the new one as soon as it arrives.
  10. A Nobleman’s Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel, by KJ Charles. I got this on the day it released, and fully intended to read it right away — KJ Charles almost never misses for me! But I wasn’t quite in the mood, and then I put it aside for a bit, and well… it’s still there now.

Cover of Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire Cover of In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune Cover of Someone From The Past by Margot Bennett Cover of Big Ben Strikes Eleven by David Magarshack Cover of A Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles

Broadly speaking, I try not to be too prescriptive about what I “should” be reading, and let it be flexible depending on what I feel like. Which does land me in messes when it comes to review copies… but it’s a fairly chill way to read, most of the time! So I’m not kicking myself too hard about not reading these books yet. Their time will come.

How about you? Do you have strict to-read lists and schedules?

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Review – Till Death Do Us Part

Posted January 22, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – Till Death Do Us Part

Till Death Do Us Part

by John Dickson Carr

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 245
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

"Who can I trust?"

Love-sick Dick Markham is reeling. He's set to marry Lesley Grant -- a woman whom he learns is not who she appears to be. She seems to have been associated with three poisonings, all of which were in locked rooms. Another crime has been committed and we will watch the great Dr. Fell investigate through Markham's watchful eyes.

That night the enigmatic fortune teller-and chief accuser-is found dead in an impossible locked-room setup, casting suspicion onto Grant and striking doubt into the heart of her lover. Lured by the scent of the impossible case, Dr. Gideon Fell arrives from London to examine the perplexing evidence and match wits with a meticulous killer at large.

I should preface this by saying (for anyone just tuning into my reviews now) that I really didn’t like the first couple of books by John Dickson Carr that I tried. After I read He Who Whispers, though, something clicked, and I determined to give him a little more time. Now that I’ve finished this one, I’m feeling a bit more complicated about it.

First, his female characters often leave something to be desired. There’s a certain almost femme fatale character type that he uses a few times (including here and in He Who Whispers) that I really don’t enjoy, though it can be difficult to explain exactly why not. Something about the overwrought helplessness of them, I think: the highly emotionally charged scenes where I favour a practical character who just steps up and takes control for herself. Which… not everyone or every character has to be like that, but when an author leans into the overwrought female stereotype multiple times, you really start to notice.

And of course, there’s his locked room mysteries, and his detectives. He tries so hard to come up with ingenious mysteries where you need to notice the tiniest clues and draw inferences from them if you want to treat it as a fair-play mystery — and to me, it feels sometimes like a rabbit just gets pulled out of the hat.

This one does get explained well, but there was a while where it was just too frustrating for words (I made a lot of cranky noises at it; my wife was definitely laughing at me). I don’t know quite what I’d want to make it hang together better for me: maybe just a bit more sense of the detective (and those around him) as humans. I’m not sure what drives Gideon Fell, beyond the love of a puzzle, yet on several occasions he shows a very human and humane side. I think a little more of that would do wonders for me.

Anyway, my newfound faith in John Dickson Carr isn’t quite shaken, but I hope the next book of his that I read takes a slightly different tack.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The Brides of High Hill

Posted January 21, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Review – The Brides of High Hill

The Brides of High Hill

by Nghi Vo

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 128
Series: The Singing Hills Cycle #5
Rating: four-stars
Synopsis:

Nghi Vo's Hugo Award-winning Singing Hills Cycle returns with a standalone gothic mystery that unfolds in the empire of Ahn.

The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to the aging ruler of a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. The bride's party is welcomed with elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, but between the frightened servants and the cryptic warnings of the lord's mad son, they quickly realize that something is haunting the shadowed halls.

As Chih and the bride-to-be explore empty rooms and desolate courtyards, they are drawn into the mystery of what became of Lord Guo's previous wives and the dark history of Do Cao itself. But as the wedding night draws to its close, Chih will learn at their peril that not all monsters are to be found in the shadows; some monsters hide in plain sight.

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.

Nghi Vo’s latest Singing Hills novella starts off by setting you up with some expectations, right from the blurb, and skillfully leans on that to guide you through the novella to the crisis point. It feels darker to me than the previous novellas in this series, with a real sense of unease throughout — not that the others have no sense of looming consequences, but I was more frightened for Cleric Chih than I usually would be. Chih has been drawn into something they may not be able to get out of, where they’re not so much an observer anymore, or just interested in how things turn out, but a part of the tale and critically affected by whatever will happen. Which is not the first time, I suppose, but this just felt more immediate.

I think Vo does an amazing job at teasing things out, with some little hints along the way to help you catch on so that once it all becomes clear, it’s really clear. It’s difficult to say much about this story without spoiling that journey, so I won’t say any more on that.

I did find that once certain things started happening, it all unravelled really quickly and I almost stumbled. I guess that’d be my only critique, but the story caught me when I stumbled and rearranged the world so everything made sense, so maybe that moment is really just part of the experience.

Rating: 4/5

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Review – Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

Posted January 20, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 1 Comment

Review – Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close

by Hannah Carlson

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 320
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

Who gets pockets, and why?

It’s a subject that stirs up plenty of passion: Why do men’s clothes have so many pockets and women’s so few? And why are the pockets on women’s clothes often too small to fit phones, if they even open at all? In her captivating book, Hannah Carlson, a lecturer in dress history at the Rhode Island School of Design, reveals the issues of gender politics, security, sexuality, power, and privilege tucked inside our pockets.

Throughout the medieval era in Europe, the purse was an almost universal dress feature. But when tailors stitched the first pockets into men’s trousers five hundred years ago, it ignited controversy and introduced a range of social issues that we continue to wrestle with today, from concealed pistols to gender inequality. See: #GiveMePocketsOrGiveMeDeath.

Filled with incredible images, this microhistory of the humble pocket uncovers what pockets tell us about ourselves: How is it that putting your hands in your pockets can be seen as a sign of laziness, arrogance, confidence, or perversion? Walt Whitman’s author photograph, hand in pocket, for Leaves of Grass seemed like an affront to middle-class respectability. When W.E.B. Du Bois posed for a portrait, his pocketed hands signaled defiant coolness.

And what else might be hiding in the history of our pockets? (There’s a reason that the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets are the most popular exhibit at the Library of Congress.)

Thinking about the future, Carlson asks whether we will still want pockets when our clothes contain “smart” textiles that incorporate our IDs and credit cards.

Pockets is for the legions of people obsessed with pockets and their absence, and for anyone interested in how our clothes influence the way we navigate the world.

Hannah Carlson’s Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close begins with the oldest types of pockets we know about, for both sexes, and quickly moves on through the years, discussing the evolution of pockets, the politics of pockets, and ultimately the fashion world’s take on pockets. It’s really not just about pockets: it’s also about women’s lives and how pockets have figured into those (they’ve been more significant than you might think), about how men’s fashions have changed and what those fashions have meant (hands in pockets used to be considered super rude), etc.

As a way of examining a swathe of history and society, it works pretty well, and it’s aided in its pace and interest by the addition of lots of colour images. I did briefly wonder whether it had forgotten all about tie-on pockets or decided to treat them as bags, but it got there after dealing with men’s pockets, in the end.

It made an interesting supplement to Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women’s Lives, 1660-1900, since it fills in some of the men’s side of things, and doesn’t confine itself within that period. Slightly less academic than that book, too, I’d say.

Rating: 3/5

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Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted January 20, 2024 by Nicky in General / 33 Comments

After last week, this one’s been nice and quiet. I’ve had a little more time to read than usual since I’ve been out of my usual routine… though at the same time, I did have my eye injury limiting things a bit, and I promise I helped out with stuff like washing dishes and so on! So I haven’t read as much as I might’ve liked — but when do I ever get to do that?

As usual, I’m linking up with Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz, this weekend.

Books acquired this week:

After the acquisitions of the last few weeks, this has been a quiet one. I’m sure my British Library Crime Classic subscription book of the month is waiting for me at home, but I haven’t been home to pick it up yet… so this week it’s just the most recent in Juliet E. McKenna’s Green Man series, which was on sale for 99p. I haven’t actually read any of this series yet: I really have to hop to it!

Cover of The Green Man's Quarry by Juliet E. McKenna

I’m pretty sure it’ll be a good time when I do get around to reading it, thanks to Imyril’s reviews. That’s why I keep picking up the ebooks when I see them on sale…

Posts from this week:

This week I’ve continued posting reviews daily, slowly trying to catch up on my backlog. So here goes the roundup!

As you see, I’m trying out adding an indication of genre in case it helps people decide whether they’re interested in checking something out!

And other posts:

What I’m reading:

As I draft this on Friday night, I’ve just finished up Cat Jarman’s The Bone Chests, so I’m not sure what I’ll focus on for the weekend. I’m feeling an itch to read more non-fiction, so I might try Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking On Paper, or possibly Bettany Hughes’ The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. I want to do a bit of catching up on my reading goal as well, so I’m eyeing some novellas.

I have done some reading this week, though, so here’s a little sneak peek of reviews to come in the next weeks/months…

Cover of Glitter by Nicole Seymour Cover of Heartstopper: Become Human by Alice Oseman Cover of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System vol 2

Cover of Digging Up Britain by Mike Pitts Cover of The Iron Children by Rebecca Fraimow Cover of Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World by Philip Matyszak Cover of The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

Hope everyone else has had a good week! Anything exciting in your reading plans for the weekend?

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Review – The Science of Sin

Posted January 19, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

Review – The Science of Sin

The Science of Sin: Why we do the things we know we shouldn't

by Jack Lewis

Genres: Non-fiction, Science
Pages: 304
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

It can often seem that we are utterly surrounded by temptation, from the ease of online shopping and the stream of targeted advertising encouraging us to greedily acquire yet more stuff, to the coffee, cake and fast-food shops that line our streets, beckoning us in to over-indulge on all the wrong things. It can feel like a constant battle to stay away from the temptations we know we shouldn't give in to. Where exactly do these urges come from? If we know we shouldn't do something, for the sake of our health, our pockets or our reputation, why is it often so very hard to do the right thing? Anyone who has ever wondered why they never seem to be able to stick to their diet, anyone to whom the world seems more vain and self-obsessed than ever, anyone who can't understand why love-cheats pursue their extra-marital affairs, anyone who struggles to resist the lure of the comfy sofa, or anyone who makes themselves bitter through endless comparison with other people - this book is for you.

The Science of Sin brings together the latest findings from neuroscience research to shed light on the universally fascinating subject of temptation - where it comes from, how to resist it and why we all tend to succumb from time to time. With each chapter inspired by one of the seven deadly sins, neurobiologist Jack Lewis illuminates the neural battles between temptation and restraint that take place within our brains, suggesting strategies to help us better manage our most troublesome impulses with the explicit goal of improving our health, our happiness and our productivity - helping us to say `no!' more often, especially when it really counts.

The Science of Sin takes on a lot of religious baggage, for all that Jack Lewis, its author, says that he’s an atheist. To some extent that’s inevitable given his background, and his choice to shape the book around the concept of the Seven Deadly Sins, looking for neurological and evolutionary explanations for the origins of each — both their pitfalls and their utility.

The problem is that it inevitably becomes very moralising. He does try to point out when certain neurological things might not be someone’s choice, but he seems to have more sympathy for paedophiles than for fat people, and is very certain that being fat is almost totally a choice people make (when in fact there are many contributing causes, including sheer poverty, where good food choices are not always available), and a moral one that impacts badly on society and on everyone around them. Fatness is also unequivocally bad for you, in Lewis’ view, where the real picture is more mixed (fat people, for instance, have lower 30-day mortality from bacterial pneumonia and have better survival rates and reduced immune depletion when living with HIV) and thinness is no guarantor of health of any kind.

(Important note: this is not something I’m interested in debating in the comments on this blog. I’ve studied some of the science of nutrition in relation to immunity as part of my MSc, but you’re best off heading to the literature with an open mind and a careful eye for bias — your own and that of the papers you find.)

In almost every chapter, he finds a way to reference narcissism, blame fat people, suggest fat people are narcissistic, and so on. And again, he treats these as moral issues, failures that people should rectify.

In some cases, he isn’t wrong, but he’s replacing religious moralising about it with a kind of secular moralising about it that sits badly with any effort to be objective. Combine that with his reliance on scans like fMRI to tell us about what’s going on in someone’s brain, and a lot of his conclusions are questionable: you can get apparently significant results from the brain of a dead salmon, with fMRI, an issue that he very briefly references before waving it away and saying that fMRI is the tool we have, so he’s going to use it.

For me, there was a kind of entertainment value in watching him build up his argument, but I was aware of the one-sided nature of his search for appropriate sources, and not appreciative of his moralising.

Rating: 2/5

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Review – Cold Iron

Posted January 18, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 4 Comments

Review – Cold Iron

Cold Iron

by Triona Farrell, Tom Muller, Andy Diggle, Nick Brokenshire

Genres: Fantasy, Graphic Novels
Pages: 140
Rating: three-stars
Synopsis:

On the rural Isle of Man, aspiring singer-songwriter Kay Farragher dreams of escaping her humdrum life. But she’s about to get more than she bargained for – and some bargains are not to be trusted.

Celtic folklore and modern moxie collide as an ancient pact between worlds is broken. The sinister forces of Faerie have slipped their shackles, and the Black Dog walks abroad this night


Andy Diggle et al’s Cold Iron is pretty fun: it’s set on the Isle of Man, and draws from fairytales and folktales. It’s perhaps not too surprising that it sees creatures from Faerie intruding upon our world, and that a trip to Faerie is eventually indicated, but it’s a fun ride nonetheless.

I liked the art, and I liked Kay, her practical approach to realising that actually, her grandmother was right after all — and her fierceness in fighting for those she cares about, and those she feels a responsibility to.

It wasn’t too surprising in terms of where the plot went, given the givens, but I had fun, and I also quite appreciated that it included a short story (in prose rather than the same comic format) at the end with a little bit more closure.

Rating: 3/5

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Review – The House of Drought

Posted January 17, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Review – The House of Drought

House of Drought

by Dennis Mombauer

Genres: Fantasy, Horror
Pages: 117
Rating: two-stars
Synopsis:

On the island of Sri Lanka, at a colonial mansion between the forest and the paddy fields, a caretaker arrives with four children in tow after pledging to keep them safe. When violent thugs storm the house demanding that Ushu repay his debt, young Jasmit and the other children hide in an upstairs bathroom where a running tap opens a gateway to escape. But the Dry House is not the only force at work in the place where the forest and the estate meet—something else stirs in the trees, something ancient, something that demands retribution.

The Sap Mother bides her time, watching and learning from the house’s inhabitants. She burrows beneath the foundations of the Dry House, hungry for atonement. Pulled between these warring powers, Jasmit must choose between saving those trapped in the mansion’s bulging stomachs and preparing the house for when the Mother emerges again.

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.

This horror novella didn’t entirely work for me, though I appreciated a number of things about it (the setting, the tension, the fact that it didn’t give the reader too many answers too quickly). The structure kind of annoyed me, with the order of events jerking around. It’s hard to describe, but first you get the frame story, the “present day” if you will. Then you jump back in time to the crisis point of other characters’ story… then forward just a little to how those characters got into that situation. Then forward back to the present day, and then a new set of characters.

It feels like the story tried very hard to come full circle, bring things together and find a way to end the story — but it felt like it missed a step. How did a certain character figure things out? Why is she so eager to save people she doesn’t know?

It’s an interesting novella but I didn’t find it wholly successful.

Rating: 2/5

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