Tag: books

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Stood Out in 2023

Posted January 2, 2024 by Nicky in General / 44 Comments

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday prompt is all about picking your favourite books of 2023. I don’t often think about books in terms of favourites, especially since my reading is highly capricious and mood-based… so I’ll just be picking ten books that stand out when I think back on the year, without trying to say they’re the best or my favourites. I’ll omit any rereads, just to make things easier.

And these are the books I read in 2023, which probably didn’t come out in 2023, because I’m rarely that up to date on recently released books.

Nettle & Bone, by T. Kingfisher. It’s rare lately that I find it difficult to put a book down, with lots of other things grabbing my attention. Nettle & Bone is one that I found myself eagerly picking up again right away, ready for more.
The Governess Affair, by Courtney Milan. I haven’t posted my review for this one yet, but I really liked it: Milan handles a traumatic issue sensitively, creating a bond between two characters that felt solid and real.
An Immense World, by Ed Yong. I love non-fiction when it makes me want to tell everyone the facts I’m learning, and Ed Yong’s book fit the bill. I was actually texting my mum about stuff I’d learned from it while waiting to be discharged from the post-op ward after a minor surgery!
Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree. I actually read this twice in 2023, because it really hit the spot for me — cosy and full of people being good to one another, and forging bonds.
Death of an Author, by E.C.R. Lorac. I often really enjoy Lorac’s work, and this was no exception, though it wasn’t much like her other work. It felt less cosy somehow, but it was a heck of a brainteaser.
The Waking of Angantyr, by Marie Brennan. Marie Brennan’s an auto-buy author for me, and I ended up reading this side-by-side with my wife while we were on a weekend away. We raced through it!
Untethered Sky, by Fonda Lee. I found this story lingering with me after I was done. I loved how the obsession was built up, the special relation between the handler and the roc illustrated.
The Good Virus, by Tom Ireland. Totally fascinating stuff about bacteriophages, and I learned a fair amount I didn’t know about existing bacteriophage therapy.
Murder: The Biography, by Kate Morgan. A history of murder and trials for murder, showing how precedent has shaped law. Interesting for its own sake, but especially in light of my interest in crime fiction!
He Who Whispers, by John Dickson Carr. Finally, this is the only one on the list not rated 5/5 by me this year, but it deserves a mention because it’s the book that actually piqued my interest in John Dickson Carr. Previously I’d tried several books by him and just couldn’t get on with them… but here we are in a world where I enjoy his books now, at least some of them!

And before we go, I have to give an honorable mention to Juneau Black’s Shady Hollow books, which I discovered in the last couple months of the year and had me totally absorbed.

How about you? Can you pick a top ten? Fascinated to see what has stood out for people this year!

Tags: books, Top Ten Tuesday

Review – Who Killed The Curate?

Posted January 1, 2024 by Nicky in Reviews / 2 Comments

Who Killed The Curate?

by Joan Coggin

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 228
Rating:

Synopsis:
Meet Lady Lupin Lorimer Hastings, the young, lovely, scatterbrained and kind-hearted newlywed wife to Andrew, the vicar of St Marks parish in Glanville, Sussex. When it comes to matters clerical, she is rather at sea. Nevertheless, she is determined to make her husband proud of her.... or at least not to embarrass him too badly.

When, on Christmas Eve, Andrew's unpopular, blackmailing curate gets himself murdered, things all get a bit (hilariously) overwhelming for poor out-of-her-depth Lady Lupin:
"Who was in your sitting room during that interval? Say four-thirty on Tuesday, and ten or eleven yesterday morning?"
"If you had ever lived in a vicarage you wouldn't ask questions like that; people just walk in and out all day long. When Andrew asked me to marry him, he said he was afraid I should find it very quiet here, and what he meant I can't imagine! If I wanted quiet I'd rather retire to the Tower of Babel with a saxophone."

Lupin enlists old society pals Duds and Tommy Lethbridge, as well as Andrew's nephew, a British secret service agent, to get at the truth. Lupin refuses to believe that Diana Lloyd, 38-year-old author of the children's detective stories, could've done the deed and casts her net over the other parishioners. But all the suspects seem so nice - very much more so than the victim.

I was hoping to enjoy Who Killed The Curate?, which is a Christmas mystery by Joan Coggin reissued by Galileo Publishers. I’d hoped to find some more fun classic crime fiction by checking out the books reissued by them, but in this one at least I was pretty disappointed.

It starts out hopefully, with a witty playfulness about it, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s all going to be that way — and that in part it’s going to be that way at the expense of the characters, particularly Lupin, the female lead. She’s quite silly, gets herself in ridiculous and unlikely tangles, and for someone with second-hand embarrassment issues, it was absolutely excruciating. Would you really get godfather and grandfather mixed up, so totally you don’t actually know the difference between them? And not just that, but also guys and guides? And just making totally inappropriate conversation everywhere —

Aaargh!

All of that made it decidedly unenjoyable to me, unfortunately. If you have a bit of a thicker skin you might make more of it, but I just couldn’t get myself past Lupin in order to enjoy anything else.

Rating: 1/5

Tags: book reviews, books, crime, Joan Coggin, mystery

Review – A Trace of Copper

Posted December 31, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

A Trace of Copper

by Anne Renwick

Genres: Fantasy, Historical Fiction, Science Fiction
Pages: 115
Rating: two-stars

Synopsis:
New recruit to the Queen's agents, Dr. Piyali Mukherji is given a simple first assignment. Travel to the small Welsh village of Aberwyn and solve the mystery of a young woman's blue skin lesion. A challenging task, for the alarming infection is unlike anything she's seen before—and it's spreading.

Evan Tredegar, the town's pharmacist and the only man to ever capture her heart, knows more than he's telling. Despite his efforts to push her away, her touch reawakens old desires. As more villagers fall victim to the strange disease, he'll have no choice but to reveal his secrets, even if it means sacrificing his freedom.

Together they must move past broken promises, capture a rogue frog, and stop the infection before it spreads out of control.

I was really fascinated by the idea of Anne Renwick’s A Trace of Copper. Steampunk set in Wales, with a female Indian doctor main character and chasing down a mysterious disease — sounds like it has my name on it, right? And there were things to like about it, though the infectious disease concepts are introduced in ways that feel really clunky to me. Sometimes it manages to bring across genuine concepts in epidemiology, and then sometimes they miss something blindingly obvious like starting to plot the known cases on a map. (Granted, they don’t have many cases yet, but how else do they really plan to track the spread they’re fully expecting to occur?)

I also cringed hard at Piyali using the names of infectious diseases to swear. Just… super pretentious. If you want me to believe this is a biologist, you don’t need to have her doing something a child might do to show off what long words they’ve learned. At first when she exclaimed “schistosomiasis!” I thought she was making a diagnosis and the author was just laughably off-base with how schistosomiasis is contracted, what it does to the body, etc… but nope. She’s just using it as an exclamation instead of “oh my goodness!” or “oh no!”

Aaand then the two main characters were too busy boning to keep their minds on the politically and epidemiologically important disease they were meant to be tracking and attempting to cure. I’ll give a pass on their supposed mechanism of cure and the speed of it working (and indeed of them finding a cure), and of the fact that they totally ignored the likelihood of resistance arising if you’re gonna use a monotherapy… because I expect this was written by a layperson and it’s sweet that they made this much of an effort to begin with. I suspect it’d go down easier for someone who doesn’t study infectious diseases, though.

Rating: 2/5

Tags: Anne Renwick, book reviews, books, SF/F

Review – Silent Nights

Posted December 30, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries

by Martin Edwards (editor)

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Short Stories
Pages: 287
Series: British Library Crime Classics
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Christmas is a mysterious, as well as magical, time of year. Strange things can happen, and this helps to explain the hallowed tradition of telling ghost stories around the fireside as the year draws to a close. Christmas tales of crime and detection have a similar appeal. When television becomes tiresome, and party games pall, the prospect of curling up in the warm with a good mystery is enticing – and much better for the digestion than yet another helping of plum pudding.

Crime writers are just as susceptible as readers to the countless attractions of Christmas. Over the years, many distinguished practitioners of the genre have given one or more of their stories a Yuletide setting. The most memorable Christmas mysteries blend a lively storyline with an atmospheric evocation of the season. Getting the mixture right is much harder than it looks.

This book introduces of readers to some of the finest Christmas detective stories of the past. Martin Edwards’ selection blends festive pieces from much-loved authors with one or two stories which are likely to be unfamiliar even to diehard mystery fans. The result is a collection of crime fiction to savour, whatever the season.

Silent Nights is another anthology of crime/mystery stories in the British Library Crime Classics series — edited as always by Martin Edwards. I think this may even have been the first one in the series, which means it contains an Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock story (Conan Doyle being conspicuous by his absence from the more recent anthologies, presumably owing to running out of Holmes stories that fit the theme) and even a Dorothy L. Sayers story.

It’s a fun collection, with a couple of authors I’d be curious to read more books from (such as Marjorie Bowen). I raised my eyebrows a bit about including back-to-back stories by the same author, one under a pseudonym… but they’re somewhat different in tone, so it didn’t feel too samey.

As ever, it’s a collection greater than the sum of its parts, which is a phrase I’ve typed about these anthologies so often that perhaps I should just assume people will take it as read. Each individual story is mildly entertaining, some more questionable than others, but as a group they’re an interesting cross-section. Or archaeological dig through time, really, since they’re in chronological order…

Rating: 3/5

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

Stacking the Shelves & The Sunday Post

Posted December 30, 2023 by Nicky in General / 44 Comments

Oof, almost time to put 2023 to bed. It was a weird transitional year for me, letting go of some stuff that had become a burden and getting out of an exploitative environment that was sucking out all of my free time and a lot of my energy. It brought me back to blogging by the end of the year, which is nice. Here’s hoping 2024 is kind to us all.

Anyway, it’s time for the post-Christmas haul, or at least the first part of it…

As before, I’ll be linking up with a few different posts: Reading Reality’s Stacking the Shelves, Caffeinated Reviewer’s The Sunday Post, and the Sunday Salon over at Readerbuzz.

Books acquired this week:

I got quite a lot of books, in fact, so it’s hard to know just how to split them up into two batches. I think I’ll show off my dorky Final Fantasy books received and the various fiction books I received, this week, and then the non-fiction books I got next week, just to avoid it being too big!

So first of all, here are the additions to my Final Fantasy XIV collection:

The artbooks are gorgeous, and the encyclopaedias have a lot of fascinating information. I previously got volume I of the encyclopaedia, so it’s nice to get up to date!

As far as fiction books go, I was equally spoiled by my family, and I’m also including a book bought off my wishlist by Cheryl Malandrinos from The Book Connection, The Book of Perilous Dishes. (Thank you so much!)

I’m eager to dig into all of these, though I need to acquire Curse of the Pharaohs before I can read The Mummy Case, in order to avoid getting out of order. I think I’ll leave that a bit until my TBR pile is a little less inclined to overflow! 😀

And of course I must also include the two review copies I’ve been approved for this week:

Thanks, Tordotcom!

Posts from this week:

It’s been a quieter week for posts, since I paused for a bit while celebrating Christmas, but there are some new posts:

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins, by P. Djèlí Clark (3/5 stars)
The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, volume 1, by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù (3/5 stars)
Christmas: A History, by Judith Flanders (DNF)
Murder at Maybridge Castle, by Ada Moncrieff (3/5 stars)

What I’m reading:

For the weekend, I’m working on hitting my reading goal for 2023: 400 books in total! Just two more books to go, but I haven’t really decided what to read yet.

Here’s a glimpse of the books I’ve read this week which I’ll probably be reviewing on here soon:

And that’s it! Hope everyone had a good Christmas, and that we’re all looking forward to the new year. Let’s hope it’s a good one (with plenty of books).

Tags: books, Stacking the Shelves, weekly roundup

Review – Murder at Maybridge Castle

Posted December 29, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Murder at Maybridge Castle

by Ada Moncrieff

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 304
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
It's Christmas 1937 and an eclectic list of guests and staff have gathered for the grand re-opening of Maybridge castle, a newly renovated yet still crumbling hotel deep in the Cumbrian countryside. They are:

The ex-socialite owner
The Doctor and his new wife
The stylish journalist
The know-all housekeepers
The still-grieving widower and his son
The tarot readers
The passionate academic
The persistent investigative reporter
The elder amateur sleuth, and her cat

An innocent game of murder-in-the-dark will turn into a real game of life and death. And by the time the first sherries have been drunk, one of these people will be dead - and one of them the killer. Someone has changed the rules, but who?

I really liked Ada Moncrieff’s past Christmas mysteries, because they were fun, a little bit classic (a country house mystery, no less, for the first one!) and easy to read. They weren’t too surprising in terms of methods and motives, but it’s sometimes enjoyable to just settle into a story where you know the rough shape of it, and let it unfold.

Along much the same lines, I enjoyed Murder at Maybridge Castle, though I feel like there was maybe a little something that didn’t work for me here. Maybe it’s just comparison with how quickly I read her other books, or maybe it’s the particular cast of characters — I don’t quite know. This one does also feature a repeat character, unlike before: Daphne King returns, with a wealth of references to characters we don’t see on the page, leaving me grasping to try and remember the details. I found that a bit offputting, to be honest.

The mystery itself unfolded more or less as I predicted, but I did enjoy the character of Mrs Threwley, and there were nice little moments of characterisation and dialogue that made things feel a bit more alive (such as the interaction between the father and son duo, and Mrs Threwley’s genuine care for her cat, Duke).

So in the end, it was fun, but I’m not quite as enthused as with previous years’ mysteries from Moncrieff. Which will in no way stop me trying out another, should she continue in this vein.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: Ada Moncrieff, book reviews, books, crime, mystery

Review – Christmas: A History

Posted December 28, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

Christmas: A History

by Judith Flanders

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 245
Rating: DNF

Synopsis:
Christmas has been all things to all people: a religious festival, a family celebration, a time of eating and drinking. Yet the origins of the customs which characterize the festive season are wreathed in myth.

When did turkeys become the plat du jour? Is the commercialization of Christmas a recent phenomenon, or has the emphasis always been on spending? Just who is, or was, Santa Claus? And for how long have we been exchanging presents of underwear and socks?

Food, drink and nostalgia for Christmases past seem to be almost as old as the holiday itself, far more central to the story of Christmas than religious worship. Thirty years after the first recorded Christmas, in the fourth century, the Archbishop of Constantinople was already warning that too many people were spending the day not in worship, but dancing and eating to excess. By 1616, the playwright Ben Jonson was nostalgically recalling the Christmases of yesteryear, confident that they had been better then.

In Christmas: A History, acclaimed social historian and bestselling author Judith Flanders casts a sharp and revealing eye on the myths, legends and history of the season, from the origins of the holiday in the Roman empire to the emergence of Christmas trees in central Europe, to what might just possibly be the first appearance of Santa Claus – in Switzerland! – to draw a picture of the season as it has never been seen before.

I was all set to enjoy some Christmas-themed reading, and quite ready to trust Judith Flanders (having found one of her previous books enjoyable and, where I could verify sources, accurate). The history of Christmas and its ins and outs might not be warm holiday reading for everyone, but I find that sort of thing fascinating.

But… quite early in the book, Flanders refers to a bunch of different traditions all at once: the Klapperbock, Julebukk, Schimmel, Old Hob, and… “Mari Lhoyd”.

Obviously she’s referring to the “Mari Lwyd”, but how she’s fitting it into her picture of a saint or wild man travelling around handing out apples and nuts to children accompanied by a horse or goat, I’m not quite sure. The Mari doesn’t do anything like that, is more likely to take apples and nuts from children, and it feels like an enormous stretch to refer to it as an “incarnation” of that tradition. Maybe an echo of it or of a shared older tradition involving hobby-horses, I don’t know, but you’d have to do some work to convince me that they’re closely linked enough to refer to the Mari as an incarnation of the Klapperbock/Julebukk/etc.

And also, most obviously of all, it’s not spelled like that. So I went looking for her sources. Neither of them spell Mari Lwyd correctly, which is already a bit telling.

In the interests of full disclosure, I did reach out to the author and ask about the sources, as the original site hosting the bibliography and chapter notes disappeared. Her comment was this:

I don’t remember now if I copied it wrong, I just made an error, or it’s a typo that I didn’t spot (I am the proud holder of Olympic Gold in the World’s Worst Proofreader). But it can be corrected, thanks for the pick-up.

So there’s that, for whatever it is worth. And the sources are available, but no longer at the link given in the book. You can find them on the author’s site.

I was so discomforted by the speedily-handled generalisation there that I decided to set the book aside, bolstered by my Flemish wife’s confused reaction to the description of allegedly Flemish customs (also described as being similar to the Klapperbock, the Mari, etc). I was alert to weird generalisations here because I know and care about what a Mari Lwyd is — but can I say the same of the rest of the information? Alas, no, so I don’t know where to apply my pinches of salt, and in that case I’d rather set the book down.

Props to the author though for answering, sending me the link to the bibliography, and letting me know the error can be fixed in future.

Rating: Did Not Finish

Tags: book reviews, books, history, Judith Flanders, non-fiction

WWW Wednesday

Posted December 27, 2023 by Nicky in General / 2 Comments

It’s been a long time since I checked in on a Wednesday with what I’ve been reading, but it feels like a good time! So without further ado, here I go answering the threes 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?

Right now I’ve got started on one of my Christmas presents, The Science of Sin, by Jack Lewis. I was always inclined to raise my eyebrows a bit at the premise, expecting a good amount of discussion of “mismatch theory” (humans evolved under circumstances xyz, to promote survival via behaviours abc, and now those very behaviours cause problems) and possibly some judginess over defining what a “sin” even is.

That’s… pretty much what we’ve got here, with each chapter based on one of the Seven Deadlies. The chapter on gluttony focuses on bodyweight, asserting very firmly that it’s all about behaviour (and ignoring the influence of stuff like PCOS). It seems like a very simplified, pop-science way of going about things. Which isn’t too surprising, but it is frustrating.

What have you recently finished reading?

The last book I finished was The History of Wales in Twelve Poems, by M. Wynn Thomas — an inspired choice of Christmas present from my dad, since I love Welsh history (and know sadly little about it), I like poetry, and I love histories that take this format. I enjoyed it a lot, though worryingly a lot of the information dripped back out of my head again. I blame Christmas dinner, and will have to refresh my memory on bits of it before I write my review!

It’s also got some illustrations by Ruth Jên Evans, and has lovely presentation in general, including the poems in Welsh and in translation, etc.

What are you reading next?

I should really return to one of the other books I have on the go! Most likely I’ll finish up Sailor’s Delight, by Rose Lerner, which I was enjoying a lot but put down because the yearning was really getting to me. The romance promises to be really sweet, but I found it surprisingly intense!

Other than that, I also want to read A Surprise for Christmas before Twelfth Night, so I can get a review out close to Christmas-time. It’s one of the British Library Crime Classics series edited by Martin Edwards, and usually I find those to be pretty quick reads.

What about you? What are you reading?

Tags: books, Jack Lewis, M. Wynn Thomas, Rose Lerner, WWW Wednesday

Review – The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, vol 1

Posted December 27, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 0 Comments

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, vol 1

by Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù

Genres: Fantasy, Romance
Pages: 339
Series: The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System #1
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
Half-demon Luo Binghe rose from humble beginnings and a tortured past to become unrivaled in strength and beauty. With his dominion over both the Human and Demon Realms and his hundreds-strong harem, he is truly the most powerful protagonist… in a trashy webnovel series!

At least, that’s what Shen Yuan believes as he finishes reading the final chapter in Proud Immortal Demon Way. But when a bout of rage leads to his sudden death, Shen Yuan is reborn into the world of the novel in the body of Shen Qingqiu – the beautiful but cruel teacher of a young Luo Binghe. While Shen Qingqiu may have the incredible power of a cultivator, he is destined to be horrifically punished for crimes against the protagonist.

The new Shen Qingqiu now has only one course of action: get into Luo Binghe’s good graces before the young man’s rise to power or suffer the awful fate of a true scum villain!

I’m new to reading danmei (though I was vaaaguely aware of the author, Mò Xiāng Tóng Xiù), and had no idea where to start, but I read a whole article about this one on Tor.com and I was intrigued. While “screwball comedy” (as it’s described in another Tor article) doesn’t really accurately sum up my interests (in fact, would usually send me screaming in the other direction), the description of the main relationship of the books had me intrigued.

Aaand the actual reading experience was a lot of fun?! Okay, there were jokes that just made me want to facepalm, and sometimes I really couldn’t believe the dense lack of self-knowledge on the part of the main character… but I really wanted to know how he managed to gain control of the narrative, and whether he’d be able to save himself. I really started to care about Shen Yuan’s affection for his student, and I laughed at some of the ridiculous situations he ends up in.

Needless to say, I’m hooked. And these books are beautifully produced, with illustrations and notes and a character list at the back (which can really help if you start losing track of the names). I hope I’m getting more volumes for Christmas… [and I did!]

Rating: 3/5

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

Review – The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

Posted December 23, 2023 by Nicky in Reviews / 6 Comments

The Dead Cat Tail Assassins

by P. Djèlí Clark

Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 208
Rating: three-stars

Synopsis:
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins are not cats.
Nor do they have tails.
But they are most assuredly dead.

Eveen the Eviscerator is skilled, discreet, professional, and here for your most pressing needs in the ancient city of Tal Abisi. Her guild is strong, her blades are sharp, and her rules are simple. Those sworn to the Matron of Assassins—resurrected, deadly, wiped of their memories—have only three unbreakable vows.

First, the contract must be just. That’s above Eveen’s pay grade.

Second, even the most powerful assassin may only kill the contracted. Eveen’s a professional. She’s never missed her mark.

The third and the simplest: once you accept a job, you must carry it out. And if you stray? A ﬁnal death would be a mercy. When the Festival of the Clockwork King turns the city upside down, Eveen’s newest mission brings her face-to-face with a past she isn’t supposed to remember and a vow she can’t forget.

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 definitely excited by the appearance of P. Djèlí Clark’s new book on Netgalley: the summary was tantalising, the cover looks awesome, and I was quickly intrigued by the world once I started reading. I don’t know quite why it didn’t work for me — it may be as simple as it being the wrong time, but somehow I just didn’t get properly sucked in, and the pace didn’t feel quite right.

Objectively, because I feel safest there while I can’t put my finger on what’s up, the world-building is really cool. There’s a whole bustling city of which we see glimpses, rather than a city that comes to life only for the characters to run through it; there are characters busy getting on with their lives in ways that aren’t fully explored and thus leave tantalising things to wonder about; there’s the whole concept of Eveen’s unlife, and how she ended up where she is. The ending isn’t too neat: possibilities remain, and the characters’ lives (or unlives) go on.

The climactic scenes are really cool, and I think I’d like to see more of the world, if Clark writes any other books in this setting. I don’t know why I struggled with this one, why I kept stopping and starting; if the premise entices you, I’d give it a go.

Rating: 3/5

Tags: book reviews, books, P. Djèlí Clark, SF/F