Good morning, folks! It’s been a while since I was able to do this, but… this post was prepared on Friday evening! It’s nice to be ahead — and I’m even all up to date on writing reviews, and it’s been a good reading week! I know the cool, rainy summer is really disappointing to some folks, but I’m revelling in it; I loathe heat. (I wouldn’t mind a bit more sunshine, just keep the daytime temperatures below 25°C and the nights cool enough to be refreshing, and I’ll still be happy… but if I have to choose between hot weather and dreary rain, I’ll choose the rain!)
In any case, what have I been stacking my shelves with and reading this week? Here we go! Linking up with The Sunday Post @ The Caffeinated Reviewer and Stacking the Shelves @ Reading Reality & Tynga’s Reviews.
Books acquired:
Thank you to the publishers for the eARCs of A Good Time To Be Born and Eight Detectives!
Finished reading this week:
Reviews posted this week:
- Annabel Scheme, by Robin Sloane. An experiment in letting Storygraph’s algorithm suggest a book for me, this worked out pretty well! Definitely entertaining. 3/5 stars
- Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders, by Aliette de Bodard. A lot of fun, and did almost precipitate me getting out of my bubble bath — multiple times — to read my wife the good bits. 4/5 stars
- Threshold, by Jordan L. Hawk. Lots of fun, as I expected, but I wish Whyborne would trust Griffin a little more! I know it’s a new relationship, but when you’ve already been through so much together — and had one nearly fatal misunderstanding because of it — argghh! 4/5 stars
- How Contagion Works, by Paolo Giordano. A clear but rather short essay on some of the statistics around COVID-19, from the perspective of the early epidemic in Italy. 3/5 stars
- The Dead Shall Be Raised, by George Bellairs. I’m rapidly finding myself feeling that Bellairs is one of the most enjoyable writer covered by these reissues, and though they aren’t memorable as stories, they’re a joy to read. 4/5 stars
- Invasive Aliens: The Plants and Animals from Over There That Are Over Here, by Dan Eatherley. Despite the Amazon review claiming it’s thinly-disguised political cant, it mostly really is about invasive species. It got a little repetitive for me, and I think it’s a combination of being not my true area of interest and not being new enough to me that it was interesting anyway. 3/5 stars
- The Murder of a Quack, by George Bellairs. I love his way of portraying characters that are funny, but with a deep sympathy as well. Another really enjoyable one. 4/5 stars
Other posts:
- Top Ten Tuesday: The Authors I’ve Read The Most Books By. As usual, it’s what it says on the tin — I mostly guessed rather than looking at actual stats, which would be dominated by the author of the Rurouni Kenshin manga I read when I was 17, and probably GetBackers as well. Not entirely representative of my current taste!
- WWW Wednesday. The usual update on what I’m reading, with my thoughts on a couple of the books already mentioned here.
Out and about:
- Postcrossing: Book Review – The Documents in the Case. It figures that my official introduction on the Postcrossing blog is about books! I’ve written a couple of posts for the blog before, but this little series will be my Thing, where you can see me reviewing books about post and mail systems. If you have any recommendations for epistolary novels or books that revolve around post in some way, can you drop a comment over there? (Or here works too!) In any case, I did a whole review of Dorothy L. Sayers’ epistolary mystery, The Documents in the Case. I’ve reviewed the book here before, but my write-up on the Postcrossing blog is all new, and hopefully still worth checking out!
- Beeminder: Beeminding the Fuzzy Friends. If you don’t know about Beeminder, basically you set goals… and if you don’t meet them, you pay! My latest contribution to the Beeminder blog discusses how I track spending time with my rabbits, and how those efforts have paid off. If you want to hear about the really cute trick Biscuit can do, you want to read this post!
Full disclosure: I help out at Postcrossing and I’m the Support Czar for Beeminder, so obviously I have Ulterior Motives in boosting these blog posts. I hope they’re interesting, though — I don’t always highlight my blog posts elsewhere, but these seemed like they’d have some crossover appeal!
So that’s everything for this week — how’re you folks doing? Grabbed any new books, or been grabbed by any?
