Good morning, folks! How is everybody? I’m having a busy time, with my wedding coming up and an assignment deadline due while I’m actually away on my honeymoon… but things progress. And there are books, which is always nice.

Books to review

I guess I need to hurry up and read Planetfall… Also, yay for Chris Holm’s new book!

Books bought

Nearly all of these were in the sale, don’t hurt me. And Roses and Rot I actually picked up a while ago, but I don’t think it ever made it into an STS post. So tahdah. Buying Temeraire for my Kindle is a blatant excuse to start rereading that series, especially given Imyril’s reviews…

Books finished this week

Reviews posted this week:
–Our Lady of Pain, by M.C. Beaton. I’m really not impressed by this series, but it made good light reading. 2/5 stars
–The Greatest Show on Earth, by Richard Dawkins. Skip Dawkins, go back to Darwin. It’s not that he’s wrong, at least in his science. It’s his attitude. I’ve never hated agreeing with someone so much. 3/5 stars
–A Surfeit of Lampreys, by Ngaio Marsh. Ngaio Marsh isn’t bad at constructing a mystery and doing little character sketches, but I’ve stopped caring about her detective, who could be replaced by a cardboard cutout in this book. 2/5 stars
–The Sleeping Prince, by Melinda Salisbury. If you enjoyed the first book, you’ll probably enjoy this one. I found it enjoyable, and probably better than the first, though I did also find it somewhat predictable. 3/5 stars
–Bitterblue, by Kristin Cashore. Not an easy read, but worthwhile, this book pulls the whole loosely linked series together very effectively. 4/5 stars
–Missing Microbes, by Martin Blaser. Makes a very good point about the way we’re destroying our own microbiomes, and how that might affect illnesses from allergies to ulcerative colitis. It might stretch a bit far at times, but I found it enjoyable and interesting. 4/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: Exiled from Camelot, by Cherith Baldry. A book I read for my Master’s dissertation on the portrayal of Kay, this one is pretty fun, with a non-traditionally-capable Kay and a strong bond between him and Arthur. 4/5 stars

Other posts: 
–Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set Outside the US. What it says on the tin, with mostly historical fantasy to delight you.

Any fun plans for this week? Reading anything I should know about?

I haven’t read as much this week as I did last week, but that would be kind of difficult! What I have managed to do is catch up to all my reading goals, for which I’m very pleased with myself. Now just got to keep on top of it.

Received to review:

I think it’s been a while since I requested the Jo Clayton books, because I couldn’t remember at first why I asked for them. But Skeen’s Leap looks like fun. Also, hurrah, The Obelisk Gate! I need to read the first book still, but…

Books acquired:

I finally read The Copper Promise and liked it, so of course I had to pick up The Iron Ghost while I was here in the UK visiting my parents. I’ve been curious about The Aeronaut’s Windlass for a while, too, and though I’ve heard mixed reviews of The Grace of Kings, everything I’ve heard makes it sound intriguing.

And then of course, I also picked up a couple of TPBs. While I was here.

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted this week:
–A Conspiracy of Kings, by Megan Whalen Turner. I liked this a lot more on the reread, probably because I knew what to expect. Sophos is a lot less interesting to me than Gen, but the glimpse of Gen through his eyes is fascinating. 4/5 stars
–The Ancient Paths, by Graham Robb. I have to admit that actually evaluating the scholarship is beyond me, but the argument seems a bit prone to wishful thinking — “this would be convenient, so it’s true”, I guess. Still interesting. 3/5 stars
–Sick of Shadows, by M.C. Beaton. The first book was kind of fun, but the formula has worn very thin. 1/5 stars
–Saga Volume Two, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Saga continues to be awesome and funny, and still makes me laugh even when it’s gross humour I wouldn’t normally go in for. 4/5 stars
–Blood Lines, by Tanya Huff. Another fun entry in the series, though more or less as you’d expect. And there’s a mummy (the kind in bandages). 3/5 stars
–Airs Above the Ground, by Mary Stewart. Definitely not my favourite, probably because of the all-too-stereotypical relationship between the husband and wife — he beats someone up for her, he keeps secrets and that’s fine, etc, etc. 2/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: The Island of the Mighty, by Evangeline Walton. Not the best of the series by far, though it’s still an interesting and effective retelling. 3/5 stars

Other posts:
–Top Ten Tuesday: Underrated Books. The theme was books with less than 2,000 ratings; a lot of the ones I chose have very few ratings and even fewer reviews. I tried to pick a nice range of different books, with SF/F, non-fiction, poetry, detective stories…

So how’s everyone been? What’re you up to? Me, I’ve been visiting my parents this week and taking advantage of my Xbox to play all the Fable 2 and Fable 3. In fact, let me get back to that now.

This week was a good week for reading, as you can see! And for only the fifth time ever, I have no new books to showcase and can instead show off the ones I’ve finished reading. I didn’t even feature the full covers this time as I normally do for an Unstacking week cause there’s just so many! Twelve of these have been on my TBR for at least a year before I finally got round to them, so it really is good progress.

So please don’t tell me to enjoy my new books! Let me bask in being good.

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted this week:

–Hasty Death, by M.C. Beaton. Fun enough, but it really isn’t anything special. 2/5 stars
–So You Want to Be a Wizard, by Diane Duane. I think I came to this at the wrong age — I’d probably have loved it when I was younger. 1/5 stars
–Lucky Planet: Why Earth is Exceptional, by David Waltham. Solid science and an interesting discussion of whether life is likely to be common or not in the universe, but I think we really don’t have enough data at all to actually come to a conclusion about how lucky or not we are. 3/5 stars
–Saga Volume One, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. A reread so I can get on with the series! Love it pretty much the same as before, especially the art. 4/5 stars
–Blood Trail, by Tanya Huff. Fun and brings in more supernatural creatures, etc. It’s fairly light comfort reading for me. 3/5 stars
–All For Love, by Jane Aiken Hodge. A good Heyer-esque romp, with some nice touches (the perfect switch isn’t perfect after all, etc). I enjoyed it a lot and will be reading more of Jane Aiken Hodge’s work. 4/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: The Song of Rhiannon, by Evangeline Walton. This book isn’t as powerful as the previous book, which is a bit of a relief after how harrowing that was. There’s a lot of good stuff here, and Manawydan remains an awesome character. 4/5 stars

Other posts:
–Top Ten Books I Was Forced to Read. It was a freebie week, so I mined for an old theme and covered books I had to read for class or research.
–ShelfLove Update. My update on the reading challenge I’m doing, which also includes my TBR for this month, as usual.

How’s everyone been? Good reading week? Anything exciting joined your piles?

Hey everyone! This week I have kind of had a bit of a spree, which I needed post Brexit-vote — I don’t really talk politics here much; suffice it to say my planned future with my Belgian partner is looking a wee bit more unsettled. Hurrah democracy, but boo, I wish this hadn’t come to pass!

Books acquired:

A nice haul, right? A good mix of fantasy and a couple of the romance-suspense type novels I like for comfort reading. Hopefully it won’t take me long to repair the damage to my to read pile I’ve just done…

Received to review:

I heard good things about the first two, and requested the third on a whim.

I did get some good reading done earlier in the week, but the warm weather here took it out of me later in the week. I do recommend Being Mortal; it’s a really important examination of what dying is like in the modern world. It made me cry, but it’s very worth reading.

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted:
–Blood Price, by Tanya Huff. Fun urban fantasy with some unique features (like a protagonist with retinitis pigmentosa). Not Huff’s all time best or something, but a lot of fun. 3/5 stars
–Darwin’s Ghosts, by Rebecca Stott. We can be prone to thinking Darwin’s idea was totally original, but as he acknowledged himself, there were antecedents. This book discusses some of them — while acknowledging that Darwin’s theory is what finally made sense of all the data. 3/5 stars
–Midnight Never Come, by Marie Brennan. I didn’t love this as much as the Isabella Trent books, but that’d be a pretty high bar anyway. Midnight Never Come has a lot of interesting set-up, though one of the characters felt a little disconnected from the action. 4/5 stars
–King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner. This book views Gen from the eyes of someone naive to his intelligence, and that makes it a lot of fun. Even though we made the same mistake when reading The Thief… 5/5 stars
–Unnatural Habits, by Kerry Greenwood. Lots of social commentary and a look at the deeper parts of Phryne’s personality, combined with a rather bitterly funny subplot. 4/5 stars
–Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Lots of beautiful prose and not so much substance, for me. Probably deservedly a classic though. 2/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: The Children of Llyr, by Evangeline Walton. More than the first book, this is where I really fell in love with Walton’s evocation of the Welsh mythology. Beautiful and harrowing. 5/5 stars

Other posts:
–Top Ten Books from 2016 So Far. I didn’t really struggle with this, which surprised me! Looks like I’m pretty caught up.

How’s everyone been doing?

Hey everyone! It’s been a busy week, but finally my wedding plans are looking more sorted and both me and my partner are done with assignments and such (for now). Now I can read more, right? Right?!

Books received to review:

I wasn’t 100% sold on Signal to Noise, but I’m interested in this one all the same.

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted this week:
–The Book of Phoenix, by Nnedi Okorafor. Maybe the strongest of Okorafor’s books I’ve read so far, at least for me. It’s crammed full of stuff and I didn’t feel like it really used it all, but it was a good narrative of how we make myth. 3/5 stars
–The Raven and the Reindeer, by T. Kingfisher. A sweet version of The Snow Queen, with a twist. Gerta still rescues Kay, but along the way she meets her real love… 4/5 stars
–Spider-Woman: New Duds, by Dennis Hopeless and Javier Rodriguez. A fun redesign for Jessica Drew, and an interesting story… unfortunately cut off by Secret Wars. 3/5 stars
–The Other Wind, by Ursula Le Guin. The ending this series deserved, beautifully dealing with some of the issues that might have been nagging at the observant. 4/5 stars
–Snobbery With Violence, by M.C. Beaton. Relatively silly and light, with a by-the-numbers mystery, but it entertained me. 3/5 stars
–Wylding Hall, by Elizabeth Hand. Has a real sense of the uncanny and an interesting structure (which some people might find annoying, but which I enjoyed). Never pushes into horror for me, but stays solidly unsettlingly. There’s one bone-chilling moment, though… 4/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: Prince of Annwn, by Evangeline Walton. Skillful retelling of the First Branch of the Mabinogion. Expands and humanises, but deals very well with the original material and keeps everything in line with it. 3/5 stars

Other posts:
–Top Ten Most Anticipated Releases for the Second Half of the Year. What it says on the tin. Gimme!

How’s everyone been?

No books bought this week! Wow. And this week started off quite slow, reading-wise, but I got quite a bit packed into the last couple of days and have plenty to show off in my fourth Unstacking post ever! We did briefly have the excitement of having a wedding date, but now we’re having to change it… ah well, at least now we have the paperwork all sorted?!

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted this week:
–Finn Fancy Necromancy, by Randy Henderson. I wasn’t really won over by this. I thought it was trying too hard to be the fantasy version of Ready Player One, in terms of references, and the characters didn’t strike me as being particularly mature or interesting. 2/5 stars
–Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor, by Charles Allen. This really is more about the search, and the searchers, than the lost Emperor himself. There’s a lot of interest, though if you’re sensitive to colonial issues you might not be comfortable with the fairly uncritical praise Allen has for the people who ruled colonial India and, coincidentally, did some work on Sanskrit and excavating Indian temples. 4/5 stars
–Rosemary and Rue, by Seanan McGuire. This is perhaps the best answer to Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy I’ve found: female driven, complex mythology, and it’s not all about who sleeps with whom. The main character isn’t always smart, but she is at least sympathetic. 4/5 stars
–Spider-Gwen: Most Wanted? by Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez. This is very much a getting-up-to-speed issue, and it’s a bit goofy at times, but I do enjoy that someone has made Gwen Stacey the hero. Not so keen on the treatment of MJ, though. 3/5 stars
–Dreamer’s Pool, by Juliet Marillier. Solidly entertaining, although with some themes people might find themselves very uncomfortable with. The side characters are engaging enough to carry a lot of the book, while the main characters’ story is set up for the future. I’m looking forward to reading more. 4/5 stars
–A Companion to Wolves, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. Deals seriously with the issues of soul-bonding to animals a la the dragons of Pern, except there’s also a solid fantasy story with wolves and trolls as well. It’s mostly about the interactions of the wolfheall, and the difficulties the main character has in adjusting to his role, but there’s an intriguing world in the background too. 4/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. Fun and nostalgic, though a bit gimmicky in execution with all those pop-culture references. The main character can be a bit of a creep at times, but then, he is meant to be a teenage boy. 4/5 stars

Other posts:

–Top Ten Tuesday: Ten Reasons I Love Fairytales. A somewhat lyrical celebration of these really old, really new, endlessly adaptable stories.

How’s everyone been? Anything exciting? Anything I just have to read?

This has been a less busy week, thankfully, and I’ve got some work done on tackling my backlog — including an epic sweep removing about 70 books from the backlog that I’m no longer interested in, or where I didn’t enjoy the first book of a series, etc. I really should get back to work again, though, because my next deadline is approaching fast…

Oh well, books first!

Received to review:

I’ve been interested in this for a while, particularly since my mother actually writes to Yoon Ha Lee regularly, and I’ve read The Fox’s Tower and enjoyed the stories in it.

Books bought this week:

I wasn’t 100% in love with The Sin-Eater’s Daughter, but I love the covers of these books and I’m curious enough… Kameron Hurley’s The Geek Feminist Revolution is obviously going to be awesome, though I don’t know how much new content it contains (since I’ve read We Have Always Fought). Aaaand the Max Gladstone means I have all the books so far, until the next one is out.

Reading wise, it’s been a relatively light week. The M.C. Beaton books aren’t even that great, but they were just the right brain candy for me at the time.

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted this week:
–Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean. It took me a long time to really get into this, and then suddenly at 85% it made things work. Also, love the setting. 4/5 stars
–Spider-Woman: Spider-Verse, by Dennis Hopeless and Greg Land. Fun enough, and if you didn’t bother with Spider-verse in general, this does give you some info. Involves a lot of the Spider-ladies! 3/5 stars
–The Sudden Appearance of Hope, by Claire North. A very interesting one-sentence idea (“what if nobody could ever remember you?”) combined with a technology thriller type plot. 4/5 stars
–The Queen of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner. More complex than the first book, The Thief, this pushes the characters we’ve already been introduced them and develops them beyond the thumbnail sketches we had before. It was a reread, so maybe no surprise I loved it. 5/5 stars
–Hawkeye: Rio Bravo, by Matt Fraction and David Aja. This run of Hawkeye has been fun, and I appreciate a lot about it, but I think the storytelling style wasn’t ideal for me. It relied a lot on the art, and I am not a visual person. 3/5 stars
–Tales from Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. My main comment on this one is that you really need to read ‘Dragonfly’ to understand The Other Wind. 4/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: Debatable Space, by Philip Palmer. Fun and compulsive read, even though it didn’t seem like it would be my thing at all. 4/5 stars

Other posts:
–Top Ten Beach Reads. Except I was difficult about the theme, because I don’t do “beach reads”.

How’s everyone been this week? The week has gone both really fast and really slow for me; it’s a little weird. I’m working on my next assignment already, but fortunately I’m not down to the wire on it, so there’s still plenty of time for reading as well as learning about microbes!

New books

After reading Dreamer’s Pool a week or two ago, I got the itch to read more of Marillier’s work again — and I found Raven Flight in the cheap-ish second hand shop in Leuven. Perfect! In Ashes Lie, I had to grab after loving Midnight Never Come (maybe not as much as the Lady Trent books, but a lot all the same). I haven’t got that pretty cover edition — yet — just an ebook, but I will be picking that up to join my paperbacks of the Lady Trent books and Midnight Never Come. The Orphan Queen, I’ve been curious about for a while, and I saw it was £1.99 on Kindle…

As for what I’ve been reading, it’s been a productive week! I still need to get my thoughts down about most of these, but there isn’t a dud among ’em.

Books finished this week:

Reviews posted this week:
–Grave Secrets of the Dinosaurs, by Philip Manning. Solid enough book on the soft-tissue finds from dinosaurs, past and present, featuring one particularly complete mummy. 3/5 stars
–The Movement: Fighting for the Future, by Gail Simone, Freddie Williams II. Love this team, wish we had more of them. Maybe they were a little ahead of their time, with comics-verse not yet ready for a team like this. 4/5 stars
–The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, by Sydney Padua. Cute art, exhaustively researched and sourced, and features Ada Lovelace being badass. What’s not to love? 4/5 stars
–Tehanu, by Ursula Le Guin. Thematically, this one is really important for Earthsea. I could do without it, though; I dislike seeing Ged so helpless. 3/5 stars
–Cruel Beauty, by Rosamund Hodges. Some interesting ideas, and definitely an interesting setting, but some insta-love and asshole alpha male stuff. 2/5 stars
–Silk: The Life and Times of Cindy Moon, by Robbie Thompson, Stacey Lee. Lovely art and a fun enough story, though Silk facing up to the real world and her responsibilities as a hero aren’t really new, especially in the context of the other Spider-characters. 3/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: The Vintner’s Luck, by Elizabeth Knox. A book I found very enchanting at the time, not least for the way it engages with the senses. And the love story. 5/5 stars

Other posts:
–Top Ten Books I Changed My Mind About. Mostly for the better, but sometimes for the worse.
–On Steve Rogers as an Agent of Hydra. I have problems with Marvel’s latest direction for Captain America, clearly.

This week hasn’t been great for reading, but my assignment is finally done, and it was the last one for this module! So maybe I can relax a bit now? I started off the relaxation in style with some new books, of course…

New books:

A mixed bag, which probably surprises no one. I’ve already finished reading The Book of Phoenix; it might be the Nnedi Okorafor book I appreciate the most so far! The other stuff is mostly from my wishlist, except The Horns of Ruin, which was an impulse buy. Oh, and The Tempering of Men, because I finished the first book earlier this week.

Books to review:

I’ve read some of Foz Meadows’ blog posts and such, I think? Anyway, I enjoy how rainbow-y the cover is and the fact that it’s openly queertastic. Tremontaine and The Fireman I’ve been hearing a lot about…

Books finished:

Reviews posted:
–Captain America: Civil War Prelude, by Corona Pilgrim et al. I was not impressed by the lack of new content in this tie-in release. If you’ve seen the other Marvel films, or even just a good selection of them, you’re good to go. 2/5 stars
–The Bread We Eat in Dreams, by Catherynne M. Valente. A varied and typically gorgeous collection. If you’re a fan of Valente, you’ve probably read some of these before — but probably not all… 3/5 stars
–Dead Man’s Chest, by Kerry Greenwood. Another strong outing for Phryne, and it introduces a secondary character who I rather hope will stick around. 3/5 stars
–The Door into Fire, by Diane Duane. A book well-deserving of the nostalgic love people have for it. I love the way it deals with polyamorous relationships, without them being idyllic, but without demonising any of the participants either. 4/5 stars
–The Movement: Class Warfare, by Gail Simone and Freddie Williams III. This is basically like Gotham, if it was policed not by Batman, but by the 99%. I didn’t like the reread as much as the initial read way back in 20…14? But still fun, and really cool and diverse characters. 4/5 stars
–The Sin-Eater’s Daughter, by Melinda Salisbury. I think it’d be hard for a book to match up to that gorgeous cover, and so it proved. But I enjoyed the story well enough, and it caught me by surprise… 3/5 stars
–Flashback Friday: Kalpa Imperial, by Angélica Gorodischer, trans. Ursula Le Guin. An interesting what-if, and I think it’d appeal to fans of Le Guin’s writing and world building. There’s something of the same flavour. 4/5 stars

How’s everyone else been? Good weather where you are? Any reading achievements to share?