Wow, it’s warm out! And in. Actually, it’s just warm. And today there’s a Lions game and a Wales game, and tomorrow I’m attending a Ceremony of Eternal Bonding on FFXIV, so it’s a busy weekend. 🤣

Anyway, I have no new books this week, so it’s straight onto the recap.

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• Plain Bad Heroines, by emily m. danforth (2/5 stars)
• Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, by Lisa Randall (3/5 stars)
• Raybearer, by Jordan Ifueko (3/5 stars)
• Ancestors: The Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials, by Alice Roberts (4/5 stars)
• Checkmate to Murder, by E.C.R. Lorac (4/5 stars)
• Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (2/5 stars)

…And that’s everything! How’s everyone doing?

Happy Saturday! I’m in the middle of watching the Wales v Argentina rugby game, with a British and Irish Lions game to follow later. So much rugby. <3 And books! It’s my day off, so it’s a good day for reading — and I haven’t been doing much of that this week!

New books:

I’ve had my eye on this one for a while. It’s actually releasing in hardback in the UK… but Bookshop.org have some paperback editions from a different press, and I snapped one up when I saw it was less than £10!

Received to review:

I was pretty fascinating by a book about working on dictionaries recently (by Kory Stamper), so a book about indices is more exciting to me than it sounds. And The Bone Wars sounds like a lot of fun.

Read this week:

Not much reading this week, as I said… alas.

Reviewed this week:

• The Map of Knowledge, by Violet Moller (4/5 stars)
• Hollywood Homicide, by Kellye Garrett (1/5 stars)
• After the Dragons, by Cynthia Zhang (5/5 stars)
• Magic Bites, by Ilona Andrews (4/5 stars)
• Reinventing the Wheel: Milk, Microbes and the Fight for Real Cheese, by Bronwen and Francis Percival (3/5 stars)

So that’s everything from me this week! How’re your shelves looking, folks?

Good afternoon! I ran out of pre-scheduled posts this week, and promptly ran headfirst into a busy time… but the backlog of reviews will be back soon, promise. In the meantime, I did get some new books!

Received to review

Thanks as ever to the publishers for these! I feel like Dead Silence is more my wife’s thing than mine, but we share a Kindle account so there won’t be any jealousy…

New books

Yesss, Subtle Blood is out — now I can start this trilogy! Have faithfully bought each book on release day, and the paperbacks as soon as possible… but until the HEA was assured, I couldn’t tuck in.

I’m also keen to read Honeycomb; I actually had an eARC through the Secret Readers programme, except then they decided to withdraw that month’s books early without explanation when I was 20% of the way through. It was infuriating.

Read this week

And that’s all for this week! How’s everyone doing? Got anything good this week?

Saturday again! It comes round so quickly. No real news from me this week, so straight into the book haul that I accidentally acquired…

Received to review

I always enjoy Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s ideas — only one of her books has seriously clicked with me, but I enjoy them anyway.

Stacking the Shelves

A real mix, as usual! I’m excited about Black Water Sister and The Jasmine Throne, in particular; I’ve been wanting to get my hands on those for a while now, since I first heard about them. Likewise The Fabric of Civilization, actually — ever since I was going on a tear of reading books about sewing and textiles, at the start of the year.

The most impulsive purchase was Seashaken Houses, which would not usually be my thing. Something about the idea of a book about lonely lighthouses built onto rocky reefs got under my skin, apparently. I’ve gone with the whim and started reading it right away!

Books read this week

Not a big reading week — or a big finishing week, at least: I’m halfway through seven books at once!

Reviews posted this week

• And Only To Deceive, by Tasha Alexander (4/5 stars) [mystery/romance]
• The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights, by John Steinbeck (3/5 stars) [arthuriana]
• White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (5/5 stars) [history]
• The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey (5/5 stars) [speculative fiction]
• The Secret Life of Books, by Tom Mole (3/5 stars) [history]

And that’s all from me this week! How’ve you all been doing? Have you got any great new books this week, or been reading anything that knocked your socks off?

Good afternoon, folks!

General update

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve been queuing up some of my backlog of reviews — mostly written during the Final Fantasy XIV dungeon “The Praetorium”, since you get good items from it at the moment… but it has looooong unskippable cutscenes!

What have I been up to? Mostly playing Final Fantasy XIV, along with the Mass Effect remaster. If any of you play FFXIV, say hi sometime, we can run a dungeon or something! I’m on Cerberus server, and I can let you know my avatar’s name…

I have been reading a bit, though; I’ve gone back to reading a whole bunch of books at once, and I’m using Beeminder to help track them and keep me from putting them down and forgetting about them for ages. Here’s how I’m doing with Maryn McKenna’s Beating Back the Devil, for example!

Stacking the Shelves

This week I don’t have too many new books in — last week’s splurge was actually kind of out of character for me lately. However, I did pick up Tasha Alexander’s A Fatal Waltz in paperback, since it came back into stock, and I’ve just got a new book to review because I remembered one of you guys talking about it recently, and it has a pretty cover.

Books read this week

I’ve actually finished a few books this week, which isn’t so common lately!

Reviews posted this week

• Death in Fancy Dress, by Anthony Gilbert (3/5 stars) – A classic mystery
• Word by Word, by Kory Stamper (4/5 stars) – Non-fiction about writing a dictionary
• A Murderous Relation, by Deanna Raybourn (4/5 stars) – historical mystery and romance
• The Angel of the Crows, by Katherine Addison (5/5 stars) – Sherlock Holmes pastiche with a fantasy twist
• Long Live Latin, by Nicola Gardini (1/5 stars) – Non-fiction designed to get you reading Latin

So that’s it! What have you guys been stacking up, devouring, or flinging across the room in despair?

Greetings, folks! This is very slightly late, but I’m determined to get it out of the door anyway and get back into the habit…

Books acquired:

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin (5/5 stars)
• Sabine’s Notebook, by Nick Bantock (5/5 stars)
• The Golden Mean, by Nick Bantock (4/5 stars)
• He’d Rather Be Dead, by George Bellairs (3/5 stars)
• A History of the Paper Pattern Industry, by Joy Spanabel Emery (4/5 stars)
• The Tombs of Atuan, by Ursula Le Guin (5/5 stars)

How’s everyone else doing? Lots of reading?

And here we are, a proper weekly roundup. At a ridiculous hour, because apparently we’re reliving our teen years and making bad sleep decisions on the weekends.

Books acquired this week:

Thanks to Arbieroo, since it was his Christmas gift that got me A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (plus Griffin & Sabine, which arrived a bit sooner).

Books read this week:

Reviews posted this week:

• The Case of the Famished Parson, by George Bellairs (4/5 stars)
• The Bookseller’s Take, by Martin Latham (2/5 stars)
• The Citadel of Weeping Pearls, by Aliette de Bodard (4/5 stars)
• Blood and Circuses, by Kerry Greenwood (4/5 stars)
• Defekt, by Nino Cipri (4/5 stars)
• Life in Miniature, by Nicola Lisle (3/5 stars)
• Ruddy Gore, by Kerry Greenwood (4/5 stars)
• So You Want To Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo (4/5 stars)
• Fence, volume 1, by C.S. Pacat and Johanna the Mad (4/5 stars)
• The Tightrope Walker, by Dorothy Gilman (3/5 stars)

So how’ve you folks been doing?

Well, it’s been a while! I’m not going to do a full roundup, because it really has been too long, but this will serve as a placeholder for hopefully getting back to business as usual. So here’s a selection of books I got recently/for Christmas…

Books acquired:

As ever, a pretty eclectic mix, and I look forward to ignoring them all equally while I reread older books… okay, okay, not really — I hope to read some of these very soon! But we all know what I’m like…

So, how are you all doing?