shanaqui's reviews
1142 reviews

I could swear I've read something really, really similar fairly recently. Not 100%, but this was just... predictable. I think it's just a familiar sort of story.

Volume eight of A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation continues the action of the previous volume -- and Lizel's manipulation of events. Someday someone is going to outmanoeuvre him and he's going to get quite the shock, but for now he's the master. I loved the extra glimpses of Shadow and his attempts to suss what Lizel's up to.

And, look, you can say "deep camaraderie" all you want, but in this volume Eleven goes to sit at Lizel's feet while he's reading, gets his hair pet and cheek scritched, and then nibbles on Lizel's finger. Come on now.

We have some real Gil/Lizel moments too, don't get me wrong -- Gil's face when he thinks that Lizel's trying to do something in order to go home, aaah. I think it's both determination to do it if that's what Lizel needs, and grief at the idea of losing him. 

Very curious what else will happen to wrap up the invasion of Marcade, and then what Lizel does to get back to what he was doing before...

Volume seven of A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation featured at least five instances of me giggling and taking my ereader to show my wife a page or panel, at least two instances of "platonic" cheek stroking, one "platonic" tucking-of-hair-behind-an-ear and one platonic Lizel-grabbing-Gil's-hand to beg him to win him a book.

Yep, I continue extremely sceptical about how these books are totally just showing "deep camaraderie". Which, don't get me wrong, is a lovely thing, but this doesn't feel like that. It genuinely seems like Gil and Eleven love Lizel, while Studd and Judge have serious crushes -- and their physical intimacies don't help at all with that, though they're not the only reason.

I loved that we get several glimpses at Gil fighting, and how very, very overpowered he is. I'm also very curious what Lizel's up to, overall (the man's mind is wheels within wheels), and what's going on with the attack on Marcade. 

So, yep, still in love with this series, still wish more people would read it. I do feel at times like explanations are a bit lacking, which is probably part the format and part the translation, plus some cultural stuff (the things that go without saying in a particular culture's stories, or are heavily implied by something else in the story, may need to be spelled out in that of another, perhaps).

Endangered Languages, by Evangelia Adamou, is part of the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, so it's essentially an introduction, a bit of a primer on what it means for a language to be endangered, what we might do about it, etc. As a Welsh person (who doesn't speak Welsh), obviously I have a bit of a vested interest here: Welsh is the least endangered of the Celtic languages, but it isn't for lack of trying on the part of our English rulers (see also: the Welsh Not, Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, etc).

Welsh is a bit too successful for Adamou to spend much time on here, despite all that, though I think the revival efforts probably deserved a bit of a mention alongside the revival efforts for Breton, Cornish and Irish, including stuff like the Welsh Language Acts. To compare how Welsh is doing compared to other more endangered languages is pretty instructive -- but there's a limited amount of space in any one book, of course.

In the end, discussing endangered languages and how to protect them is surprisingly similar to discussing conservation, though of course it's best not to stretch the similarity too far. I was interested to read about the fact that languages should be considered "dormant" rather than "extinct" now: I don't know if I think that's a nice way to look at it, or perhaps one which softens the tragedy of losing all native speakers of a language a little too much.

Anyway, an interesting introduction.

Okay. I'm going to admit up front that I ended up skimming D.P. Clarence's The Paper Boys. I skimmed a lot, because by page 10, I wanted to claw my own eyes out rather than keep reading, but also I'm stubborn and wanted to write a review, and I don't do that if I haven't given a book a bit more than 10 pages.

It sounds like a very fun concept -- two young gay journalists who're rivals end up getting together while competing over the same big story? Sign me up! Buuut it's a romance that's being written by someone who wants to write "non-smut" romance because sex scenes don't drive the plot forward, which... does not encourage me that he's read a lot of romance and knows the genre he's throwing himself into. Sex scenes can build characters, relationships, and yes, drive plot (KJ Charles being my #1 example of all these things; Cat Sebastian, too). To dismiss them as almost all failing to "drive the plot" tells me the author doesn't understand the genre, and that (for me) is a bit of a red flag right there.

It's also attempting to be profoundly British, but it's been written by an Austalian who has "wonderful beta readers and a fantastic development editor who were all hyper-aware of the British class system".

That's a funny way of saying "British people who read this and thought I did well", and makes me wonder if those beta readers and development editor were British or not. It's also possible that they are, or some of them are, but their experience of Britishness is very different from mine; that's a fair point in mitigation. But.

Mostly it felt like it was trying way, way, way too hard. Some people in Britain do say "proper" regularly, in spoken and informal communication (e.g. "it was raining proper hard" or "it was proper cold out"), but to repeat it so often (someone counted 90+ times in the story, but by page 10 it felt like I'd encountered it every other sentence already) foregrounds it way more than is necessary to give the flavour of how a British person might speak.

I'm not going to say that literally nobody uses the word "jolly" like Ludo does, as well, but nobody I know or have ever known does. You might say "jolly good", or "you jolly well should", maybe, but... it really, really wouldn't be that common.

And the class stuff... well. It didn't match my experience, let's just say that. A kid from that background would probably say "gay", not "queer" (in my experience). A kid from that background probably wouldn't call people "class traitors" (even jokingly) for being interested in the Royal Family (it's, in my experience, common among the working class; it's the middle class who're uncomfortable about them). Labour are the "socialists" (insofar as anyone is, and not really in any practical sense), not Lib Dems.

If I haven't said "in my experience" enough, add it in as many times as Sunny said "proper" or Ludo said "jolly" until it's clear.

It's just... it was clearly never going to work for me. Which is not to say it wouldn't work for anyone, including potentially other British people. But it doesn't read to me at all like it was written by someone with a very good understanding of how to make it sound British without caricature.

That said, in my skimming I did come across some very cute scenes between Ludo and Sunny, and despite the author's comments about smut scenes, he did pay some attention to the chemistry between the two and showing some not-explicitly-sexual intimacy. The romance in and of itself is not unenjoyable -- I just couldn't enjoy it past (waves hand) all of that.

I got the first volume of the light novel version of Natsu Hyuuga's The Apothecary Diaries after reading the first novel of the manga. It covers some of the same material, and then goes on much further -- I think I read that it's about volumes 1-4 of the manga. The series is historical, with a series of mini-mysteries throughout the first volume, though one of the characters would very much like it to be a romance as well...

I found that it was much easier to follow the sections of the plot that I'd also read in the manga, which is an experience I had with reading danmei: often it helps to get absorbed in the world and follow the various events if you read the same story as both manga/manhua, animation, and novel. I can't put my finger on quite why that is, but probably a mixture of unfamiliar settings/attitudes and translation. The writing and translation certainly feels clear and easy to read, but I'll read it and be like "okay, yeah, XYZ is happening, I understand, I understand... wait. What?!" (You could interpret this as me being an idiot, too; you may or may not believe me when I say I'm generally not, but either way, clearly something doesn't quite click for me with a lot of light novels.)

Anyway, the big draw of this series for me is Maomao. I find her fascinating as a character: pragmatic, curious, self-absorbed in a way that isn't intended to be offensive, perceptive and yet capable of turning a blind eye to things she wilfully doesn't want to know... Her setup is a lot of fun as well, with her apothecary training and natural powers of observation fitting her excellently to work out the intricacies of the rear court's life, while her laser-focused interests actually leave her completely out of step with others in other ways. (E.g. the way everyone thinks she's been abused, but it's all self-inflicted during experiments with poisons, etc.)

As for other characters, I find Jinshi's thoughts and motivations actually perhaps a little less clear here than in the manga, which surprised me. I'd expected to get a bit more insight into what he's thinking, and in a way you do see more of his reactions to Maomao, but still... I feel like I understood his situation less well from the light novel.

Overall, I had a good time, and I'm glad I have the next two volumes ready to read. I'm very curious how much of it is a "case of the week" episodic-type format, and how much of it starts to chain together into a larger plot.

Lettice Cooper's Tea on Sunday is only from the '70s, but the introduction is right: it certainly feels like it fits within the British Library Crime Classics series, and that might well because of the author's generation. There are hints here and there of a slightly more modern world than the one the likes of Lorac, Sayers and Christie were writing about, but for the most part, it's of a piece with them. I did find it fascinating to learn about Lettice Cooper and, for example, her work toward establishing the Public Lending Right (which pays authors for their work when borrowed from libraries in the UK).

As a story, we have a closed circle of suspects: eight visitors who were invited for tea with the victim, the only ones she was likely to have let in (due to her suspicious nature). A former friend, a young Italian she was patronising, a former convict, her nephew and his wife, her doctor, a man who worked for her father, and a solicitor who helped manage her affairs. Few of them stand to benefit from her death, leaving the motive feeling tangled -- but Corby, the police detective, methodically works away at it. 

A good chunk of the book is spent introducing the suspects and their view of the crime through his interviews with them, with some glimpses into Corby's methods, attitudes and home life: it felt like a glimpse of a series detective who could have been pretty solid, somewhat in the Inspector Macdonald line (E.C.R. Lorac's detective).

As with many classic stories, there are some... questionable attitudes, with the victim's nephew and his wife having what looks pretty much like an abusive relationship (and characters seeming to feel that if the nephew would just beat her properly he might do better). That part is a bit unpleasant, though it's not enormously prominent.

In the end, the solution doesn't come as a surprise, because you're honestly shown all the clues as you go, and they point clearly at one of two people. It feels less like a puzzle and more a bunch of character sketches wrapped around a mystery story. I quite enjoyed it for what it was, but those looking for a tricky mystery with a twist might be disappointed.

What an Owl Knows, by Jennifer Ackerman, is a fun exploration of owls as a species, how they're adapted for what they do, how they're adapting to changes made by humans, etc. There's a certain amount of "oh wow I touched a bird" personal stuff, and canned biographies of people who've interacted with owls for various reasons, but also plenty of facts and discussion thereof.

I learned some fascinating things, e.g. the fact that some owl species will adopt the owlets of other pairs, if the owlet gets into their nest or somehow interacts with them demanding food -- even if they don't currently have owlets of their own. And the fact that some screech owls grab blind snakes (they're tiny) and use them as nest cleaners, resulting in healthier, quicker-growing owlets.

It also contradicts some other stuff I was reading lately about owls being stupid, pointing out that they have small, densely packed neurons, as some other birds do -- allowing a high degree of intelligence, even if their kind of intelligence isn't as readily measured as that of primates or crows.

Overall, enjoyable and informative, if sometimes a bit padded with filler-statements about the majesticness of owls (you can only take it so often).

I wasn't a big fan of Jonathan Silvertown's Selfish Genes to Social Beings. Ultimately, it's as the subtitle ("A Cooperative History of Life") suggests, rather than focusing on the question of how cooperation arises from "selfish" genes, or trying to dissect the evolution of altruism. It's probably best read keeping that in mind.

Even so, I found it slow, and sometimes strangely organised. It works back through time... more or less. Sometimes it's more like it's working back through scale, finding fresh simulated surprise as smaller and smaller living things turn out to cooperate (a fact which should not be a surprise, since we know our own individual genes must cooperate). Sometimes the examples didn't really contribute to a narrative, and I found the pop-culture references (like references to songs) cringey, like Silvertown was trying to add readability through pasting in some song lyrics.

Whiiiich is the other problem: I couldn't put my finger on why, exactly, but I constantly found my attention wandering before the end of a paragraph -- or sometimes, the end of a sentence. It's not that I can't focus on this kind of thing, because I love reading non-fiction. It's also not that I know it all already (though I did), because I can happily read popular science about my pet subjects even when it contains absolutely nothing new. What's required is usually just enthusiasm and a will to put across one's own point of view.

I did find some of his later chapters more interesting, since his discussion of the RNA World hypothesis went deeper into it than my previous reading, but I still found this a very slow read and, ultimately, not for me. The stuff about kin selection has been discussed ad nauseum in many other books, and I didn't feel that anything particularly fresh was added to the discussion.

Jack Strange's Look Up, Handsome is a cute Christmas romance set in Hay-on-Wye, based around the fact that one of the romantic leads (Quinn) owns Hay's only queer bookshop... which is under threat of eviction, without much chance of being able to set up anew. The other romantic lead is Noah, a romance writer who grew up in Hay, came back for a book-signing at a festival, and got stuck due to snow. 

The two predictably flirt and seem close to forming a relationship, in and around efforts from Quinn and his friend Ivy to save the shop, but then it becomes clear that Noah actually has a partner already, which obviously complicates things greatly. (There's no actual cheating by the letter of the law, so to speak, but it comes very close and the intent is there: if Quinn hadn't put the brakes on, I don't think Noah as written would've done so. So bear that in mind.)

There's also a bunch of other relationships in the book which help make it feel alive: Quinn's friendship with Ivy; Ivy's fling with another character; Quinn's relationship with his mother, step-father and sort-of cousin; Quinn's work for Noah's mother (an Oscar-winning actress hit by scandal), when he becomes her ghostwriter; Quinn's vague knowledge of his assistant in the shop, Daniel Craig (who ends up in a relationship with a guy called James Bond)... and there's Hay itself, written with love and an eye to Welshness (there are some Mari Lwyds!) that was appreciated by this reader. I didn't actually love Hay an enormous amount myself on a brief visit, but this book made me want to go back and give it another shot -- maybe in less miserable weather.

I think there could've been a bit more attention to the villain of the piece, though; he comes across as very one-dimensional, and it makes him feel like a pantomime villain. I think it's realistic that he doesn't come round and change his mind, to be clear, but it felt weird that he had no redeeming qualities in the present. There are some faint hints of supportiveness in the past, but... I think it would've felt more rounded if he'd been a little pained by what he's doing, rather than being a clean-cut out-and-out villain.

Overall, it's basically one of those small-town romances where everyone comes together, there's a clear bad guy, and yes, there's a happy-ever-after in the end. It felt more well-rounded and more grounded in a real location than I expected, though, and ultimately I enjoyed it quite a bit. It's probably somewhere between three stars and four, but I'm rounding up because I enjoyed the Welshness and the fact that it's centered around a queer bookshop. Shout out to places like Portal Bookshop (York) and The Bookish Type (Leeds) for being great places for queer people to get books and community.