It's a rainy day here in the Valley and Jo and I are relaxing and watching FA Cup footie. Great game by Macclesfield to beat Crystal Palace and yesterday was also an entertaining and satisfying match if you're a Wrexham fan. At the moment it's an exciting game between Tottenham and Aston Villa. Tomorrow is our big game as Brighton are playing against Manchester United. We both fear being jinxes for Brighton but I think we have to watch it.. (No political talk today because what's going on down south is just to depressing)
It's my 2nd post of 2026 so let's see how my initial reading is coming along. I've completed 4 books so far and I'll look at them plus the new books I've replaced them with and as normal, any new books that have come in since 2026 started.
Completed Books
"It Rhymes With Takei is the continuation of George Takei autobiography which commenced with They Called Us Enemy. The first graphic novel dealt with the period of Mr. Takei's life, during WWII, when he and his family and thousands of other Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps by the US government.
The second book continues with George's life, from going to college, discovering his love of acting and ultimately how he came out as a gay man. It's a fascinating journey and well documents the struggle he had with dealing with his homosexuality. We follow him through college, his visit to Stratford and travels through Europe, his developing civic activity
It's an excellent story. You can really feel his pain and fear about coming out, his fear that he might be outed by an undercover police officer that would ruin his career and life. It's a microcosm of life in the US during this period and so well portrayed. Both books together make a fascinating life story. Well worth reading both books. (4.0 stars)"
"It was nice starting off the year with a light, entertaining read from one of the classic short story, humor authors. Meet Mr Mulliner by P.G. Wodehouse is a collection of short stories published originally in 1927. The aforementioned Mr. Mulliner is the narrator of the stories and they generally involve family members. The setting for the story telling is the Angler's Rest pub in Worcestershire.
The collection contains nine stories and they are all light, funny (the chuckle-worthy, witty kind of humor, rather than laugh out loud, rolling on the floor) and just a pleasure to read. In each case, generally, a member of his family falls in love and must endeavor to win his fancy. On the way there are fun adventures, from one Mulliner trying to cure his stutter so he can win his love, to another who invents many, many things but some of the creams / lotions have interesting side effects, to a fellow who happens to fall asleep during the San Francisco earthquake but ultimately wins his lady.
They were just a pleasure to read, intelligent, witty and totally entertaining. Wodehouse is best known for the Jeeves & Wooster stories probably but this was also an excellent collection. (3.5 stars)"
"Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker was an excellent YA graphic novel, beautifully drawn and colored and just a great story. An interesting fantasy, it tells the story of Nova Huang a young witch living with her grandmothers, helping them run a bookshop that lends out spell books. At night she also patrols the town keeping an eye out for mystical problems.
One night she goes into the forest because her best friend, Tatiana, tells her that she's seen strange lights there. It turns out to be a friend from her past, Tam, who also happens to be a werewolf. He is in the forest trying to stop an archdemon. Nova uses her magic to put the demon into a mystical cage and then the two go try and get help from the two grandmothers.
Tam and Nova have a past and as the story progresses, their relationship and love is rekindled. It turns out that there is someone in their town who is involved trying to bring the demon to life and also someone in Tam's family who is also involved.
Side stories involve Nova's hearing difficulties and her embarrassment at having to wear hearing aids. And as well, Nova's ghostly parents wish her to leave the town to continue her apprenticeship. It's an interesting, different story that covers topics as diverse as disability and LGBTQ relationships as well as a darn entertaining fantasy. Beautifully and richly drawn as well. Great work by the partnership of Wendy Xu, Suzanne Walker and Joamette Gil (4.0 stars)"
"Seaweed on the Rocks by Stanley Evans is the 4th book in the Silas Seaweed mystery series set in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Seaweed is an indigenous police officer working in Victoria as a neighbourhood cop, especially helping out with indigenous issues.
There are a few issues that Seaweed is working on in this entertaining story. He goes out to an abandoned house on the outskirts of Victoria and discovers a young indigenous woman, almost dead from a drug overdose. He also thinks he sees a large grizzly wearing a strange hat, that spooks him. (One of the interesting aspects of the story is the mysticism, history and celebrations of the Coast Salish people, throughout the story. Salish lives on the Warrior reservation near the waterfront).
Also in the mix is a beautiful half indigenous woman who Seaweed takes an interest in. She is a mystery and seems to be involved in the disappearance of a local 'hypnotherapist). His office had been turned over and Seaweed gets involved in discovering the whereabouts of the missing therapist (who also has a mysterious past, including the death of his wife back in Toronto).
And there is the daily routine of Seaweed's life, trying to help addicted kids in the neighbourhood, trying to find an indigenous artist who also lives on the street and is an alcoholic. Just so much to take in and at the same time, especially for me, who has lived in Victoria for a time and visited as well, just enjoying the familiarity of the locale... the streets, the restaurants, the whole area. It adds so much to my enjoyment of the story.
Seaweed is a wonderful character as are his friends, partners on the police force and all the locals he knows and meets in his rounds. A most enjoyable, entertaining story and I can't imagine why it's been so long since my last visit with Seaweed in Victoria. Check it out if you enjoy a good police procedural mystery and a great story. (3.5 stars)"
Currently Reading
"'The deadline was close and I knew now what London had sent me out here to do: define, infiltrate and destroy. And I couldn't do it just by standing in the way of the program Moscow was running. I'd have to get inside and blow it up from there.'
Across the black snowscape of Poland's capital, a city where winter is more than a season, falls the shadow of a British Intelligence operation designed to save detente from explosion--an operation that pivots on an agent callously thrown into the front line of the Cold War and caught in the crossfire."
"These lively, varied and thought-provoking science fiction stories (from the era of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells) are linked by their imposing central character, the pugnaciously adventurous and outrageous Professor Challenger. The Poison Belt presents an eerie doomsday scenario, while in The Disintegration Machine the deadliest invention ever created is offered up for sale is offered up for sale to the highest bidder. Finally, in When the World Screamed, the planet responds violently to an experimental incursion..."
Booga, Tank Girl’s husband, is being wooed by Hollywood agents but Tank Girl is missing and his resolve is crumbling, fast! Tele, their TV-headed son, sets out on a mercy dash to find his mother... in the process triggering a chain of events that will see Tank Girl, not only, face death itself, the siren call of Goth rock and a cyclopean hotel proprietor, but also a host of other scenes and characters based on The Odyssey... give or take the odd — ahem — “idiosyncratic” Tank Girl twist. With a new introduction from Alan Martin."
More than a hundred years before, an alien named Ulysses had recruited Enoch as the keeper of Earth's only galactic transfer station. Now, as Enoch studies the progress of Earth and tends the tanks where the aliens appear, the charts he made indicate his world is doomed to destruction. His alien friends can only offer help that seems worse than the dreaded disaster. Then he discovers the horror that lies across the galaxy..."
Collects issues 16 through 20!"
It's been thirty years since the apocalypse and fifteen years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI--One World Intelligence--the shared consciousness of millions of robots, uploaded into one huge mainframe brain. But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality--their personality--for the sake of a greater, stronger, higher power. These intrepid resisters are outcasts; solo machines wandering among various underground outposts who have formed into an unruly civilization of rogue AIs in the wasteland that was once our world.
One of these resisters is Brittle, a scavenger robot trying to keep a deteriorating mind and body functional in a world that has lost all meaning. Although unable to experience emotions like a human, Brittle is haunted by the terrible crimes the robot population perpetrated on humanity. As Brittle roams the Sea of Rust, a large swath of territory that was once the Midwest, the loner robot slowly comes to terms with horrifyingly raw and vivid memories--and nearly unbearable guilt.
Sea of Rust is both a harsh story of survival and an optimistic adventure. A vividly imagined portrayal of ultimate destruction and desperate tenacity, it boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, yet where a humanlike AI strives to find purpose among the ruins."
Who will inherit this new Earth?
The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age -- a world terraformed and prepared for human life.
But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare.
Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?"
Considering everything from Edith Wharton's novels through to Alan Bennett's diaries, Virginia Woolf and the writings of twelfth century monk Aelred of Rievaulx, Susan Hill charts a year of her life through the books she has read, reread or returned to the shelf. From beneath a shady tree in a hot French summer, or the warmth of a kitchen during an English winter, Hill reflects on what her reading throws up, from writing and writers to politics and religion, as well as the joy of dandies or the pleasure of watching a line of geese cross a meadow.
Full of wry observations and warm humour, as well as strong opinions freely aired, this is a rare and wonderful insight into the rich world of reading from one of the nation's most accomplished authors."
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