nigellicus's reviews
1566 reviews

The House on Vesper Sands by Paraic O'Donnell

adventurous dark funny mysterious tense

5.0

All the characters seem ever-so-slightly larger than life, especialy the inspector, as does the plot, kicked off when a seamstress sews a message nto her own body then jumps through a window. It all turns low-key, and seamlessly, into something with supernatural elements, but honestly a lot of the dialogue is the main attraction. 

The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

adventurous mysterious tense

5.0

Time travelling crime solvers! It does work, although if you've read the likes of Kage Baker or Connie Willis you wince a bit about how they're really not thinking through the potentials and possibilities, but who knows as the series goes on, they might work a few of them out - even so, the mystery/time-twistery aspect is more than entertaining enough, with great characters. 

Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera

adventurous dark funny mysterious tense

5.0

Fast, slick, cool little mystery, the central tension being between whether the amnesiac protagonist actually wants to remember whether she murdered her best friend or not. Prompted by her grandmother to come back to her home town, where everybody thinks she did it, while a true crime podcast is doing an investigation into the case, we get some nice production on the audiobook as they replicate podcast episodes and you actually forget it's two narrators doing all the voices. It's a page-turner, helped along by short chapters, the dramatics generated by the podcast, twists and revelations, but with dark digressions into domestic abuse and very dodgy choices. Lucy is spiky, sarcastic and doesn't seem to like anyone, not even her boyfriend, with very few exceptions, but then we meet the townspeople and her family and her ex-husband and learn more about her trauma and the gaslighting that followed, and we're very much on her side even as we wince at some of the stuff she does. 

The Will of the Many by James Islington

adventurous tense

5.0

Grand epic fantasy type thing - a Roman-Emprie-esque empire that taps into peoples' wills and channels them to individuals at the top of pyramids, making them strong, imbuing objects with power. Our narrator is the survivor of a small island kingdom that's been the most revent acquisition of the empire, surviving in an orphanage, working in a nasty prison, fighing in arranged bouts. He attracts the attention of a member of a powerful family and ends up getting adopted, all the time keeping his real identity secret. But he's been adopted for a reason, and gets sent to an academy to, among other things, solve a murder and discover whether someone's found an ancient weapon. A rather terrifying resistance movement who know exactly who he is further complicates his life. There's lots of twists and reveals and reversals and politics, good fun.

The Thirty Years War by C. V. Wedgwood

dark informative sad

5.0

I'm not a hundred percent sure about reviewing this because I'm not a hundred percent sure even one percent ot if went in and stayed in. I could probably take a stab at some of the causes and one or two of the main players - ok, the King of Sweden is pretty unforgettable - but I'm not entirely sure how it actually ended - the Peace Of Westphalia, obviously, but how did they get there? Lots of battles, lots of characters, lots of burning peasants' houses and fields and generating plague and pestilence - syphilis is mentioned as one of the diseases that follows an army around, all of it a monumental waste. The author is not without sympathy for almost anyone involved, except for a few standout creeps. I don't know how anyone can look at this mess and come up with the Great Man theory of history. The Small Army Of Completely Rubbish Men And Some Rubbish Women theory, maybe. 

Alternate Routes by Tim Powers

adventurous dark mysterious tense

5.0

Hang on. I read this last year. Or the year before. But I didn't mark it as read or review it? Gosh darn it.

Read it again! Still haven't reviewed it! For shame! 

Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History by Simon Winder

adventurous emotional funny informative lighthearted reflective sad

5.0

Pungent, witty, sometimes hilarious, deftly satirical, but written from a place of deep love and affection if also exasperation and, as you might well imagine when the twentieth century comes around, borderline despair. Personalities, politics, instiutions, geography, borders, customs and endless little museums, displays, historical folk-park nonsense, often appalling monuments and frescos, meander through this exploration of place and history and, not incidentally, the mindset of the writer for whom it is all a sort of resigned obsession. 

The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch

challenging dark informative

4.0

We had a book in secondary school, and Irish convent secondary school, called Renaissence And Reformation and the one thing I remember about it is that at one point it said something like 'now, obviously, the Spanish Inquisition was no summer camp, but...' The effects of the Reformation are so huge and run so deep they're hard to fathom, but here we go, several hundred years worth of intense theological disagreement and the subsequent social upheavals, displacement of peoples, wars and persecutions, the whole damn thing. A considerable percentage of this book details various and endless and sincere life-or-death disgreements about things that seem to belong in a fantasy novel they're so arbitrary, generated out of the mess of human faillibility in an effort to transcend it. It's fascinating. I doubt I'll remember a fraction of it, but it was a marvelous read.

Adventures in Unhistory: Conjectures on the Factual Foundations of Several Ancient Legends by Avram Davidson

adventurous funny informative lighthearted reflective

5.0

Essentially a collection of musing and speculations and explorations of assorted odd and erudite topics, fascinating, funny, and mischevous. The audio book narrator mangles some Irish and his Irish accent is deplorable, but it's all of a piece with the twinking, chatty, discursive rambling around familiar and unfamiliar esoterica. 

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

adventurous dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing sad tense

5.0

And so it came to pass, I now have reached a place where I am rereading The Lord Of The Rings every few years. Impossible though it may be to recapture the aching longing of the first time, I am at least better able to appreciate the writing and the thematic concerns and the evocation of the world and landscape. Or at least I flatter myself that I am. Strangest of all on this reread was finding myself as an outpatient at a clinic in Limerick's Regional Hospital for a few hours - my very first read of the trilogy coincided with a teenage trip to the Regional to have my appendix removed. Roughly the same time of the year as well. 

Oh well. Our youthfulness has sailed on into the West, never to return and we stand now in the Middle Age of Man. It's nice that this thing that excited our childish mind now consoles our more wearied adulthood, on occasion. It's not a bad ambition, to want to turn more hobbity, and enjoy the finer things in life, like food and dink and good friends and family. Teeangers can go off and be Aragorn. The rest of us can take our ease in the Green Dragon for awhile.