My masterplan to maximise all those double and triple stamps offers at Waterstones is starting to pay off. Lots of lovely new books arriving through the door and now I have nearly £30 in stamps. Now I just need to find some space for them all. I seriously need a good clear-out of books I no longer want. They are everywhere.

Last week I reviewed The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake and reminded myself of some of the 2021 releases I didn’t get round to. Then I actually read one of those Top Ten Tuesday books and patted myself on the back.

I didn’t enjoy Rise to the Sun as much as Leah Johnson’s previous book, You Should See Me in a Crown. I’m not a big fan about reading about music in general, so the setting of the music festival should have been a warning sign but I was hoping for some of the joyousness I found in her first book. A bit too much instalove, with behaviour that would be a red flag at the the start of a relationship, and some plot points were overly convenient.

I listened to The A.I. Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole, which is included in the Audible Plus catalogue. This was OK, didn’t quite work for me as either a romance or science fiction. I didn’t feel the chemistry and I found the plot a bit hard to believe. Her neighbour AI sounds like a robot, yet the household AI can carry on a normal conversation, and she doesn’t realise he’s not human. It’s explained away by a brain injury, but it wasn’t convincing.

So after a run of disappointing reads I picked up one of my new purchases, How High We Go in the Dark and so far I am loving it.

New books acquired:

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
A Terrible Kindness by Jo Browning Wroe
All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes
[gifted] The Butterfly Assassin by Finn Longman (Simon & Schuster)
Loki: A Bad God’s Guide to Being Good by Louie Stowell