#TBRPile 📚 “My parlour smelled of linseed oil and spike lavender, and a dab of lead tin yellow glistened on my canvas.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Mars was empty before we came.”

All of these books from @ozma.of.oz look so good! I already have The Conductors, and the Chambers and Klune are both on my Xmas list. I just read (and LOVED) Middlegame so I'm excited to read more of Seanan McGuire. Also, that cover is giving me serious mid-00s urban fantasy nostalgia! #NYWD22 @monalyisha

#TBRPile 📚 “I will always remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard that my father had died.”

#TBRPile 📚 “There was a razorstorm coming in. Sylveste stood on the edge of the excavation and wondered if any of his labours would survive the night.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The child was awakened by the knotting of the snake‘s coils about his waist.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Film legend and ‘60s It Girl Evelyn Hugo has just announced that she will auction off 12 of her most memorable gowns through Christie‘s to raise money for breast cancer research.”

#TBRPile 📚 That night, when Mrs Chamberlain called, Emira could only piece together the words “…take Briar somewhere…” and “…pay you double…”.

#TBRPile 📚 “Rachel White flung the cab door open, tossed the driver a banknote and dived into the rain.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The new doctor took her by surprise.”

#TBRPile 📚 “My sainted mother taught me the seven acts of corporeal mercy: to feed the hungry; refresh the thirsty; clothe the naked; shelter the traveler; comfort the sick; visit those imprisoned; and bury the dead.”

I really enjoyed this fifth mystery- it‘s slow and it‘s as much about Strike and Robin as it is about the 40 year old mystery they are investigating. I didn‘t guess the ending (although all the clues were there) and even though both detectives had a lot going on personally, the story never felt too much like a soap drama. A long but enjoyable read! #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

#TBRPile 📚”The snow came down so thickly that it formed fragile snowballs in the air, which rumbled and melted as soon as they landed on the horses lined up along the dock.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Four or five days after she died, I sat alone in the living room wondering what to do.”

#TBRPile ? “Each year, at the end of March, a great fair was held in Cría, the capital of Galla.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Agnes de Courtenay knew that most people would say she‘d been blessed, for she was both beautiful and highborn, the daughter of the Count of Edessa, cousin to the rulers of Antioch and Jerusalem.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The furnace burned bright in the darkness.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Caledonia stretched along the prow of the Ghost as the ship sliced through black water.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Director Procopius of the Imperial Academy of Music and Performing Arts came by the scar when he was 18 months old, on the day when his father, in a drunken rage, stabbed his mother sixteen times before turning the knife on his baby son and then himself.”

This was an imaginative, gritty and wonderfully weird sci-fi that was full of cool ideas, but I can‘t say I enjoyed it. I loved the all-female world, the unreliable narrators, the quest through different levels… but the biotech was all a bit too icky for me. The blood and sclera and teeth and afterbirth 🤢 I spent a lot of time grossed out. Cool concept, but too visceral for me! #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

#TBRPile 📚 “I woke to find her lying next to me, quite dead, with her throat torn out. […] Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Here we go again.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Lydia Crow stood on a wet pavement in London and peered through the grimy front window of The Fork cafe.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Before her Thing begins. Before even Kev is born. Before the move to Harlem.”

#TBRPile 📚 “My life fell apart when I was sixteen.”

This sci-fi got off to an intriguing start with all my favourite tropes - found family, vengeance, orphan with a mysterious provenance - but a major plot device about a quarter of the way in left me feeling cheated. Add in a lack of exposition, jarring timing issues and an MC increasingly amazing at everything and I stalled at 67%. #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

#TBRPile 📚 “She slices through the water, imagining herself a deadly beam of black light.”

#TBRPile 📚 “It is just like Earth, Terra-Two. […] But there is nobody on it.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The first thing Sanda did after being resuscitated was vomit all over herself.”

#TBRPile 📚 “On her tenth birthday, Nessa overhears an argument in her parents‘ bedroom. She knows nothing about the Three Minutes yet.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The real story isn‘t half as pretty as the one you‘ve heard.”

Me and the cat battled over the sofa and the blanket this evening… guess who won 😂 #catsoflitsy

#TBRPile 📚 “Rain clung to the earthen floor of the forest as a light mist and white petals from the mourning rises scattered the edges of the grave.”

#TBRPile 📚 “They said, when they died, that all they could hear was the screaming.”

For me, Sir Terry is at his best when he writes stories about stories, and here he has great fun riffing on fairy tales and ‘happy ever afters‘. As always, there‘s lots of characteristic Pratchett humour overlaying more serious questions - this time about autonomy and the right to make our own choices and define for ourselves what ‘happy ever after‘ means. #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

#TBRPile 📚 “The truth-speaker was tall as a stretcher, thin as a rifle.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.”

#TBRPile 📚 “The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other.”

#TBRPile 📚 “There is a tradition in our kingdom, one all castes of demon and human follow. We call it the Birth-Blessing.”

#TBRPile 📚 “My brother and I grew up dreaming of new worlds.”

#TBRPile 📚 “It was my eleventh birthday.”

This was an absolute hoot! It‘s like Jane Austen wrote Skins - it has all the delight and wit of a Regency setting but with far more drink, drugs, and bad behaviour than Jane Austen would ever dared to write about. Not one for historical purists and it does tackle some thorny issues, but I loved it. #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

This was down to me, not the book - it‘s been a looooong half-term and a chest infection means that I really wasn‘t keeping track of the plot. Back it goes on the TBR Pile! #bookspinbingo @TheAromaofBooks

#TBRPile 📚 “The first thing you need to understand is what it means to sell your soul.”

#TBRPile 📚 “It was a crime that shocked the nation. During the early hours of Sunday 27 June 1999, three generations of one family, all female, […] were killed in a series of vicious attacks.”

#TBRPile 📚 “It was eighteen years since she‘d seen the city. Twenty since she‘d last seen her father. Now he was dead.”

#TBRPile 📚 “Wolverhampton, 5 April 1988. Here I am, on my 13th birthday. I‘m running. I‘m running from The Yobs.”

An especially eclectic list for #bookspinbingo this month - sci-fi, fantasy, a couple of whodunnits, short stories, and rom-com! @TheAromaofBooks

#TBRPile 📚”In the drowsy heat of the summer afternoon, the Red House was taking its siesta.”

#TBRPile 📚 “People would say she came to Qaanaaq in a skiff towed by a killer whale harnessed to the front like a horse.”

#TBRPile 📚 “It came through lanes crazy with rain, its sides slabbed with mud, its wheels throwing arcs of mud behind it.”