NextRead

Well November isn’t naughty but I feel I’ve been a little after looking at last months post on the blog. I did a very poor show on the reading and I had high hopes for that but I got a little distracted with playing with Corel Painter and Photoshop ( I’m blogging a little about it here). Though mostly I felt a little bit burn out.

I’m almost recharged but taking it easy with more familiar or at least less taxing reading. I’ve just started on Fool Moon by Jim Butcher. It’s the second of a series of stories about Chicago’s only Wizard in the phone book and it’s the books that the TV series The Dresden Files were based on (which has also been cruelly cancelled). Only six pages in but I’m hooked already. And the good news is that I’ve got another 8 at least to look forward to. I love episodic books that are more self-contained than some of the more immersive fantasy.

I’ve still got loads that I want to read soon and some review copies that I need to get on with before they start gathering dust.

Starting with the thinner ones there is Jeanette Winterson’s non-scifi scifi The Stone Gods which has been generating a lot of interest though I’m yet to read a review.

Something more interesting, in terms of it being a debut and being more up my street, is Once Bitten, Twice Shy. It already has some great reviews here and here.

I also want to get to read another slow burning but still buzzing Gents by Warwick Collins though it falls in the literary fiction category.

Flipping back to debuts we have Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn which has a quote from Stephen King, ‘a terrific debut, relentlessly creepy’. You can’t get a much better quote than that now can you.

Still with thin books it’s The Devil in Amber by Mark Gatiss. Gatiss has recently appeared as Dr Lazarus in the third season of Dr Who as well as a fabulous actor he is also a screen and novel writer. This is his second non-series novel and a sequel to The Vesuvius Club. I’ve had this one gathering dust since July
Almost the last thin book and sticking with the Urban Fantasy theme from Once Bitten is No Dominion, Charlie Huston’s follow-up to Already Dead.

The actual last thin book, well books but I might only choose one, is a book from the Future Classics Promotion. I’m deciding whether to start with Blood Music by Greg Bear or Schild’s Ladder by Greg Egan. I want to read the others at some point too but at the moment I’m sticking with the thin ones.

Actually I’m going to end it there for now. I have more books to blog about but I’ll let you absorb those first