Welcome to my Monthly Roundup for February. 2021 continues to be a bizarre year, but February seemed to fly past at speed and I can’t quite believe it’s March already! Over the last two months my Track of Words output has settled down to roughly four posts per week (give or take) which I think is about right, and February certainly felt busy in terms of writing but not crazily so. On the reading front, I got through a dozen books over the course of the month – I’ll talk a little bit later about some of the highlights from those books, but spending time reading and listening to audiobooks has really helped me stay sane of late! I hope you all had as good a February as possible under the circumstances…
As usual, I’ll start off this article with a recap of everything I posted in February, complete with links, before giving a bit of a general update later on. I’m always interested to know what you think, so once you’ve read through the article, do let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see more or less of on Track of Words!
Reviews
I ended up writing nine reviews last month, which I think is pretty good all told. Four were for novels, three for short stories and two for novellas, and I covered a range of styles and series from the usual Black Library stuff to one of my favourite Aconyte novels so far, and a few slightly different stories to what I often read.
The Night Parade of 100 Demons by Marie Brennan – the third Legend of the Five Rings novel from Aconyte Books, and a fantastic mixture of supernatural adventure, mystery, investigation and even a little romance. Another 5 star L5R book for me – loved it!
Last One at the Party by Bethany Clift – a post-apocalyptic, post-pandemic dystopia that’s darkly funny, close to the bone, and just plain dark. It’s a bit different to what I usually cover, taking a sci-fi concept and delivering something surprisingly grounded and deeply relatable, but it’s absolutely brilliant.
The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by P Djèlí Clark – a pacy, entertaining and evocative novella exploring Clark’s fascinating alternate history Cairo of 1910, and following on from the short story A Dead Djinn in Cairo. Such a great series, and I can’t wait for the full length novel!
QUICK REVIEW: The Lives of Ferag Lion-Wolf by Barrington J. Bayley – a classic Black Library short story from the late 90s, this offers a slightly different take on 40k to what you’d see today, but it’s a lot of fun nonetheless.
QUICK REVIEW: Judge Dee and the Three Deaths of Count Werdenfels by Lavie Tidhar – the second in a new series of supernatural Golden Age-esque mysteries, this is another hugely satisfying story of vampire life.
These Lifeless Things by Premee Mohamed – a strange, ambiguous, unsettling cosmic horror novella, set both during and years after an invasion by faceless, nameless and utterly terrifying creatures known only as ‘Them’. It’s the sort of story that leaves you with as many questions as answers, but is well worth the experience of reading.
QUICK REVIEW: Salvation’s Crucible by Denny Flowers – currently only available in the latest Black Library events anthology, this excellent Necromunda short story introduces the Promethium Guild to the underhive, and looks to tie in with an upcoming novel (so will hopefully get a wider release soon).
The Archive of the Forgotten by A.J. Hackwith – I absolutely loved The Library of the Unwritten, but sadly I was really disappointed in this, the sequel. The world of these stories is still brilliant, but I just couldn’t get along with the plot or where most of the characters went.
The Magos by Dan Abnett – the unplanned fourth novel in Abnett’s Eisenhorn trilogy, this is both a brilliant (if quite different, compared to the rest of the series) book in its own right and a fantastic prequel to Pariah, the first book in the Bequin series. On second reading I think I loved this even more!
Author interviews
While I posted quite a lot of reviews last month, I didn’t do so many interviews. I feel like it must be a few years since the last month when I only managed two author interviews, but at least both of these were for books that I think a lot of Black Library fans have been looking forward to for a long time!
RAPID FIRE: Graham McNeill Talks The Swords of Calth – Uriel Ventris is back, bigger and stronger than ever, and in this interview you can check out Graham’s thoughts on the character and what’s changed since the last book in the series, along with a reading order for the whole series.
RAPID FIRE: Dan Abnett Talks Penitent – here’s Dan talking about the long-awaited sequel to Pariah, giving us the lowdown on what we can expect from the novel and what it was like coming back to a book so long after the first instalment in the series!
Blog articles
I published four articles in February, evenly split between Aconyte Books and Black Library, including my second ever guest blog (from Robbie MacNiven) and a couple more guides to Black Library series that I hope will be helpful!
February 2021 Releases From Aconyte Books – overviews of the two new Aconyte novels out in February (The Night Parade of 100 Demons by Marie Brennan and The Shield of Daqan by David Guymer), with links out to author interviews and a review for one of them!
A Guide to Dan Abnett’s Inquisition Series – with the second Bequin novel now available at last, it’s a good time for a guide to the whole series – check this out for a reading order along with links to all of my reviews and author interviews for the series.
Found Family and the Characters of First Team – Robbie MacNiven Guest Post – with First Team out this week, here’s Robbie to talk a bit about the main characters featured in the novel, and how they relate to the central theme of found family.
Black Library: Age of Sigmar Grand Alliances – if you’ve ever wondered which Age of Sigmar book to read in order to get a feel for each of the four Grand Alliances in the game – CHAOS, DEATH, DESTRUCTION and ORDER, this article should hopefully help!
General update
I’m pretty happy with my writing output for February, especially considering how foggy my brain has felt for much of the month. It’s been tricky recently to get in the headspace for writing (trickier than usual, I suppose), but I managed to get quite a lot done in the end, and hopefully it’s mostly of a decent quality…fingers crossed! The site seems to have been pretty popular at least, which is great to see – February was the second busiest month ever (after January), with the most popular new posts being my Guide to Dan Abnett’s Inquisition Series, and my two recent author interviews.
What I’m finding particularly interesting, however, is the enduring popularity of my ‘New 40k’ Reading List article. If you’re not familiar with this, I first published it in July 2020 before updating it in January 2021, and it’s my attempt to make sense of how all the recent 40k books exploring the ‘new’ timeline fit together. It was one of my most popular articles in 2020, but in the (just under) two months since I updated it the page view count has sky-rocketed, more than doubling! It’s now been viewed considerably more than 10,000 times, which blows my mind – but it also demonstrates both the level of interest in these books from 40k fans and the amount of confusion around how they fit together. I personally think it’s crazy that Black Library doesn’t try to make things clearer for its readers, but for the time being at least there’s my article!
On the reading front, I found myself once again choosing a lot of my books just for fun rather than with a view to reviewing – of the 12 that I read in total, fully half were purely for fun. Some were non-SFF titles, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed. Alice James’ Grave Secrets in particular is a fun, easy to read page-turner, and both it and Judith Eagle’s The Pear Affair were exactly the sort of comforting read I needed at the time. The Black Echo by Michael Connelly is a darker, less comforting book, but having watched the Bosch TV show last year I’d been meaning to go back and check out the books it was based on. I do like a bit of crime fiction now and then, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of this series.
Others of my just-for-fun reads were books that I’d read before, as re-reading books I know I like is continuing to prove very relaxing. I tackled both of these re-reads as audiobooks – I picked Peter McLean’s Priest of Bones with a view to refreshing my memory ahead of the upcoming Priest of Gallows, and Brothers of the Snake was simply a case of being in the mood for some more Dan Abnett. I read both of those, along with LJ Ross’ Heavenfield (not a re-read), while walking to the supermarket and painting Warhammer miniatures (not at the same time), and I can highly recommend all of them – I particularly enjoyed hearing Jonathan Keeble narrating Heavenfield, which was quite a change from the usual Warhammer stuff I’ve heard him read before!
Of the books I read with a view to reviewing, you can find my reviews of These Lifeless Things, The Archive of the Forgotten and The Magos earlier in this article. I still need to find the time to review SA Tholin’s excellent sci-fi tale Iron Truth and Ben Aaronovitch’s fantastic upcoming novella What Abigail Did that Summer, but I’ll give you a sneak peek here – go buy both of these books, they’re fantastic! I did also pick up Graham McNeill’s Fury of Magnus with a view to reviewing it, but while I enjoyed it I think I must have read it at a time when I was really struggling for writing headspace, as I couldn’t quite get in the mood to write it. I’ll see what happens with that, and whether I can find the time and energy to review it after all…
If you’ve been keeping up with my reviews you’ll probably have spotted that I didn’t really enjoy The Archive of the Forgotten, and that I wrote a rare negative review for that one. Interestingly, it wasn’t the only book I couldn’t get on with of late – I made a start on a Black Library book (in audio) that I’d been looking forward to for a while, but for the first time in a long while I just really wasn’t enjoying it. So much so that I gave up a little under a third of the way through. I’m not going to name it, as I don’t want to affect anyone else’s experience of it while not having read the whole thing myself, but suffice to say I can’t remember the last time I DNF’d a Black Library book! I might give it another go at some point, to see if I was maybe just not in the mood for it.
Still, life’s too short to push on through books I’m really not enjoying, and my TBR list is lengthy enough that I’m never going to be short of something to read! As I write this I’ve just finished Robbie MacNiven’s excellent X-Men novel First Team, while my next reads are likely to be Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace, The Library of the Dead by TL Huchu, Gabriela Houston’s The Second Bell, and Richard Strachan’s The End of Enlightenment. Oh, and maybe also A Master of Djinn by P Djèlí Clark and Network Effect by Martha Wells. So many to choose from, and that’s not even mentioning things I’m looking forward to like Peter McLean’s Priest of Gallows and all the other amazing-sounding Aconyte novels that are coming soon!
You may have noticed that I’ve only included one Black Library novel on that list – The End of Enlightenment, which Richard Strachan very kindly sent me a review copy of. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got plenty of BL books to look forward to as well – a re-read of Pariah before starting on Penitent, The Gate of Bones, Darkness in the Blood, and more – but they’re just not my priority at the moment. What I am going to be doing, however, is writing up a few of my thoughts on February’s ‘Black Library Celebration’, about which I have mixed feelings (as usual). All being well I’ll get something put together for that in the next few days, and I’m hoping to publish some more BL-related author interviews whenever BL actually releases some more new books!
I’ll finish off with a quick mention of one of my 2021 goals, which is to read more books which aren’t written by men. I’m making decent progress with this goal so far in 2021 – of the 24 books I’ve read so far, 13 were written by women, so that’s a good start! I just need to keep that balance going now.
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That’s about it from me for another month, then. Fingers crossed everyone has a good March, with lots of great books for company! I’m always keen to hear about what you’ve enjoyed reading or listening to recently, what you think about the interviews and articles I’ve been publishing of late, whether you’ve read and enjoyed any of the books I tackled this month, and whether there’s anything you’d like to see in these roundup articles! Do drop me a line in the comments below, or get in touch on Twitter.
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