Hello, and welcome to this Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. While August was an unusually quiet month, I got back up to speed in September with twelve new posts – thirteen if you include this one! It felt great to be back in the swing of things, working on a variety of different pieces. I feel like I managed a good balance in September, with a range of book reviews, author interviews and blog articles, and I’ve even managed to catch up with my backlog of reviews in order to (for once) have a supply of new content ready and waiting to be published. Whether or not I can maintain this sort of progress for long remains to be seen, but at least it’s worked out well for September!
As usual, in this article I’ll quickly run through the interview, reviews and articles that I’ve posted in September, before going on to talk a bit about the month as a whole.
Author Interviews
I posted no fewer than five author interviews this month – four of my regular interviews along with a fun multi-author piece talking about a recent Warhammer Crime anthology. I’m really pleased with how that one came out, and I hope it’s as interesting to read as it was to work on!
Amanda Bridgeman Talks Pandemic Patient Zero – imagine writing a novel based on the board game Pandemic just before a real-world pandemic struck…that’s what happened to Amanda Bridgeman, and I chatted to her to find out what that experience was like, and what we can expect from this new novel.
Sanction & Sin: Warhammer Crime and Women in Black Library with J.S. Collyer, Victoria Hayward, Jude Reid and Danie Ware – the new Warhammer Crime anthology Sanction & Sin is a bit of a landmark for Black Library, as the first to include stories from four female authors. I spoke to those authors to find out about their stories and their experiences writing for Warhammer Crime, and get their thoughts on female representation in Black Library.
Tristan Palmgren Talks Outlaw: Relentless – following on from Domino: Strays this is Tristan’s second novel in the Marvel: Heroines series from Aconyte Books, and I spoke to Tristan to find out more about what it’s about, who Outlaw is and what sort of book this is overall. If you ask me, it sounds great!
Jane Killick Talks In the Shadow of Deimos – I had loads of fun chatting to Jane about her first Terraforming Mars novel for Aconyte Books, a mystery/adventure featuring unscrupulous corporations crashing asteroids onto the surface of Mars! Check this out to get the lowdown on this fun novel.
Michael S. Jackson Talks Ringlander The Path and the Way – here’s author Michael S. Jackson to tell us all about the first book in his Ringlander series, The Path and the Way. There’s a cool map to enjoy as well – every fantasy series needs a good map, right?
Reviews
Four book reviews in September, with a mix of Black Library and other publishers. These are only a fraction of the books I’ve read recently (see the general update section below for more on my reading progress) but they’re all books that I would happily recommend.
Last Resort – Josh Reynolds – I may not know much (anything, really) about the world of Zombicide, but I do enjoy a zombie story now and then and I definitely enjoy Josh Reynolds’ writing. This suited me perfectly, as a pacy and entertaining zombie adventure with a little gore…but not too much!
Sanction & Sin – Warhammer Crime Anthology – I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read in the Warhammer Crime range, but this anthology has probably been the highlight (alongside audio drama Dredge Runners) so far. It’s packed full of variety, with some stories that are going to stay with me for a while to come.
Darkness in the Blood – Guy Haley – the third of Guy’s 40k Blood Angels novels, this follows on directly from The Devastation of Baal while also picking up the ongoing arc of Chief Librarian Mephiston. It’s pretty darn dark, and has a lot to do, but while I didn’t think it quite hit the levels of Dante (which is phenomenal) I did thoroughly enjoy it.
A Few Thoughts On: Legacy of Steel by Matthew Ward – I wrote a full review of this great book (part 2 of the Legacy Trilogy) for the British Fantasy Society, but I wanted to talk a bit more about the series so far and my experience of reading Legacy of Steel, which helped me stay sane while recovering from illness. There’s a link in here to my BFS review, too.
Articles
I’m particularly pleased with these articles, both for their variety and – in my opinion – their quality. Hopefully there’s something here for any SFF reader!
Re-reading The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan – I loved the Wheel of Time series when I read it some years ago (over the course of many years, too) but I never really thought I would go back to it. Watching the trailer for the new TV show tempted me to pick up the first book in the series once again, and I have to say I’m very glad I did! Read this article to get some of my thoughts on the experience…
Warhammer Crime – The Range So Far – although this is a range rather than a sequential series, I thought it might still be useful to have an article which collects together the details of all the Warhammer Crime releases so far, complete with connections between some of the stories and links to all my reviews and author interviews.
Cover Reveal: Recruited by Thomas Parrott – check out the cool cover art for a new novel coming in February 2022 from Aconyte Books, based on the world of Tom Clancy’s The Division, along with a few of author Thomas Parrott’s thoughts on both the cover and the book itself.
General update
Aside from getting back in the swing of writing, September has also been a bumper month for reading – largely due to the fact that I put aside a whole week to do nothing but read! I love a reading week, once in a while. Including the eight (count ‘em!) books I read that week, my total for September is 18; some of those were pretty short, but others were 700+ page epics, so all told I’m pretty happy with that. I’ll talk more in a little while about my overall reading progress for the year so far, but first I thought it might be interesting to touch quickly upon a few recurring themes for September’s reading, and pick out a few books to mention in particular.
Firstly, if you haven’t already taken a look at my Re-reading The Eye of the World article then I would definitely suggest you give it a go. I actually ended up re-reading the first three Wheel of Time novels (totalling a cool 824k words, according to Wikipedia!), after having watched the trailer for the upcoming TV show and succumbed to temptation. I’m going to pause my re-read there, as I don’t want to get sucked into working through the whole series in one go – which is a genuine risk, knowing what I’m like – but I’ve got to say I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed revisiting these books. It’s been a long time, and I’m a different reader now to when I first picked these books up, but there’s something about this series that just works for me. When I do eventually get round to re-reading the rest it’s going to be interesting to see how I cope with the mid-series slump!
It wasn’t just epic fantasy that I enjoyed in September, either. I don’t talk much about other genres of fiction here on Track of Words, as I want the focus to remain SFF for the most part, but I’ve been enjoying reading and listening to crime novels of late. In the last month I blitzed through five straight-up crime books, including a pair of LJ Ross’ DCI Ryan novels (a series I simply can’t stop reading) and Rachel McLean’s The Corfe Castle Murders – all of which are indie-published, and impressively unputdownable – along with a vintage Japanese crime novel (Seishi Yokomizo’s The Honjin Murders) and the classic that is Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. I’ve also had tremendous fun with a couple of the Adventures on Trains series by M.G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, which are delightfully fun adventure mysteries for children that gleefully draw upon classic crime influences. All of these are highly recommended!
Two more books I want to mention, beginning with Cassandra Khaw’s novella Hammers on Bone, which I have to say was deeply creepy and totally weird. I think I enjoyed it – sort of a deeply sinister urban fantasy/horror set in Croydon of all places (although come to think of it, Croydon is as bleak and depressing a place as any…so it kinda works) featuring a detective who’s an actual, bona fide monster. Very strange, but a story that’s really stuck with me. Secondly, while I’m not reading all that much in the way of Black Library books these days I did borrow my friend’s copy of Dan Abnett’s The Vincula Insurgency, which has only been released as an overpriced ‘mega edition’ so far. I’ll be interested to see where the Gaunt’s Ghosts series goes next, and what Abnett does with the ‘Ghost Dossier’ arc – I thought this was an interesting novella/very short novel, and I like the idea of dipping back into these characters’ history, even if the deliberately different style (it’s present tense, rather than past) does lend it a slightly odd feel compared to the usual style of the series.
Anyway, I promised an update on my overall reading progress so let’s have a look at that. September’s 18 books takes me to 110 in total for the year, which is amazing – I’ve a feeling my reading speed is going to slow down towards the end of the year, but it’s been a wonderful year for reading thus far so I can’t complain! In terms of my goal for authorial gender balance, 8 of September’s 18 were written by women, along with two books that were written by a male/female writing partnership and one anthology that had a lot of female representation…so that’s not bad. For the year to date, 55 of my 110 books have been written by non-male authors, along with four male/female partnerships…so I think I’m pretty much on track.
And just because I had an annoying comment on Goodreads recently complaining about the gender representation I discussed in my Sanction & Sin review, for the record: my choosing to read more widely and actively seek out books (SFF in particular) written by non-male authors is A) my choice and nothing to do with anyone else, and b) not going to harm any male authors! Reading more widely makes me a better-informed reader, end of story. Sigh. Rant over!
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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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