After June’s rather delayed roundup, I’m back on schedule with July’s post after a month that’s been busy on the reading front and just a little quieter than usual on the writing front. It’s also been unseasonably warm for those of us living in the UK (oh how I would have loved air conditioning this month!) but thankfully I didn’t melt, and have remained in solid form despite the heat. As always in this article I’ll run through the various posts that I’ve published over the last few weeks so you can catch up on anything you missed, and then I’ll give a quick general update for anyone interested.
July’s posts
With seven posts published in July I was a little down in terms of volume compared to previous months, but hopefully the quality has still been there! No fewer than five of this month’s posts were book reviews though, so I’m pleased with that.
Monthly Roundup – June 2022 – last month’s roundup was both a little late and quite short, largely because of how busy the end of June was, but it still included details of eight new posts and a handful of updated posts, along with the usual general update!
Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir – via Grimdark Magazine – I’d been looking forward to this book for ages, and I prepared for it by revisiting the first two novels in the Locked Tomb series in audio before making a start. I wasn’t disappointed either, and I enjoyed it so much I read it twice in succession – I wrote a full review for Grimdark Magazine (which you can find a link to in this article) along with this piece talking about my experience of reading the book more generally.
The Patriot List by David Guymer – if you enjoy Marvel stories but fancy something a bit darker and a bit less heroic, this is absolutely the novel for you. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching out and out villains trying to pass themselves off as heroes, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and to varying degrees of success!
Mindalker by Kate Dylan – Kate wrote a brilliant guest post for ToW in June, which had me really looking forward to reading this YA sci-fi novel…and when I got my hands on a copy it was every bit the neon-soaked blast of fun that I expected, only with added depths beyond what I could have expected! Just because it’s YA doesn’t mean it isn’t properly dark and genuinely thought-provoking!
Prince Maesa by Guy Haley – whether you’ve been reading/listening to Guy’s Prince Maesa short stories and audio dramas as they’ve been released, or this is your first introduction to the character, if you’re an Age of Sigmar fan (or a Guy Haley fan of any kind) then I would definitely recommend this novel. It’s a clever consolidation and expansion of the existing stories, and a really satisfying narrative in its own right, and I had a lot of fun with it.
On Comfort Reading – I think most people have one or two go-to genres (or even series, authors or specific books) that they pick up when they want to read something easy and comfortable. For me that’s always been SFF, but recently I’ve been choosing quite a lot of crime fiction and nature writing for comfort reading. In this article I’ve taken a look at why I’ve been gravitating to those genres, and some of the specific books I’ve enjoyed recently.
IN BRIEF: The Triumph of Saint Katherine by Danie Ware – if you’re interested in 40k Sisters of Battle stories and you’re up for the idea of a short novel that’s very much written in the oral tradition – a bit like a group of characters sitting around a fire telling stories – then this might well be of interest. It’s not your usual Black Library novel, and I kind of wish it had been longer, but it’s definitely interesting.
General update
I’ve mentioned the heat this month already – reaching almost 40 degrees centigrade (about 100 F) where I am in London – and while it really only lasted for a few days it somehow feels to have dominated July! The weeks seem to have passed in a frazzled, sweaty haze, but perhaps that’s what I needed because for some reason I seem to have been in the mood for writing reviews. For months now review writing has felt a bit like pulling teeth, but over the last few weeks it seems to have come a little easier – I don’t know if that’s because of the books I’ve been reading, or a general upturn in creativity and mental health, but whatever the reason I’m happy to take advantage of it.
Ironically though, one of my goals for this year was to focus less on reviews and more on author interviews, blog articles and so on, and my upturn in review writing productivity seems to have coincided with a downturn in getting anything else written. That being said, in the last few days I’ve started working on a few different interviews which I’m hoping to get published reasonably soon – one of them very soon in fact. Every time I do any work on an interview I’m reminded of how much I enjoy putting them together, so I really should make an effort to do more of these. If you’re an author and you’d be interested in contributing to an interview (especially if we’ve chatted previously, or I’ve reviewed one or more of your stories) then do get in touch, and likewise if you’re a reader and there are authors you’d like to see me chat to, then let me know!
Writing aside, it’s also been a pretty productive month on the reading front, as I finished a whopping 14 books in July! That takes me to 90 in total now, which is bonkers – as I regularly remind myself the number of books I read isn’t as important as the enjoyment I get out of them…but I’ve largely enjoyed those 90 books so I’m pretty happy with that. If you read my On Comfort Reading article then you’ll already know that I’ve been picking up a lot of crime fiction and nature writing recently, and between those genres they accounted for over a third of my July reads. Of those, my highlights were definitely Dissolution by CJ Sansom (the first Shardlake novel – what a great character he is!) and The Bumblebee Flies Anyway by Kate Bradbury, which has really got me hankering after a little garden of my own.
As I said in that article, I still choose plenty of SFF for comfort reads, and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries definitely counts. I blasted through the second and third novellas in the series (Rogue Protocol and Exit Strategy) as audiobooks – my second time reading both of them – and was reminded of just how great this series is! I’m trying to ration myself and not binge the whole lot one after the other, but it’s really tempting. If you’re a science fiction fan and you haven’t already got on board with this series, I really can’t recommend it enough!
As for looking ahead to August, I’m hoping to keep riding this wave of enthusiasm for review writing so the plan is to pick up a fair few review copies that have either been sitting on the shelf for a while or have arrived recently. Fingers crossed I can catch up a bit on my Aconyte Books backlog (Elsa Sjunneson’s Assassin’s Creed novel Sword of the White Horse is looking very tempting, and likewise Evan Dicken’s To Chart the Clouds and David Annandale’s Reign of the Devourer), and maybe even a few Black Library books that I’ve been looking forward to reading for a while (Nate Crowley’s The Twice-Dead King duology has been calling to me for ages). If nothing else though, keep an eye out for reviews of Priest of Crowns by Peter McLean and Planet Havoc by Tim Waggoner!
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That’s it for this month’s roundup. If there’s anything you’d like me to cover in these articles in future please do let me know. All that’s left to do then is to say that I hope you had a great July, and wish you an excellent August full of good books and hopefully slightly less extreme heat!
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