A Month of Reading: August 2018: Robinsonfest and ARCs

The highlight of this month – and easily in the running for highlight of the year – was finally meeting Jeremy Robinson in real life at Robinsonfest 2018 after having known him online for a decade. I flew into Boston for the first time in my life, for a weekend of firsts as far as locations, some modes of transport, and even some activities. I mean, how often in your life do you get to cosplay as yourself AND “cause the Apocalypse” while doing so? (Which is what is happening in the pic – here, I’ve just “planted corn”. When I did that in the book Jeremy wrote that I appear in, I wind up accidentally causing the Apocalypse.) I covered all of it in a post here both before and after the event, along with a couple of YouTube videos.

The end of August also marked a new review strategy for me – YouTube Book Reviews. The first was for The Waiting Room by Emily Bleeker, and I’ve since shot videos for Sleepyhead by Henry Nicholls and The Perfect Catch by Maggie Dallen.

Overall, I read just 9 books in August 2018, per Goodreads. But this was all unknown territory for me as far as overall annual count goes, as I busted my previous record there at the end of July and now I stand at 90 books on the year, with four more ARCs already on deck. Of the 9 books on the month, only three were from the same series – Lisa Clark O’Neill’s Sweetwater Trilogy. Only four of the books were from the 2018TBR project – the first three (the aforementioned trilogy) and the last one, The Postman by David Brin. The remaining five were review copies (four of them ARCs), with only one of those being from an author I’m not connected to at all on Facebook.

The 9 books accounted for over 3100 pages of (Kindle) text at an average length of 347 1/3 pages per book.

As I mentioned above, I only read one series on the month, so best series of the month goes to the Sweetwater Trilogy by Lisa Clark O’Neill.

Most interesting book of the month goes to Sleepyhead by Henry Nicholls, which was a fascinating look at the neuroscience of sleep and sleep disorders.

There wasn’t much humor in the list again this month, just a couple that could really be considered humorous at all, and I’ll give the edge on those two to Christine Nolfi‘s The Comfort of Secrets, mostly because her Sweet Lake Sirens are frakkin hilarious old broads.

Best book of the month? Emily Bleeker‘s The Waiting Room, for reasons that can only be discovered by reading the book – it would be a spoiler to discuss them openly.

Below the break, the entire list, in date completed order – with links to my Goodreads reviews of each.
Continue reading “A Month of Reading: August 2018: Robinsonfest and ARCs”

Featured New Release of the Week: Coldfall Wood by Steven Savile

This week, we look at the latest release from another long time friend, Coldfall Wood by Steven Savile.

This book is the sequel to Savile’s late 2017 release, Glass Town, and picks up just some time after the end of that book, immediately dealing with the repercussions of that book – which will reverberate throughout this one. That said, this book can be read first – as I did – as everything that is crucially important from Glass Town is explained again in this book.

The front half of Coldfall Wood is basically setup and transition from Glass Town into the meat of the story of Coldfall Wood. We get a lot of detail about the origins of several new characters, and finally around the halfway point these new characters start to actually work on their mission. And what a mission it is – to destroy modern London and return her to her more natural state. The book actually does an excellent job of showing that everyone is the hero in their own story, that there are few indeed truly bad people. It also has some fairly blatant pro-environmental themes, though those are deftly pit against the idea of “well, we need to change things… but we also can’t just kill the people that are currently here or increase their suffering”.

Fans of fantasy books or Anglophiles generally should truly love this book, as it tends to be an excellent fantasy tale solidly centered on London and British myths of the Horned God, the once and future king, the Wild Hunt, and the surrounding myths.

And now, the “but”. I personally struggled mightily with this book, and both Savile and I thought I might. I’m not a fan of fantasy. As in, almost at all. Particularly the sword and sorcery level that this book gets into. I’m fine with real world stories with fantasy themes where the fantasy is almost a macguffin and/ or just hinted at to establish an overall mythology for a given series, but I just can’t handle the sword and sorcery level fantasy. I never have been able to get into it in text form, going back to some of my earliest reading experiences. So this book was extremely difficult for me – I was barely halfway into this book that Goodreads lists as 336 pages after 7 hours of reading. To put that in perspective, I normally read books twice that long in less time – and indeed did so just this past weekend with another author friend who I’ve known nearly as long as Savile and met in the same place I met him.

So this book just wasn’t for me, but it was extremely well written and a compelling story generally – one I personally would love to see in movie format, as I think it could do well in that medium. (And again, I have a history of being able to enjoy fantasy stories there – I’ve never been able to read more than a paragraph of Lord of the Rings, yet I *love* those movies.) Because of this, I gave Coldfall Wood 4 stars.

As always, here is my Goodreads/ Amazon review:
Continue reading “Featured New Release of the Week: Coldfall Wood by Steven Savile”