I love reading. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me or knows anyone who is a writer.
Back in January of 2012, I came up with the brilliant idea to record every book I read in the year. I wanted to see how much I could devour. At the start, I was on pretty good pace. I had five books complete before the end of February. It slowed down a bit as I finished up Genie Memories and moved onto another project.
Then came the Work Incident. The one I’ve mentioned frequently. The one that pretty much took it all out of me. It’s hard to describe. I can accept that I didn’t want to work on my own writing. Being creative is hard work and the day job was draining everything I had out of me. But the past five, six months have been so bad I haven’t even wanted to indulge in someone else’s world. Reading became a chore. That’s downright frightening if you ask me.
Overall I finished with a mere 14 books. I hope, very much hope, that 2013 will be different. Nonetheless, I did enjoy every page, however few there might have been.
The Rook by Daniel O’Malley : Brilliant, fantastic world and an excellent thriller.
The Lies of Locke Lamore by Scott Lynch : Wonderful epic fantasy with a heist thrown in the middle. Read this while we were down in Belize and it was almost enough to distract me from the beach.
The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks : Excellent characters, dark and complex story. Unfortunately I’m not hooked enough right now to read the entire trilogy but I’ll probably read his other work.
500 Ways to Be A Better Writer by Chuck Wendig : Foul mouthed and brilliant as always.
Exogene by T.C. McCarthy: War is not a pleasant thing, especially when your whole purpose is to fight for two years and then die.
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed: Fantastic debut novel and an excellent tale for those tired of the stereotypical fantasy.
City of the Lost by Stephen Blackmoore: A dark horror, pulp, urban fantasy novel. I called this one ‘awesomtastic’.
Caine’s Law by Matthew Woodring Stover: Quite possibly my favorite author, this one wraps up the Acts of Caine quintet.
Redshirts by John Scalzi: On the surface a parody of Star Trek (and all those other sci-fi shows) but practically every writer I know that’s read this has gone “God, why didn’t I think of that?” Funny and serious all at once.
Tome of the Undergates by Sam Sykes: Fantasy novel in which the heroes are anything but and each one hates one another so much that they would have no problem if the others died. Very cool and the ending left open a lot of questions. I will definitely pick up the next in the series.
The Hollow City by Dan Wells: Paranormal horror/thriller. The main character is a paranoid schizophrenic who comes to realize that some of the delusions he sees are real. Wells is one of the best out there for getting into the head of characters. Feel in love with his stories upon reading I Am Not A Serial Killer about a young man who is afraid he’s going to become a serial killer.
The Hammer and the Blade by Paul S. Kemp: Straight up old fashioned fantasy. I kind of needed this after a few rough weeks.
Blackbird by Chuck Wendig : A foul mouthed heroine with the ability to see how people are going to die just by touching them. Very neat story about fate and what it takes to change it.
Partials by Dan Wells : Second book of the year by Wells and significantly different from his previous works. Partials is a dystopian YA and I really enjoyed it. And while I like Wells as an author, I am very much looking forward to the sequel (Fragments) because back in May, Wells did a Twitter contest and the end result is that my birth date will be mentioned somewhere in the novel. So that’ll be fun.
Moose and Ink 