sunday-salon-2So here we are; one month out of the way already. Where does the time go? Anyway, time for a round-up I think.

Challenges:

A couple of challenges finished on 31 January

  • the Sci-Fi experience – over the two months the challenge ran I managed 1 x novel, 3 x standalone (i.e. not in a collection) short stories and 2 x movies. Not bad, but would have liked to read more, just couldn’t find the right thing. But I’m sure there will be more sci-fi throughout the year….
  • the Clear Your Reader challenge – all seven books I’ve finished this month have been on my Kindle app so yay me!
  • the TBR Double Dog – the seven books read this month all count towards this; the buying embargo is firmly holding under extreme provocation. A couple of pre-orders downloaded this week and I got two books as part of my birthday presents yesterday, but all tucked firm away until the beginning of April.
  • I haven’t previously mentioned the 2015 Horror Reading Challenge which runs throughout the year. I’m doing particularly well with this one – 2 x short story collections and 2 x novels so far; suits my taste at the moment. Which probably says something, I’m just not sure what!

In progress

Most of my current reads are shown on the blog sidebar; after a good reading month in January I’m dithering a bit, jumping from book to book before I (hopefully) settle on something.

Events

I attended my first Super Relaxed Fantasy Club meeting in London last week. Particularly pleased to meet EJ Swift (whose short story The Spiders of Stockholm is up for an award) and who is now firmly on my wish-list, and Sarah Pinborough. I was very lucky to be given directly from her own hand an uncorrected proof of her next novel  The Death House which is out in February. I think the rules of the TBR Dare will allow me to include this one; at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it 🙂

The Jonathan Strange Update

I’m still where I was on Christmas Eve, page 134, mostly because I just haven’t been reading much. But I had an interesting conversation with a couple of people I met at the SRFC and it seems that Jonathan Strange is one of those books people are glad to have read in retrospect but struggled with a bit while they were actually reading it. Glad I’m not alone!

Abandoned

Nothing abandoned since my last post.

Not bad. Not bad at all.