Daily Archive

I hope everyone has had a wonderful Christmas. I was very pleased with the great selection of books I was given (picture to the right – with a couple of DVDs and an audio play).

We apply a very simple mechanism to selecting gifts – we share an enormous list of things we want, then the other selects an agreed number of presents. That means we get things we want without knowing exactly what we’re getting.

It also means that I get to make some additional purchases after the holidays to pick up things I didn’t get as presents  before I hit the end of the year and the TBR dare and self-imposed buying embargo.

But in the background I finished the Stephen King short story collection I was in the middle of this time last week, continued to move forward with Jack the Ripper and began my first read for the 2016 Sci-fi experience, The Three-Body Problem (Chinese sci-fi, very interesting).

So what did I get?:

• The Bullet by Mary Louise Kelly – Two words: The bullet. That’s all it takes to shatter her life.
• Abomination by Gary Whitta – “Game of Thrones by way of HP Lovecraft”
• The Visitant by Megan Chance – A crumbling palazzo in nineteenth century Venice holds a buried secret
• Romantic Moderns by Alexandra Harris – subtitle = English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper
• The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates – one of my absolute favourite writers, this is “a writer’s coming of age“
• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi – because everyone tells me to read this
• The Creation of Anne Boleyn by Susan Boyd – “in search of the Tudors’ most notorious queen” (really?) because it wouldn’t be Christmas without something about the 16th Century
• The Rim of the Morning by William Sloane – “two tales of cosmic horror” with an introduction by Stephen King
• The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J Mazzeo – “life, death, and betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris“
• The Last Policeman by Ben H Winters – can’t remember who recommended this but it’s been on my list forever
• Made to Kill by Adam Christopher – “part Chandler, part Asimov, and part Philip K Dick” – ooooh!
• Dreams & Shadows by C Robert Cargill – “a dark place to be“

Not a bad haul! Hope Santa brought you everything you wanted too. Back to normal next weekend when the dares and challenges will be underway, and I’ll know my books read total for 2015!