Some Books Chris Read

July in Review

July has been a pretty good month for reading, all things considered. I've read consistently every day, I've knocked books off my TBR lists, I've started reading short fiction again, and it's only towards the end of the month where I've found myself starting a book and not really being able to settle with it. That last is probably due to catching COVID and the ensuing brain fog rather than once again approaching burnout. I'm not counting those as DNFs, because in all cases I know that they're books I'm going to go back to when I'm in the mood for them.

The beginning of the month started off with me reading some ARCs I got from NetGalley, but the back end of the month has been largely dictated by recent awards shortlists and trying to get through last year's Booker Prize longlist before the new longlist is announced later today.

Here's everything I read in July:

There were also a few DNFs, too - Scott E. Williams' Hardcore History: The Extremely Unauthorized Story of the ECW, Scott Bradley's Basilisk, Marcia Armandi's The Haunting of Blackwater, and Samantha Harvey's Orbital all failed to keep me reading for one reason or another. I think the most surprising one out of those four is Orbital, which I'd really been looking forward to but just couldn't get to grips with. Two of them were ARCs, so I'm not particularly disappointed that I didn't get on with them.

If I have to pick a top 3 this month - and I don't have to, I don't have to do any of this blogging stuff, but just humour me here, okay? - my immediate reaction is that I can't just limit myself to 3 and I'd quite like to pick a top 5 instead. So I will.

My second reaction is that Nghi Vo is going to dominate the list, and I could quite easily just pick three of the Singing Hills Novels. But I'm going to force myself to pick just one of them along with four other books, which makes that list look like this:

As well as novels and novellas I've been reading a ton of short fiction, too. Earlier in the year I started reading an anthology of movie-inspired horror called Cinema Viscera (edited by Sam Richard) that I finally got around to finishing at the beginning of the month. I also read the most recent issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Analog Science Fiction and Fact, as well as working through all of the finalists in the Novelette and Short Story categories for the Ignyte Awards. Short fiction was my preferred form for a very long time and I'd forgotten how much I missed it. Favourites from the shorts have been:

I'm going to make more of an effort to keep up with what's going on in short fiction. There are far more magazines than I could possibly hope to keep up with, but I'm going to have my book tracking spreadsheet pick one at random each month and dedicate a post to an issue as I read them. I already wrote the first post because I'm impulsive.

I'd also like to find somewhere that publishes crime and mystery short fiction other than Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, since I've found that they aren't really scratching the particular itch I have. I used to get that fix from Crimewave but that, alas, no longer exists.

It's also been a good month for music, too. Here's my July playlist.

This blog doesn't have a comments section, by design. If you want to chat about any of the posts here, drop me an email at chris @ loottheroom dot uk.

#blog #in-review #jul24