New Year, New Reading List

A very happy Year of the Querulous Megapode to you all.

Real life may be resuming after the ethereal Cold Holiday Time, but happily I am now furnished with a nice long list of other worlds to escape into – some given to me, some bought by me, all sitting waiting on shelves physical or digital for me to get stuck into. So while I’m wrapping my head around what I’m going to be writing this year, I thought I’d let you know the first chunk of what I’m going to be reading.

Blackest Night/Brightest Day

I’ve owned DC’s Blackest Night crossover for many years, have read it many times and am re-reading it now, and it’s great. (To summarise: evil Black Lanterns resurrect dead heroes as zombies, apocalypse ensues.)

Having recently dipped into some of the other ‘big crossover’ comics DC and Marvel have put out over the years (Final Crisis, Death Metal, Battleworld, etc.), I have to say that Blackest Night is the high mark they should all be measured by. So often these crossovers are diminished by having to branch off and read other stories – Marvel especially is guilty of this – that the core story falls rather flat. But Blackest Night is good on its own without any spinoff bits – despite cramming in Green Lantern, the Flash, and a ton of other characters.

But what I’ve never read, and now finally have, is the follow-up story, Brightest Day, which covers the fallout of this superpowered zombie apocalypse and what a bunch of suddenly resurrected heroes – and villains – have to deal with when they’re suddenly back from the dead. I’m looking forward to it immensely.

Rides a Dread Legion/At the Gates of Darkness

The final stages of the Riftwar Re-Read are at last underway. I was waiting for my birthday/Christmas before buying the last few books in case someone got them for me, a caution justified as I was indeed given the next book I needed for Christmas. So now it’s onto the last-but-one arc, the Demonwar, in which some space elves show up, which is pretty neat so far. And then there’s just one last trilogy to go before I’m done with Midkemia. It’s an odd feeling.

Intergalactic Bastard

I’ll be honest, I bought this for the title alone. But I’m always down for gladiatorial combat In Space, and this looks like a bit of fun.

A Song for the Void

An SPFBO 8 contender I saw recommended on Twitter, I like the look of this eldritch mystery. I don’t tend to read that much horror, but I like a bit of Lovecraftian stuff as it scratches the fantastical itch while at the same time dragging me kicking and screaming out of my comfort zone. (I also played a game of Call of Cthulhu recently, which has primed my mind for existential terror.) And the fact that it’s a bit historical, being set on a pirate-hunting ship during the Opium Wars, is also a bonus for my historian’s brain.

Saga vol. 10

I have rambled before about how phenomenal Saga is, and have done so with good reason, because it’s probably the best comic and one of the best stories I’ve ever read. This cosmic Romeo and Juliet odyssey is amazing. After the heartbreaking end of volume 9, Staples and Vaughan went on a bit of a hiatus before starting the second half of the, well, saga. As far as I knew said hiatus was still going on – and then I stumbled across volume 10 in Waterstones a few days ago. I can’t wait. Though I am going to have to reread the whole thing again first… oh no…

Good Omens

I’ve read this before, but I’ve got book club next week and I really need to refresh my memory of the actual book, for my mind is (as it often is) full of the excellent BBC show. But if you haven’t read Pratchett and Gaiman’s fantastic version of the coming of an 11-year-old reluctant Antichrist and the shenanigans of the delightfully incompetent angel/demon pairing of Aziraphale and Crowley, then you really need to. It’s fabulous.

SPSFC – GSV Galactic Beards

And finally come the rest of my immediate rivals for the SPSFC: the other books being read and reviewed by the GSV Galactic Beards team. From what I’ve read so far: The Pono Way, a cracking near-future climate crisis tale; and The Engineer, a sprawling epic fantasy/romance; I’m up against some stiff competition. To find out just how stiff, I’m going to have to do some more reading. Goliath Fallen might be the first on the list – I like a generation ship story.

So that’s what I’ll be reading. Let me know what’s on your list for the first bit of the year. (Especially if it might happen to be one of these…)