I was too busy reading up a storm on the last night of April to post updates here, so here’s a very quick roundup of my April reading before I go back to…reading!
I fell into a Pern reread rabbithole towards the end of April while recuperating from Apocalypse Knee so I tore through Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall Trilogy and I’m finishing up Dragondrums tonight. These books still make me very emotional; probably for very different reasons now than they did back when I was a teenager.
I also picked up Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels and found My Brilliant Friend very difficult to put down so I tore through it pretty quickly. Ferrante definitely knows how to tell an engrossing story and I’m hooked! On the Doris Lessing front, I am very slowly reading The Golden Notebook to peel apart the different layers of meaning.
On the SFnal front, I have finished reading Martha Well’s System Collapse and cannot wait for the continuation because I’m so hooked on this world. I’m also aiming to read more SF books in May! I have Julian May’s Intervention waiting in the wings for a reread. It’s one of my favourite SF novels ever and I got all nostalgic for it. I seem to be all about the nostalgic, comfort rereads lately but I also think it’s important because it’s helping me trace back the foundations of my own SFF imagination so I can break new barriers within my SFnal worldbuilding capacities (this involves reverse-engineering and unpacking/untangling some general internalised assumptions).
Other rereads: I am well into my reread of Robert Jordan’s Winter’s Heart and completed Patricia A McKillip’s The Tower At Stony Wood with a sigh of delight; I loved it even better the second time around. Next on my McKillip grand reread will be In The Forests of Serre. But that’s after I finish McCaffrey’s Dragondrums and Ferrante’s The Story of A New Name this weekend.
All up, I’ve completed my goal of finishing 10 books in April but I read way more than that (some are still not finished) since I have the very bad habit of reading multiple books at once which is why there are piles of books on my bedside table.
Chess Notes: My Blitz rating has improved significantly and my ELO remains at around 720. Maybe I can breach 800 in a few months time? Hope springs eternal! I also learned some new openings and neat new middle game tactics. Loving what it did to my strategy! Oh, and I think my endgame is improving also. It’s more of tiny improvements day by day than anything major.
Okay, I have two novels calling out to me rather seductively from my bedside table so I will end here. Night-time is reading time. I wish you all (well, those of you who read these little blog posts, at least) many happy hours of reading!