I didn’t mean to go for so long without updating this blog! I’ve read a few things but not as much as I would have liked because of work, life and music practice. A lot of the things I’ve been reading have been related to various articles I’m either writing as sole author or as co-author. I remain quite determined that most of that should stay off this blog!
Currently Reading
- All Systems Red — Martha Wells
- Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie (Reread)
- The Shadow Rising — Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time #4 — Reread)
- A whole stack of Helen Oyeyemi books in various stages of being reread for articles that are being revised. I keep saying I’m done with writing on Oyeyemi but there are all these pending articles (post peer-review etc) so the work goes on.
Books I’ve finished reading included a whole stack of Alisha Rai novels over the 2024 year’s end holiday period, and more recently enjoyed Talia Hibbert’s Brown Sisters trilogy, along with the novella Wrapped Up In You. I consider reading romance novels “research” these days for the escalation of certain plot points in Rosemirror. It’s also great that there are far more diverse romance novels available these days which have a diversity of relationships ranging from neurotypical to non-neurotypical, and romances featuring people with disabilities which are written in a realistic manner. This is a good development and I hope to read many more books like these.
I also finished reading Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World some time back and Five Star Billionaire is next since it’s crucial both to my personal research and my supervision! As I type this I have this kind of surreal feeling because when I started book blogging in the late 1990s, I never imagined I’d be writing someday that I’m reading through stuff or rereading them because I’m supervising PhD dissertations on these books. Do I pinch myself frequently? Yes. You have no idea.
Which brings me to my more immediate TBR:
- The rest of the Murderbot books, and I’m also going to be burning through my Imperial Radch trilogy reread which is related to my research and my supervision (I have a PhD supervisee working on Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy)
- Tash Aw’s Five Star Billionaire. I also have his latest book ordered but it’s taking forever to be delivered. Working on a couple of articles on Aw as a sole author (I’ve presented around 3 papers on his work so far), plus am supervising a PhD thesis on his work by a supervisee who is a major fan of his work.
- Yangsze Choo’s The Fox Wife.
- C.R. Collins’s Woodspell and The Wilder World.
- Devan Barlow’s An Uncommon Curse (and the other books in the series). Devan’s an author I’ve published in Truancy and I love her writing so I’m really looking forward to digging into her books.
Books Most Recently Acquired:
- The Book of Love — Kelly Link
- The Warm Hands of Ghosts — Katherine Arden
- A Tempest of Tea — Hafsah Faizal
- My Big Fat Fake Marriage — Charlotte Stein (ebook/via Kobo)
- Artificial Condition — Martha Wells (ebook/via Kobo)
- Rogue Protocol — Martha Wells (ebook/via Kobo)
- All Systems Red — Martha Wells (ebook/via Kobo)
(Belated) Plans for this Blog in 2025:
I’ve pretty much given up on reading as many books as I did in the past. With the escalation of research/supervision duties, my health issues, my music and language learning plus other pursuits , my attention’s divided. But I still enjoy many hours of reading, albeit slower than before. I do intend to return to blogging more frequently here. Whatever is a general update will be under this general “Notes from the Bibliotheca” title. But there will also be individual posts about things I’m watching (I have an Elrond post still in drafts), and I’m toying with the idea of doing alarmingly random short fiction reviews. I can’t be as systematic as other short fiction reviewers but I can highlight random short stories I’ve read and really enjoyed. This is not just for you but for me. I want to write better short stories and this means reading and analysing excellent short stories. A win-win, no? We’ll see if I can get to it.
I’m also planning to do a small series of blog posts about Palestinian authors, poets and other creatives. I’ve promised this for quite awhile and hope to do that after I clear my current frightening workload.
And that’s it for now!
Published in Petaling, Selangor, Malaysia (28 April 2025)