The A-to-Z Book Survey

So a few days ago my reviewing/blogging buddy Ria at Bibliotropic posted a nice survey of sorts on her blog. It was a cool article and with her permission, I’m sneaking off my own spin on it.

Hope you enjoy! And even if not, do share your thoughts in the comments!

Best of 2013 Part 1

I did two “Best of the…” lists last year, one for the half-year from January to June, and the other for the half-year from July to December. The lists proved to be quite popular, and I was recently asked if I was going to be doing any more. To which I said yes. I like putting together lists like this. It gives me a chance to reflect a bit on all the good stuff I’ve been reading in novels and comics, or listening to in terms of audiobooks, audio dramas and so on.

You can check out my top-of-the-month lists on my Reading Awards page and this list is both an extension, and a continuation of what goes on there.

Let’s see what makes the cut and which comes close then!

June Reading Poll Results

The voting process on my latest reading poll closed last night, after two weeks of intense excitement and record after record. Once again, just as with the previous two polls that I’ve run, this was a humbling experience given the tremendous response from the authors and their fans and everyone else who helped make this new poll such a success.

June Reading List Poll

In January and February, I ran two highly successful polls where I asked all the readers of the blog to help me pick my reading list for the following months. The first one was for novels, the second one for comics. I managed to meet the reading goals for the first of those polls, but am still progressing through the second one, mostly because I’ve been traveling a bit too much of late, and reading time has generally been at a premium due to work and more time devoted to my writing.

However, I should be done with it by the end of this month, so keep an eye out for updates on that.

In the meantime, here’s my next reading poll, and this one is for novels once again. Hit the break to find out more.

Why I love Dune

I first came across Dune, if I remember correctly, in late fall of 2002, when I was still in high school, 10th grade to be exact. It was a time when I was really getting to explore the wider world of speculative and contemporary fiction than just Animorphs or Enid Blyton. To give a few examples, this was when I discovered Warhammer 40,000, John Grisham, Dungeons & Dragons, Raymond E. Feist, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell’s 1984 and many, many other things. Dune, and the entire Dune-verse, has been obsession of sorts for me for ages now, going on 10 years, and when I was listening to the first half hour of the Dune audiobook yesterday, narrated by Scott Brick, Orlagh Cassidy, Euan Mortan, Simon Vance & Co., I started to think about why I liked Dune so much.

After all, in the summer of 2007, on my 20th birthday, when I was out and about at The Grove mall in Los Angeles and me and my friends walked into the Barnes & Noble there, I held up the book to them and told them that Dune was the best Science-Fiction novel ever written. An old gentleman who was browsing the same shelves turned to me and said: “You got that right, kid.”