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.

51 Most Anticipated Releases For 2013

With regards reading, 2012 was a fantastic year for me. It was the year that I stepped out of my comfort zone and read in genres that I normally would not read, such as urban fantasy (involving angels, vampires, werewolves etc) and historical fiction. It was also the year that I read more than the traditional fantasy, and tie-in fantasy at that. My experiments seem to have mostly been successful as I’ve started to really like reading these kind of books.

My goal for this year is to continue on that same path and read as widely as I can. Which is why this massive list is so huge in scope, with tons of variety. I went through the catalogues for most of these publishers and picked out things I liked,and which caught my eye. Getting through the entire list this year will probably not happen, but then again, never say never!

NANP: A Rose By Any Other Name

As we move into the final stretch of the first wave of guest posts for Names: A New Perspective, today’s guest is Elspeth Cooper, author of the two Wild Hunt books Songs of The Earth and Trinity Rising, all of them published by Gollancz. I’d been meaning to read the first book (my review) for quite a while, as part of my sort of unofficial 2012 Morningstar reading challenge, and I got the chance to read the book in August. It was a fantastic read, with some decidedly new takes on some of the old tropes of epic fantasy, very much in line with a lot of the “modern” epic fantasy I’ve been reading of late. Elspeth is definitely in my top tier of modern authors and I have a firm hope that Trinity Rising will be just as great a novel as Songs of The Earth. Here’s what Elspeth had to say about how she uses names in her novels.