Category Archives: Article

Nicholas Binge – 12 SFF Books of Christmas

Hello and welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where I’m delighted to be joined by author Nicholas Binge for a look both back at 2022 and ahead to 2023. Author of Professor Everywhere and the upcoming Ascension (coming in April from Harper Voyager), Nicholas has kindly curated a whole host of recommendations for brilliant SFF books, so if you’re on the lookout for a great book released this year, or something coming next year to look forward to, look no further than this article. I’ve read and can happily endorse a few of these recommendations too, but there’s loads here that I’m now really looking forward to getting hold of!

Continue reading

Monthly Roundup – November 2022

Hello and welcome to November’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. It’s been a busy month for me, in terms of both writing things to post this month and planning/commissioning/writing things for December. I’ll talk more about December later (how is it almost the end of the year?!), but for now let’s focus on November – eight posts this month (plus this one, which is a little earlier than usual) feels about right, and I’m happy with how everything’s turned out I think. As usual I’ll use the first part of this post to recap on all of the November articles, reviews and interviews, so you can check out anything you might have missed, and then I’ll use the second section to talk mostly about what you can look forward to next month on Track of Words.

Continue reading

Monthly Roundup – October 2022

Hello and welcome to October’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. Each month I write this opening paragraph for my roundup post and boggle at how quickly time is passing – we’ve only two months left in 2022! It’s going to be Christmas before we know it. Looking backwards instead of forwards for the time being however, October has passed in a bit of a blur, starting off a bit slowly but ramping up as the weeks have gone on. I’d say it’s been a middling month for me in terms of productivity, but I’ve got plenty to talk about here. As always I’ll kick things off with a recap of what I’ve been posting these last few weeks, then talk a bit more generally towards the end.

Continue reading

Monthly Roundup – September 2022

It’s October already (can you believe it? Only three months left of 2022!), and so it’s time for September’s Monthly Roundup post on Track of Words. It’s felt like quite a busy month for me, but that’s actually translated into fewer posts written and fewer books read than August. Of course it’s not all about volume though; I’m pleased with what I did get written in September, and likewise with the books that I did read. I’ll talk a bit more about reading and non-Track of Words activities towards the end of the article, but as usual I’ll start off with a quick recap of the nine posts that I published over the last few weeks.

Continue reading

Finally Reading The Shepherd’s Crown

As readers there might be many authors that we love, but there aren’t necessarily very many that are genuinely important to us; for the enjoyment that their books give us, but also on a more personal level as human beings. Terry Pratchett is perhaps the important author to me personally, over and above anyone else before or since, and he has been for a long time. He’s the author whose death hit me the hardest, whose absence I still feel the most, whose books I would choose if I could only choose one author’s books to ever read again. I’ve read every Discworld novel at least twice, some many more times than that…except, actually I haven’t. There’s one that until very recently I had never read – The Shepherd’s Crown, the 41st and final Discworld novel.

Continue reading

Monthly Roundup – August 2022

Hello and welcome to August’s Monthly Roundup post here on Track of Words. To my considerable surprise, August was a pretty busy month for me in terms of writing and getting things posted, but I’ve just been going with the flow and enjoying being in a productive mood! I spent slightly less time reading than last month (albeit still plenty of time), but quite a bit more time writing, spurred I think by some nice surprises that I’ll talk about shortly. As always, I’ll recap all of the reviews and interviews that I’ve posted over the last few weeks, and then write up a few thoughts about the month as a whole for a general update later on.

Continue reading

Monthly Roundup – July 2022

After June’s rather delayed roundup, I’m back on schedule with July’s post after a month that’s been busy on the reading front and just a little quieter than usual on the writing front. It’s also been unseasonably warm for those of us living in the UK (oh how I would have loved air conditioning this month!) but thankfully I didn’t melt, and have remained in solid form despite the heat. As always in this article I’ll run through the various posts that I’ve published over the last few weeks so you can catch up on anything you missed, and then I’ll give a quick general update for anyone interested.

Continue reading

On Comfort Reading

As readers we often talk about comfort reading, and a lot of us have go-to genres, series, authors or individual books that we look to for comfort and relaxation. Unsurprisingly, for a long time I’ve turned to SFF for my comfort reading, whether that’s Warhammer fiction, Terry Pratchett, or more recently things like Rivers of London and The Murderbot Diaries. As a reviewer, reading purely for the enjoyment of it (as opposed to reading for the purpose of reviewing) is something I think a lot about, and recently I’ve noticed something interesting – that my comfort reading has actually involved reading quite a lot from outside my usual comfort zone. With that in mind I thought I would take a brief step away from my usual SFF focus here on Track of Words and talk a bit about the sorts of books I’ve been finding comforting of late. In particular, about two genres which I wouldn’t ordinarily cover here, but which I’ve been enjoying reading very much: crime fiction, and nature writing.

Continue reading

Monthly Roundup – June 2022

It’s somewhat delayed, what with a seaside holiday, birthdays and a wedding (not mine, one that I attended!) keeping me busy, but better late than never – here’s my Monthly Roundup post for June 2022. As always I’ll quickly run through everything that I posted (and updated) last month, before giving a fairly short and sweet general update on how things have been of late. I have a similar number of new posts to talk about as May (perhaps eight is going to be the new norm that I’ll settle into), so do take a look at any of those which you haven’t already read!

Continue reading

A Big Milestone

I reached a big milestone with Track of Words recently, and at the risk of sounding utterly self-indulgent I wanted to write a little something to mark the occasion. I’m in my ninth year of running Track of Words, which in itself feels bizarre to think about, as I can still remember writing my first review way back in 2014. Since that day I’ve reached various milestones, the biggest of which being in 2018 when I published my 1,000th post and then in 2019 when I hit a million words written on the site. This latest milestone might be the biggest yet though – as of about 10.30pm on the 9th June, my WordPress stats showed that Track of Words had just passed one million page views!

Continue reading