Anyone familiar with Warhammer will surely be aware of the cataclysmic changes happening as part of the ongoing End Times sequence. While the books published for this series are not approaching the complexity of the Horus Heresy, I think it’s still worth having a quick overview of what’s what.
And so, after twenty-four days of brand new short stories and audio dramas from Black Library, the 2014 Advent Calendar ended on a high note with a new World Eaters novel. Just to recap, at the start of December I decided that I was going to take the plunge and go for the Advent Calendar subscription, and each day I would read or listen to the new release before posting a short review of my thoughts. For anyone who hasn’t read my reviews of these new releases, follow this link to my original Advent Calendar post and you will find subsequent links through to the review of each day’s release. For anyone who has read the reviews, here are a few further thoughts about the Advent Calendar overall.
As has become tradition in the run up to Christmas, Black Library have provided us, their devoted readers, with an advent calendar full of fictional fun. This year we it’s Warhammer 40k and Horus Heresy only, but according to today’s New@BL blog post we’re actually going to get ‘over 30 new stories’. Not only that but anyone who pays in advance for the ‘subscription’ will receive each day’s story/stories as well as a ‘free’ novel on Christmas Day. The advent calendar page on the Black Library website is showing an icon for each day, presumably representing the focus of each day’s story/stories.
Second-hand bookshops are great, aren’t they? There’s something lovely about spending a few minutes browsing the shelves in a good second-hand shop, just seeing what’s there and keeping an eye out for anything unusual or unexpected. It’s a very different experience to shopping in a high street bookshop, and I think the main difference is that I don’t tend to go into a second-hand shop with anything in mind that I’m looking for. More often than not when I pop into Waterstones or Foyles I’ll have at least one book in mind that I want to have a look at, or see if it’s on special offer. You can’t really do that with a second-hand shop, simply because you have no idea what’s going to be on the shelves, and that’s a lovely feeling. Every time you go in there’s going to be a different range of books, and you never know when something special is going to show up!
I’m happy to admit that I’m not really one for Halloween. I can never be bothered with fancy dress, and trick or treating just doesn’t appeal, so I’ve largely tended to just ignore it, and treat the 31st October as I would any other day. This year I have at least made the concession of starting an occult/horror book in order to get a little bit in the spirit of things, but wait…there’s more. What better way for a Halloween miser to spend a (bizarrely sunny) Halloween afternoon than by visiting the British Library and its Terror and Wonder : The Gothic Imagination exhibition?! Huzzah! At last, something to do on Halloween that I can sink my teeth into! Ahem…sorry.
I’ve been reading for so long I’ve actually grown a beard…
To borrow a well-used phrase, and a Jasper Fforde title, for the last few days I’ve been well and truly lost in a good book. Actually, two good books – I’m re-reading the first two Kingkiller Chronicles novels from Patrick Rothfuss. I’ve already re-read and reviewed the first one, The Name of the Wind, rhapsodising muchly, and now I’m about two thirds of the way through the second, The Wise Man’s Fear. Between the two they amount to over 1500 pages of fantasy goodness, just the kind of stories that I’m liable to get completely caught up in.
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, right? Everyone knows this to be true…but we all still do it. Admit it. I do, for sure. I’ll browse around a bookshop just waiting for something to jump out at me, idly scanning the books on display, looking for anything that stands out amid the endless copycat covers. In fact it’s not even just the covers, it’s titles too. I’ll yawn and skip over anything that’s entitled ‘The Something-Or-Other Code’ or ‘The Girl With/Who/What (delete as applicable) Does Something I’ve Heard Of Before’, generic titles doing as much to put me off a book as generic covers. It’s in our nature, and it’s why books are no longer published in plain, single-colour covers; there’s so much competition, books have got to stand out somehow. Or in the case of the copycats, they’ve got to find a way to ride the coat tails of the trailblazers. Just think about how many cringe-inducing romance books hit the shelves in the wake of Fifty Shade of Grey…they all looked the same (dark cover, something supposedly erotic in lighter tones, possibly draped with a silk scarf) and had titles like ‘Thirteen Shades of Blue’ or ‘Revealed to You’.
Value for money. That’s about as subjective a topic as it’s possible to get, as everyone has their own opinion as to what constitutes good or bad value. When it comes to books, where do you sit on the subject? Are you happy to pay for a hardback of the new novel from your favourite author, as soon as it comes out? Or do you wait for the paperback, look out for the special offers or trawl through charity shops to get your literary fix? Maybe you’ve converted to the joys of the e-reader, and get all of your books in electronic format, taking advantage of the proliferation online of free or 99p ebooks. There is even a final option, of course…the library!
What would your choices be if someone asked you to pick your ten favourite science fiction and fantasy books of the last fifty years? Pretty hard to decide, right? Let’s narrow it down to just a single publisher then, and make it nice and simple. Take Gollancz, the longest-running publisher in the UK to specialise in sci-fi and fantasy. A quick look at the list of authors on their books returns names such as Terry Pratchett, Ray Bradbury, Stephen Donaldson, George R. R. Martin…the list goes on. And on. Many, many truly great books have come to us, the readers hungry for more, through this one publisher. So how about now, could you pick ten from their roster of authors? Still no? Me neither.
When does a reader become a writer? For those who really read a lot, who describe themselves as ‘readers’ (you know who you are) as opposed to someone who happens to read, there seems a curious inevitability to the change, gradual or otherwise, from reader to writer. After all, it’s a rare writer who isn’t (or at least wasn’t) already an avid reader. I should point out here that by ‘writer’ I don’t necessarily mean published author, but rather someone who chooses to contribute somehow and somewhere with the written word, be that in the form of fiction, non-fiction, books, blogs or anything else.