Mid Year Reading Review

It's been a good reading year so far. I've finished 40 books, which according to The Storygraph is 9,606 pages read and 203 hours listened. Hours listened might be slightly off, as I have done a couple on 1.1 or 1.2 speed. (Oh god, I'm turning into one of those people. I'll keep nudging it up and then be on 2x speed before you know it!)

I've now completed my read of the Iain M. Banks' Culture series, which I began last year. Loved pretty much every one of those. One was a bit of a slog in the middle, but it picked up by the end. I've also started and finished a read of the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons. I have in fact been totally derailed this year by the Hyperion Cantos (a series of four books, structured as 2 duologies.)

Me and Hyperion

I had Hyperion sitting in my audiobook backlog for ages, so I put it on my "definitely get to it this year" list, and started it in late February. I was instantly hooked, (one might even say, impaled) and finished it in March. I took a couple of days to catch my breath, and jumped right into The Fall of Hyperion, also on audiobook. I liked that even more! I finished that just after the start of April.

So then I waited a bit, thinking about the second duology in the series, called Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. I was toying with waiting for them to maybe be in a sale on Audible. But I only made it to May before I decided I couldn't wait! This time I got them as paperbacks, and tore through them, with just a short break between the two. It only took about ten days to read each of them, even though The Rise of Endymion is 800 pages long and I'm not a very fast reader any more.

It's going to take something spectacular to knock the whole series off my top spot for the year, and I've read some other pretty spectacular stuff so far already!

When I do a reread (and I will) I will do the first duology in paperback and the second in audio, so the other way around.

Other Faves

Death's End by Cixin Liu

Another series I finished was the Remembrance of Earth's Past (a.k.a. The Three Body Problem) series, with Death's End by Cixin Liu, the third book of the trilogy. I read the first two last year in paperback, but listened to this on audio (29+ hours!) and preferred that. I did find the dialogue clunky in the other two, and the characters are notoriously a bit thin. But a narrator brought both those aspects to life.

A Song of Legends Lost by M.H. Ayinde

I've been watching more "BookTube" lately. (That's like BookTok, but for grown ups.) And I picked this up from a recommendation on a video. It's a sci-fantasy, with lots of magic, but also mysterious tech from a precursor civilisation that I'm sure we're going to get closer to the truth about in the next two books of the Invoker trilogy. It's really good and highly recommended. The next book isn't out until next spring though! Aaargh!  

I read this one in hardback, from my local library, after putting in a suggestion that they buy it. They did! Yay!

Here's a list of everything I've read/listened to so far this year. If you're a Storygraph member, feel free to add me as a friend there.

Plans for the rest of the year.

Two series I'm actively working on are The Final Architecture by Adrian Tchaikovsky and The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman, so I expect to finish them. And now I'm done with the Culture I'll read Iain M. Banks' other sci-fi, but not Culture books. As I've managed to read one 800+ page books so far this year, the copy of the absolute honker that is Perdido Street Station by China Mieville that's sitting on my To Read shelf is looking less intimidating. 860 pages? Easy! By next year I'll be gobbling up Peter F. Hamilton books, you just wait and see!  

The rest of my To Be Read is here. But for sure some others will sneak in there.