The months continue to tick along at an alarming rate, and so we have come to August. I’m hoping that my reading picks up a bit this month, which is should do, as I have no major engagements planned. I’m still in a semi-storage position due to renovations, but that will hopefully wrapped up by the end of the month. Once everything is back on the shelves, I’m planning a quick tour for the blog. But until then, we’ve got some reading to do. Won’t you join me?

TBR

Just look at that monstrous Helliconia omnibus. Magnificent, isn’t it? In fact, August is shaping up to be the month of the omnibus. This might end up cutting into my overall number of books read, but when one is equal to three, the amount of the story.

Priority one is the three random Star Trek books in the TBR stack. Two of these are anthologies, and the third is quite short, so these shouldn’t take too long to read. While they are a priority, I’m going to space them out between other reads. The rest of my Trek reading is still in a bookcase behind a bookcase behind another bookcase, so I’ll have to save those for later.

Onto omnibuses, Deathwatch is one I want to get to soon, as I don’t want the Black Library books to start piling up again. This is a book I’ve mostly picked up for Storm of Damocles, which will fill the final hole in my Justin D Hill reading, and there are a whole bunch of other stories in there too. Another omnibus I want to get to is Skyward Flight by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson, because it’s been in the TBR stack for a while now. There are others, but I with one exception, I’m putting them off for now so I can get through shorter reads.

That exception is Helliconia. As it would have been Brian Aldiss’ birthday on the 18th, I want to be reading the book at that time. At a whopping 1200 pages, I expect I’ll be reading it for a while. This leads neatly into the Gollancz SF Masterworks series, which I’ll be tackling a few of this month. In fact, I’m going to make a push to read all the ones in my stack. A lot of these older works are fairly short, so we’ll have to see how it goes.

I don’t have any non-SF to take breaks with this month, which gives me a provisional reading schedule that looks something like this:

• Star Trek 12, by James Blish & J. A. Lawrence
• Star Trek III: Short Stories, by William Rotsler
• Cybersong, by S. N. Lewitt
• Deathwatch, by various authors
• Skyward Flight, by Brandon Sanderson & Janci Patterson
• Helliconia, by Brian Aldiss
• The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
• Nova, by Samuel R. Delaney
• Double Star, by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith

That’s ten books, but with enough pages to be worth about twice that. I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.

AND BEYOND

This month I will finish watching The Orville: New Horizons, which has been great, and will then start Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which I have high hopes for after all the comments I’ve seen. Alongside this I’m really enjoying For All Mankind.

Once again, I’m quietly pleased to see a thin release schedule on the cards, as it will allow me to catch up on my existing TBR. At some point this month is the release of Alec Worley’s The Wraithbone Phoenix, part of the Warhammer Crime range that I am very much looking forward to. Then on the 16th, we have a Star Wars release in the shape of Beth Revis’ The Princess and the Scoundrel. Romance is pretty far outside my usual wheelhouse, but I’ll give just about anything Star Wars related a shot.

What about you? Let me know if there’s anything I’ve missed, and be sure to stick around for the reviews that will inevitably come.