There’s no point in pretending otherwise: February has been a rough month. I am currently running on 4-5 hours sleep a might, my days are filled with screaming lambs, and my long-term relationship came to an end. As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have two ways of keeping myself sane. Cracking jokes and reading books. I managed to not go quite as overboard with the stress reading as I did in January, though with some chunkier books on the TBR, I ended up reading more pages overall. Thankfully, it turned out to be a better month of reading than January, largely thanks to the return of some of my favourite authors.

Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence is a major series I started last year, and this month I managed to finish the main narrative. Endurance, Vengeance, and Redemption made for some great reading, with heady ideas and rock-hard scientific basis. It’s by no means a series I’d recommend to everyone, but they do encapsulate pretty much everything I love about Baxter’s work. Now that I’ve completed Xeelee, I’m going to turn my attention to some of his smaller-scale books.

I was also lucky enough to receive a review copy of Jack Campbell’s latest offering Destiny’s Way. It was a great conclusion to the story of The Doomed Earth, and a welcome break from more oppressive reading. Speaking of Campbell, I’ve been listening to the audio version of his Lost Fleet novels, and it has been a welcome trip down memory lane, with Christian Rummel doing stellar work as narrator.

I read and listened to a few other novels here and there, but my focus in February was short fiction. Some of these stories were new to me, while others were old favourites. Returning to he Ken Liu-edited Invisible Planets proved to be a particular delight, and rereading Hao Jingfang’s stories in that collection have renewed my determination to find a copy of Jumpnauts sooner rather than later. Another delight was Gold, the final, and posthumous, collection of Isaac Asimov’s fiction. The stories were good, but the accompanying essays were the real star of the show, as well as being a reminder that I need to read more science fiction non-fiction.

Some of the other anthologies and collections didn’t hold up so well. The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF and The Casebook of Newbury and Hobbes were both marred by repetitive stories, and Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories skewed a little more literary than I typically enjoy. I’ve got one more collection to review that I’m still trying to formulate my thoughts on, so expect that review soon.

With everything else going on right now, I didn’t get any non-review articles out this month, but I have jotted down some thoughts for a few going ahead. About the only other blogging I did was to update my Review Policy and Contact Form. These days I split my time between BlueSky and Instagram. BlueSky has become the go-to place for keeping up with authors and reviewers, but Instagram is where I’ve been spending too much time lately. I’m not visually oriented enough (or, honestly, pretty enough) to have much of an impact over there, but Bookstagram is definitely the best community of readers I’ve stumbled upon.

Next month I’m hopeful that things will improve (though lambing will be an ongoing concern for a few weeks yet), so stay tuned tomorrow for all my March reading and blogging plans. Until then, keep reading. It might just keep you sane.