Can you believe it? We’re already at the end of July. Not much longer and we’ll all be drawing u our Christmas wishlists.

I have had a fantastic month of reading, completing no fewer than seventeen books. It turns out that the trick to getting your TBR stack under control is to pile all the short books into one month of reading. Few of this month’s reads were over three hundred pages, and a fair few of them came in at under two hundred pages. Of course, reading shorter books has led to me not having a whole lot worth saying, so I’ve been experimenting a bit with coming reviews. If you have any thoughts on how this has gone, let me know in the comments.

Short books sometimes make big splashes though. George Orwell’s 1984 is an absolute classic, while Alexei Panshin’s Rites of Passage, Barry Malzberg’s Beyond Apollo, and Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville have all won major science fiction awards. Orbitsville is the one book I still need to review, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, I can see why all of these books won their respective awards.

I also caught up with some ongoing concerns. Ben Bova has been cleared from my TBR until I next stumble across his novels, and I also got back into the Venture SF Range courtesy of David Gerrold’s Starhunt, which proved to be the gritty version of Star Trek I didn’t know I needed. Speaking of Star Trek, I’ve spent the past few days beavering away at some Original Series adventures. All being well, there’ll be a mega roundup of Trek reviews sometime next month.

I also took a brief break from science fiction with a Stephen King collection, though my reading of that specific book has been put on hold due to the minor discovery that I am epileptic. I look forward to retrieving my King book from storage in September.

As a side project, I’ve also been going through the shortlists for the various major SF awards and adding them to my spreadsheets. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the Hugos I have the most familiarity with, but it appears to be the Dragon Awards that I have the most common taste with. While this is little more than an exercise in data collection, I do find it fascinating how many different the Hugos, Nebulas, and BSFA Awards are, and there definitely see to be some favourite authors that crop up more in one award ceremony than the other. Looking through the Nebula nominees, for example, it’s great to see Jack McDevitt getting the attention he deserves.

The final personal update is that I am officially attending FantasyCon in Brighton this Autumn. Given that I was in the right place for last year’s convention but missed it by a matter of days (Niagara Falls has other charms though) I feel I owed it to myself to attend this year since it was as local to me as major conventions ever are. I’ll be there flying my sci-fi flag and hopefully dragging a friend or two with me, so I hope to see some of you there.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to finish before the clock strikes midnight.