The Great British Summer is well and truly underway, with a familiar mix of sweltering heat and pouring rain. August is the part of summer where things are quieter for me. I’ve got no LARP and no conventions planned, and work on the farm can largely be summed up as ‘hurry up and wait.’ Lambs do, in fact, fatten themselves.

All of this leaves plenty of time for reading. Once again I’m going for a loose TBR that is equal parts theme and resource management. For August, I’m focusing on older books, and will be working on my TBR in chronological order. Unusually for me, I don’t have any massively out of date books on my TBR, so the furthest back I’ll be going is 1980, with John Varley’s Wizard – a science fiction novel in spite of its fantastical name.

The 1980s continue with 1986’s Cobra Strike by Timothy Zahn, and 1988’s Agent of Change by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, which could well get me hooked on the sprawling Liadenverse. Then comes 1989 and Rama II, by Arthur C. CLarke & Gentry Lee. I’ve got Garden of Rama on the docket too, and have high hopes for the sequels to Clarke’s best novel, even if they’ve drawn the same mixed response as legacy continuations so frequently do.

The 1990s brings me authors such as Charles Sheffield, Christopher Evans, Jeff Noon, and Robert Charles Wilson, which will keep things nice and varied. Of course, the big unrated books from the 90s are Scott G. Gier’s Genellan trilogy, which I have not read since I was in high school. I’ve provisionally set those aside as the big project for August, but whether I read them back to back or spaced apart is something I haven’t settled on yet.

Another reread I have planned is China Mieville’s Embassytown. I didn’t love this when I read it about a decade ago, but this time I’m coming at it armed with a better idea of what to expect, and a buddy to read it with, so that’s something to look forward to.

Outside of that, I’ve still got some Star Trek reading to catch up on. With any luck, I’ll finish off the Lost Era novels this month and bundle them into my upcoming mega-review. It’ll only be six short books, but that’s fairly mega by my standards.

This will clean up a lot of odds and ends on my TBR, and I hope to continue making progress at the current rate. I am still just about on schedule to eliminate my whole TBR by the end of the year. Of course, to this end, I am still on a book buying ban, but having gone an entire month without buying anything new and shiny, I’m sure I’ll be battling temptation for the next thirty-one days.

As always, I welcome your thoughts and input on my reading plans, and I hope you’ll join me along the way.

Dates for Your Diary

On Thursdays throughout this month, we’ve got new episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, while Fridays bring new instalments of Foundation. Hopefully I’ll be caught up on both of those before the end of the month.

12th – The Hungry Gods, by Adrian Tchaikovsky – Britain’s most prolific science fiction author returns with another novella, this time bringing a mix of sci-fi and fantasy. There are a lot of authors I wouldn’t trust with that combination, but Tchaikosvky has earned my faith as a reader.

19th – Frontlines: Evolution #2: Corvus, by Marko Kloos – The Frontlines spin-off series continues, meaning I really should get around to reading the first book in the Evolution subseries.