See that nice big stack of chunky books? That was my planned reading material for the month.

Yeah, that ended up not happening.

I did manage to read Peter Watts’ Firefall, which varied between excellence and horrible boredom on an almost page-to-page basis. Far and away the best thing about the book was that it was a buddy read, so I had someone to scratch heads alongside. The other thick and sturdy book I read was also an omnibus, this time of Stephen Baxter’s Behemoth trilogy. It was a rather sad but ultimately very enjoyable slice of evolutionary speculation.

Because I went travelling for my last LARP event of the year, I took along a Stephen King short story collection for the ride, and that short book ended up taking a big chunk out of my reading month. I’ll definitely be reading more King in future, but as his best works are not science fiction, you won’t hear much about them here.

I spent the rest of the montn trying to play catch-up with my TBR. William C. Dietz’ The Final Battle was a reread, and much more enjoyable the second time around. I’m currently a few dozen pages from finishing off the month with Paragon of Faith, a recent Black Library anthology. I found Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Prince to be slightly overrated, whereas Mickey Zucker Riechert’s To Protect and To Obey are some of the best Asimov successor fiction I’ve ever read. I hope to catch up on reviewing all that sooner rather than later.

I managed to rein in my book-buying habit for another month, and only bought one book. Passing through Bath, I tripped and fell into Skoon Books in the market, and was delighted to find a Jack McDevitt book. Yes, Echo is now a slightly larger paperback than the rest of my mass market editions, but what matters is that I’ve filled a gap in one of my favourite series. That would have been the only acquisition this month, had my reading buddy not sent me a pair of books. One’s a fantasy, but the other is a 2025 sci-fi release called Symbiote by Michael Nayak. It was not remotely on my radar, but it’s nice to have some more recent releases on my TBR.

Outside of the reading, life is going well. I’m slowly getting myself back into a healthy writing habit. I’ve been watching a lot of great TV (it is so good to have Dexter back in my life, Star Trek continues to excel, and now I’m getting back into Foundation).

I’ll be back tomorrow with my October TBR, and a look ahead to an exciting month of science fiction and travel.