With a week to go before the summer holidays, my reading list is starting to grow. Currently queued up on the ereader I have the following:
These are crime thrillers penned, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, by John Banville who wrote The Sea. I was particularly intrigued by The Black-Eyed Blonde as a new Raymond Chandler book.
Continuing with both the crime and pseudonym motif, I’m also ready to try
which I have so far avoided for the same reason that many others will have leapt on them: Robert Galbraith is the nom-de-plume of J. K. Rowling.
As a break from crime, I’m also looking at
which is the new Joe Abercrombie offering, escaping the realism of crime fiction by delving back into fantasy. And I have Edward St. Aubyn’s Lost For Words which satirises the self-indulgent and self-important world of book prizes and awards.
Slightly more self-consciously literarily, I’ve also loaded up
Finally, as I am currently reading The Long War (and not hugely enjoying it) for the sake of continuity and completion I also have the third Long Earth book.
And this doesn’t take into account the paper books I’ve got or the work I need to do over the summer. Or the twelve-month old baby squatting in my floor as I type this. I can just hear my wife’s voice as she reads this saying, “Well, we won’t be seeing much of you then…!”
Of the paper books I’m hoping to get time to read, I’m particularly looking forward to Patrick Ness’ (one of my all time favourite Young Adult writers after the Chaos Walking trilogy and A Monster Calls) new novel
and continuing the crime / thriller genre, John le Carre’s
The Book Lovers' Sanctuary 