Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish, and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. It’s all about books, lists and sharing our love of both with our bookish friends. This week we’re meant to be looking back at books we read on holiday, but I’m stealing a November topic (series we’d like to finish) as an excuse to check in on my Great Series Read Project.
This week’s topic is a doozy, but I’d have to go back through my calendar to figure out when I was on holiday then try and figure out what I was reading and I ought to be painting the fence. As I’ll be going off-topic in November with SciFiMonth-themed top tens, I’m borrowing one of November’s prompts to consider what series I need to get around to finishing – which dovetails nicely with an overdue check-in on my ongoing Great Series Read Project. There’s a lot of series in my list getting no love – and I need to add several more as I keep finding new ones to love – but today I’ll focus on series I want to get on top of soonest (for various definitions of ‘soon’).
To my shame, I’ve never actually finished The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin even though I loved the first two books. I wanted a clear head and a strong heart to tackle The Stone Sky – but I’ve given up on achieving either so I am currently listening to the trilogy on audio (Robin Miles is a queen of narrators).
Not quite finishing a trilogy is a theme, okay? The Book of Flora – closing out Meg Elison’s Road To Nowhere – is another that has been languishing on my TBR. However, its brutal male-dominated post-flupocalypse world may have to wait a little longer; the first two were painfully bleak.
Sebastien de Castell’s Spellslinger series is a romp – coming of age themes, buried histories, family conflict, magical threats – and I never quite got round to Queenslayer and Crownbreaker. No excuses here as I’ll race through them when I pick them up; they just keep suffering from slippage on Mount TBR.
I’m always going to be mad that the final book of The Anomaly dropped in a vacuum (marketing? What marketing?) – I only heard about it because I follow the author on Twitter and I’ve been following this series for years. I plan to read The Ends by James Smythe for SciFiMonth to complete my aptly cyclical revisits of this intriguing series of psychological paradox dramas.
Forever on my TBR: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I love Murderbot, and quite deliberately don’t race to catch up so that I always have more to look forward to. Thankfully, Wells has signed to write several more, so I might finally sneak in a read of Network Effect next year.
Welcome to the magical multiverse, where agents of the Library hop between versions of worlds to retrieve specific copies of particular works to safeguard from extremes of chaos (faerie) and order (dragons). Right up my street? In theory, but I’m now 3 or more books behind. Oops. Better get back to The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman.
I’m determined to read The God Breaker by Mike Brooks before year’s end, closing out The God-King Chronicles. I’m not sure how Brooks can satisfyingly tie everything up in one book – however chunky – but this trilogy has reliably surprised (and delighted) me with its narrative choices so I’m keen to see how he does it.
I finally got round to reading Planetfall this year and loved it, making Emma Newman’s series one of the most recent additions to my Great Series Read Project. I’m keen to pick up After Atlas soon to further explore this universe and its damaged souls.
What series do you want to catch up on?
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