December 2022 book blog

Another month when I read a lot less than usual. I blame Netflix and a free Prime month. I spent most of the Christmas holidays bingeing two seasons of Fear The Walking Dead, which has well and truly jumped the rotting corpse of the zombie shark, but is still a fun watch and something entertaining to follow whilst I’m ironing or knitting. Knit and Splatter?
Anyway, long overdue catchups of fave zombie programmes aside, this is supposed to be a book blog, so here we go.
I first ‘met’ Alix Harrow in a short story anthology, and loved her story so much that I bought ‘Ten Thousand Doors of January’ as soon as possible. Then, I promptly lost it. I’m getting good at this buying and losing books lark. I was reluctant to buy it again, because it had to be somewhere, didn’t it? Anyway, a while later ‘The Once and Future Witches’ came out and it wasn’t a sequel, but it was Harrow, so I bought it, read it and loved it. I loved it so much that I ordered the paperback of ‘Ten Thousand Doors of January’ and put it in a safe place once it had arrived.
I caught up with it in December and read it in two days. Don’t believe my Goodreads account, that blog site is useless these days. I forgot to tell it that I wasn’t a robot when I logged the read, so it’s been pretending that I took five weeks to read the book. So, it’s a fantasy, and there’s magic, and a quest, and romance and a villain AND a villainous conspiracy. It’s great, it’s everything that I thought it would be. It’s a hugely fun read with sympathetic characters and unless you hate fun fantasy reads, you’ll probably enjoy it.
My next, and final, read of the month, which I finished on Jan 1st 2023, was Marc Burrows ‘Manic Street Preachers. Album by Album’. There are a lot of books about the Manics, and whilst I’ve not read them all, I’ve read a fair few. Simon Price’s ‘Everything’ remains the gold standard, but it’s very out of date now. Burrows’ book is clearly written by fans, which is not a bad thing as Manics fans tend to be pretty thoughtful people. The book consists of a strictly chronological history of the band, divided into album eras. The lists of events are split up by essays about each album, from Generation Terrorists to Resistance is Futile. The essays are fan written, and each one addresses a different album. This book did take nearly a month to read, I was dipping into it and reading a section at a time. I’m a Manics fan (FMF) myself and the book took me on a startlingly clear (ultra vivid?) trip down memory lane. This is a must read for Manics fans, and an interesting window into the world of the Manics, their music and their fans for the uninitiated.