BlogOfTheMoon

I’ve been reviewing the books I read for a very long time on GoodReads, and have recently started archiving them on my own website (separate to this, at BooksOfTheMoon).  While I generate my “year in books” on GR every year, I thought I’d do something a bit different and flag up the ones from last year that I enjoyed the most (yes, this is another list to make an easy blog post!).  The links are to my full reviews.  If any of them intrigue you, I’m sure you can find them yourself at the usual suspects (or your local bookshop, if you happen to have one).

• Exhalation, by Ted Chiang
  An absolutely breathtaking collection of short stories – some of the best SF I’ve read this century!
• The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, by Becky Chambers
  I love all the Wayfarers books, and this is no exception.  I’m sad that this is the last in the series, but it’s a beautiful way to finish it
• Gunnerkrigg Court, vol 8, by Tom Siddell
  This is the latest collection of my favourite webcomic which is just so good
• The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells
  To date, this series consists of five novellas and a novel.  I grumble about the commercial pricing of novellas, but this series is worth every penny, they’re such good stories
• A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher (aka Ursula Vernon)
  I’m a recent convert to Ursula Vernon and her alter ego T. Kingfisher.  This is a delightful story of creative uses of magic
• Comet Weather, by Liz Williams
  I loved just how evocative this felt. Best read in the autumn.
• The All Creatures Great and Small series, by James Herriot
  Not books I would have picked out for myself, but a friend bought me the boxset and it turns out I adore them (apart from when horrible things are happening to dogs)

So that’s your lot.  If you’ve read any of them, do tell me what you think, either in the comments for this post; in the comments for the reviews themselves; or on Twitter.

I’ve been reading books forever. I mean, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love just sitting down with a book and spending hours getting lost in it. And I’ve been writing about books for years now too. I’ve reviewed pretty much every book I’ve written for the best part of three lustra – that’s over a thousand books. Originally, these reviews were part of the 50 Book Challenge that was facilitated through IoForum back in the day. When that slowly faded away, I moved to using GoodReads, which I still use to this day.

However, with one thing and another, I don’t really trust any cloud-based provider to not disappear one day so I spent a weekend figuring out how to mirror my existing (and future) reviews from GoodReads back to LordOfTheMoon.com. I’ve now done that, and all my book reviews are now available on the new Book Reviews section of this website.

I still intend to keep writing on GoodReads. Whilst I’m not a great one for social media, I do quite like seeing my friends’ book reviews; but each review I write will be mirrored here, for posterity (and, to make it easier for anyone to follow my own book reviews, an RSS feed is available).

I’ll write a more technical post on the details later, and maybe make the scripts I wrote available to others, if anyone’s interested.