How are we all doing? Recovered from the holiday madness? I, for one, had forgotten what a real Monday felt like, but my memory has been cruelly jogged...
Many, many things are happening here in the near future, and I'm looking forward to almost all of it! I'm not sure I'm sold on the impending lack of sleep, but I'm told that comes hand-in-hand with the baby snuggles I will definitely appreciate. Besides the looming due date, my excitement continues to build for the new Last Shadow Puppets album (they've released two goofy, uninformative trailers here and here), and there are also two books I'm really looking forward to reading as soon as they drop:
This one is coming soon, expected out January 19! Tim Powers is a very weird, very inventive author. If you're not familiar with his work, I'd highly recommend either Three Days to Never or Hide Me Among the Graves. (I've heard Declare is also amazing, but I haven't had a chance to read that one yet.) With any of his books, you accept from page 1 that this isn't real life, and then you settle in and enjoy the ride. There are ghosts, monsters, and magic in abundance. His 1992 novel, Last Call, reminded me of a hyper-violent, Vegas-centric version of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, if that provides any useful frame of reference for you. I've loved reading about the supernatural since I was a very young oddball, and Tim Powers' work feels like the grown-up version of all the ghost stories I used to gobble up like candy each time my parents took me to the library. Needless to say, I'm going to put my name on the library's wait list for this one as soon as I finish this blog post.
Also a master of the fantasy novel, Justin Cronin's third book of The Passage trilogy is due out this May. If you don't mind a little (okay, a full ton) of gore, this trilogy is epic. The books are huge, and the characters are widely varied and compelling. The villains are....sort of vampires, definitely genetic experiments gone horribly wrong. Take it as a cautionary tale of why the government should probably not try and manipulate human DNA to create perfect, nearly indestructible weapons. The risks outweigh the rewards.
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