Since the last post made here work has sort of taken over everything in sight. Even with weekly shift changes I have actually managed to fit some reading time into these six-day work week. The trouble was more of having time to sit down and write. For those of you that have typed out papers for school – assuming they still do that now days you may remember waking up the next day and looking at the prior nights work wondering how in the hell it got so messed up. Remember fixing that twenty page term paper the day it was due because some how you randomly had a paragraph about zombies and the end of the world? Okay, maybe that’s not exactly true, but I think you get the idea. My started posts got so damn random that they never made past the edit. Laugh if you want. I have no doubt you are now thinking just how random they got. Best I just leave it at that and let you just imagine the stories of zombies in ugly Christmas sweaters invading the grocery store bakery. Hey, it could happen you know.

For those of you that don’t know this already from having read other posts I have gotten into some new subgenres of sci-fi this year. I have grown to really enjoy the space opera and some of they military space novels. Over the summer my Uncle introduced me to the world of LitRPG which I have really found to be enjoyable. I had no idea it existed beyond the occasional anime like Sword Art Online or just the typical fan fictions. There is some rather well done game based novels with really different takes on getting stuck within a game theme.

Particularly over the last couple of months I have spent some time exploring the offerings within the LitRPG genre and have found a series that I really grew to like called World Seed by Justin Miller. So far I have listened/read the first three books. I plan on reading the rest of the series as time allows. I have also really enjoyed the NPC’s series by Drew Hayes I have elected to listen to rather than read. I am currently listening to the second book of the trilogy which I hope to finish over this week.

In the more space sci-fi front this year I finally got around to finishing the Far From Home series by Tony Healey. I found the first two books in the series were by far better story wise that the third, but over all it was a good read. It was a lot like Star Trek meets Battle Star Galactica (the 1980’s version). If you are into either of those shows you’ll probably like this series. This lead me to the more tech heavy space sci-fi by Michael G. Thomas’ Black Widows series Season 1. These six episodes chronicle a side story in his Star Crusades books which I plan to read since I have the entire series already. While some of the characters do make reference to events that happen in the other books you don’t have to have read any of them to enjoy this spin-off of the main books.

So as not to make it look like I only read sci-fi these days I have actually read some more traditional fantasy this year. Some I have already posted about and some I have not had the time to do so for. I am currently on the final book of the Silver Leaf Chronicles by Vincent Trigili. I have also finished the first two book in the Song of Albion trilogy by Stephen Lawhead which I will get back to once I finish the Paladin trilogy by James Hillebrecht since I currently already have the third book on my Kindle ready to download and I don’t yet have the last Albion book. These fantasy titles usually take me a little longer to read the entire series since I tend to slip then between my sci-fi books to try to keep things a little more fresh.

I think this sort of catches everything up to my current state of books on the reading list. After the first of the year I think things at work will get back to their normal flow of having a more traditional work week. That should give me time to write more often and more about each book as I finish it rather than the more brief bits about the books like here on this post. In the mean time I hope get at least one or two regular posts in before the end of the year. On that note I really hope I don’t wake up to zombies wandering around in the bakery tomorrow morning, but then again holiday shoppers do tend to act like it’s the end of the world when they can’t find their pumpkin pie.