The second of my annual year-end blogs rounds up what I was reading in 2017. I was in danger of clocking in with a lot fewer titles than 2016’s total, due to me having little opportunity for just losing myself in a book. Usually I get time to make that up on holiday, but my trip to Iceland last year was mostly on-the-hoof and not enough by-the-pool… Still, I decided to have a “fiction-cation” over the Christmas/New Year gap and packed in a bunch of novels and audiobooks to bring up the numbers at the last second.
This is the first year my science fiction and crime/thriller reads have almost been level, partly because all of a sudden people have started sending me advanced reader copies of things. I’ve clearly got myself on to a freebie list, which I am totally happy about. My top picks were Matthew Richardson’s debut My Name Is Nobody, Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon, Harry Sidebottom’s The Last Hour and the gorgeously retrotastic Art of Atari.
Here’s the full list:
Rogue One: The Ultimate Visual Guide (Pablo Hidalgo); Ghost Flight (Bear Grylls); My Name Is Nobody (Matthew Richardson); Art of Atari (Tim Lapetino); Countdown to Zero Day (Kim Zetter); Luna: New Moon (Ian McDonald); Dark Waters (Richard Dansky); This Gaming Life (Jim Rossignol); Crisis (Frank Gardner); You Only Live Once (Haris Orkin); Freefall (Adam Hamdy); The Ghost in the Shell: Five New Short Stories (Various); Hot Wheels: 40 Years (Angelo Van Bogart); Desperate Hours (David Mack); The Final Hour (Tom Wood); The Last Hour (Harry Sidebottom); Blackbird (James Hamilton-Paterson); Brethren (Phil Kelly); The Calculus of Battle (David Guymer); Perpetual (Dan Abnett); The Embrace of Pain (Ian St. Martin); The Midnight Front (Mack); Slow Horses (Mick Herron); Fire With Fire (Bernd Perplies & Christian Humberg); The Art of Provocation (Josh Reynolds); The Soul, Severed (Chris Wraight); Valerius (Gav Thorpe); One Rough Man (Brad Taylor)
