Books

For those unfamiliar with the PLR, here’s my annual public service announcement on the subject:
If you are a writer/editor/illustrator/etc, a resident of the UK or Ireland and you ever need a reason for donating your books to the library – on top of all the obvious ones like promoting reading and supporting this valuable and increasingly undermined public service – this is it. The PLR is a system where authors who’ve written books that are in public libraries get a little revenue each time somebody borrows their works. It’s a way to repay writers who won’t be earning a royalty from a sale in a bookstore. The hardworking folks at the PLR office pay a nominal fee based on how
borrowed you were – and in the interests of fairness, you can’t earn more than around £6000, so the big names don’t get to hog all the money.
In the current political climate, both the PLR and the libraries it springs from are under threat, so if you are a writer or a reader, please do your bit to help support both as best you can.

Here’s my Top Ten Library Loans of my novels for 2015 (with 2014’s position in brackets)
1  (-)  Deadline
2  (1)  Peacemaker
3  (6)  The Poisoned Chalice
4  (3)  Nemesis
5  (2)  Fear To Tread
6  (5)  Hammer & Anvil
7  (7)  Synthesis
8  (10) The Flight of the Eisenstein
9   (-)  Icarus Effect
10 (4)  Cast No Shadow

The big shake-up in my top ten this year was the arrival of my 24 novel Deadline straight into the top slot – number one with a bullet, which seems apt for a story about Jack Bauer! That kicked back my Doctor Who Western Peacemaker to second place for the first time in years, which was closely followed by my Star Trek: The Fall novel The Poisoned Chalice. Also new in the list this year is my Deus Ex novel Icarus Effect.

As always, my thanks to everyone who supported their local libraries and borrowed my books!

Does anyone out there read these? I’m not sure, but be honest at this stage, I’m just doing this as a way to keep score for myself… Anyhow. Thanks to my good friend Ming’s generosity and his inexorable lust for cutting edge technology, I became the custodian of a hand-me-down last generation Kindle eReader after remarking that I didn’t read enough digital content – so this year, just over a third of all the stuff I read this year was on a screen.

I found it interesting how many of the digital titles were short (or short-ish) fiction, and I gotta wonder if that’s reflecting the fact that people eReading are buying more by name than by physical size of the work. Never mind the quality, feel the width, as they say. But I’m not denigrating the format, far from it. Without the Kindle, I’d probably never have had the great nostalgia trip that was Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons series, an exhaustive set of volumes about the history of pencil-and-paper roleplaying games. I also read a whole bunch of Star Wars tie-ins this year, largely to prime the pump for The Force Awakens, after being away from the franchise for some time. It seems I’ve missed some cool stuff over in the GFFA, so I reckon 2016 will feature them a bit too.

But the biggest swing in my reading habits for 2015 was a lead toward thrillers once more, including a couple of Bonds and some SAS roughnecks as I rediscovered my love of stuff-blowing-uppery. Best of the year is shared between David M. Ewalt’s hymn to roleplaying Of Dice And Men, and Diamond David Lee Roth’s wild stream-of-thought autobio Crazy From The Heat, which reset my rock playlists back to 80’s Hair Metal setting for the rest of 2015. The worst was the novel that taught me not to pay attention to recommendations from book bloggers who talk in ALL CAPS and haven’t read anything older than they are.     

Here’s the list:
The Perfect Kill (Robert Baer), Bedlam (Christopher Brookmyre), Poseidon’s Arrow (Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler), Malta Spitfire Pilot (Denis Barnham), Fortune’s Pawn (Rachel Bach), Destination: Moonbase Alpha (Robert E. Wood), Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds), Final Orbit (S.V. Date), Outlaw (Mark Sullivan), Red Notice (Andy McNab), Masters of War (Chris Ryan), Glasslands (Karen Traviss), Attack of the Seawolf (Michael DiMercurio), The Supercar Book For Boys (Martin Roach), Exit Wound (McNab), Dead Centre (McNab), Pirates (Ross Kemp), Blood Ransom (John Boyle), Tied In (Various), New Life And New Civilizations: Exploring Star Trek Comics (Various), Armada (Ernest Cline), Drone (Michael Maden), Game Over (Various), Of Dice And Men (David M. Ewalt), Edge of Tomorrow [All You Need Is Kill] (Hiroshi Sakurazaka), Lynx (Julian Jay Severin), Seven Brief Lessons On Physics (Carlo Rovelli), Solo (William Boyd), Trigger Mortis (Anthony Horowitz), State of Emergency (‘Sam Fisher’), Unworthy (Kirsten Beyer), Orphan X (Gregg Hurwitz), Designers & Dragons: The 1970’s (Shannon Appelcline), Designers & Dragons: The 1980’s (Appelcline), Dark Disciple (Christie Golden), Valour’s Choice (Tanya Huff), Crazy From The Heat (David Lee Roth), All Creatures Great and Small (Landry Q. Walker), High Noon On Jakku (Walker), The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku (Walker), The Face of Evil (Walker), The Perfect Weapon (Deliah S. Dawson), Before The Awakening (Greg Rucka), Press Start To Play (Various), Blood of Sanguinius (Mark Clapham), The Blooding (Ray Harrison), The Chalice (Chris Wraight), Honour and Wrath (David Annandale), Eternal (Dan Abnett), The Hades Factor (Robert Ludlum with Gale Lynds), Designers & Dragons: The 1990’s (Appelcline)

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