Leviathan Awakes
Really enjoyed this sci-fi book set in a future where we have colonised Mars/ the kaiper belt… kind of part noir detective/part horror/part sci-fi.
Think it’s the first in a trilogy so keen to read the next ones!
Yes I really liked it too - may make you happy to know that it's 9 novels and there's a decent Amazon TV series 'The Expanse' that follows it mostly faithfully.
Children of Time I liked when I read it but I later read Vernor Vinge's wonderfully named "A Deepness in the Sky" which was written in 1999. Adrian Tchaicovsky's 2015 take is more than a little derivative. As a sci-fi and fantasy reader I don't massively mind derivative but in this case I thought it reduced the value of Children of Time considerably.
Other things I have recently read:
The Lady in the Lake & other novels - Raymond Chandler. I personally absolutely love the hard-boiled detective genre and these didn't disappoint. I try to read only a few a year as I don't want to burn through the supply too quickly. As well as Chandler the others I like very much are the Lew Archer series by Ross Macdonald.
Revelation Space: The Inhibitor Trilogy - Alastair Reynolds. Had read the first of these a long time ago and thought it was good but forgot about. Picked up the second one and found it compulsive reading, third one slightly disappointing afterwards but still very, very good. High up the sci fi pantheon for me.
The Complete McAuslan - George MacDonald Fraser. Remember finding a collection of these stories hilarious many years ago and picked this up. Moments were very funny indeed but less universally amusing than I recalled. An interesting read in a sort of fin-de-siecle, end of Empire vibe.
Ivanhoe -Walter Scott. This was a re-read for me after many years and I enjoyed it again. Very much the prototype action-adventure historical novel. This lead me to read:
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle. This is a novel written in 1883 sort of compiling the known ballads of Robin Hood and packaging them up into the format we're more familiar with today. It's written in pseudo Olde English which is quite hard work but I read it all few in a week or so and enjoyed it. The 1920s film The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn (always my favourite Robin Hood film) actually is fairly true to the source material and the character portrayed of Robin Hood, even to the point of reusing dialogue which is interesting.
I'd love to read some really good Robin Hood historical novels if anyone has any recommendations?
Empireworld - Sathnam Sangera. I am struggling through this if I'm honest. My wife really enjoyed it. I think it suffers from the same flaws as Empireland its precursor where the author pursues his own personal lines of interest rather than giving an expert analysis of the Empire and its effects. Makes for interesting reading but at times it leaves me unconvinced of the validity of his analysis, which sort of erodes the validity of the project as a whole. I'll carry on reading it and see if my opinion changes as I get further on. Would also like to read further on this topic, as think my previous reading on it is rather stale by now.