Cover via Amazon

Holiday Reading

I'm back, refreshed from a week in Tenerife.  It's the first time I've ever been on holiday and not taken a book.  Instead, luggage pared down, it was my Kindle, loaded up with my intended reading.

The experience only reinforced my existing Kindle mania.  Light, easy on the eye and infinitely practical.

First on my reading list was Justin Cronin's weighty modern-day vampire novel, The Passage.  This didn't justify the hype, and would have benefited from being 200 pages shorter, but it was still an absorbing read.  More rewarding was Joe Abercrombie's long-awaited The Heroes.  In publishing terms, Abercrombie is a well-established brand: ultra-violent, blackly comic deconstructions of the fantasy genre, told through mulitple viewpoints and clearly differentiated viewpoints.  Nobody does this niche better but, after five novels, I'm interested to see where he goes next.

My final reading, which I'm still working through, is Antony Beevor's immense history of Hitler's Russian campaign, Stalingrad.  It's a grim and chilling account of an almost unimaginably hellish time.