kelsusie

📚 Reading:

I didn't finish any books this week, but I've continued reading Religion For Dummies and Brigands & Breadknives. I'm also about to start Roman Britain: A Very Short Introduction, which is recommended reading for Week 2 of my course, so apparently my recreational reading is now just becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from my university reading.

🎧 Listening To:

Not to be super predictable here, like, but... NEW TAYLOR SWIFT SONGS! 🧡

And I absolutely love them. I have listened to them an entirely reasonable number of times. Probably.

📺 Watching:

There hasn't been a huge amount of TV watched this week, tbh, mostly just our daily Pointless episodes. Some things are simply constants.

The Great British Bake Off is back, though, and we have good intentions this time! We are going to actually try to watch it properly rather than somehow ending up six weeks behind and then bingeing half the series in one go. We shall see how long this lasts.

I'm also really excited that there's a baker this year who is a wheelchair user. It's always lovely to see more disabled people represented on these sorts of shows, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what they bake and following their journey through the series.

🎾 Tennis:

Okay, so quite a lot happened this week!

Czechia won the Billie Jean King Cup! 🇨🇿 I was cheering for either Italy or Czechia, so I'm very happy with that result. Europe also won the Laver Cup, so it's been a pretty successful week for my tennis bebes all round.

Leylah Fernandez won Singapore, Maya Joint was runner-up in Korea, Andrey Rublev has made the semi-finals in Hangzhou, and Alejandro Davidovich Fokina and Hubert Hurkacz are both through to the semi-finals in Chengdu. So plenty to keep me occupied there.

I am, however, absolutely gutted that Jannik won't be defending his Beijing title. 💔😭 Obviously I would much rather have him properly fit and healthy, and hopefully we'll see him back for Shanghai, but that doesn't mean I'm not sad about missing him in Beijing!

And then we have the small matter of WHAT I AM ACTUALLY GOING TO WATCH THIS WEEK. 😂

Chengdu and Hangzhou are finishing up on Tuesday, and then Beijing and Tokyo start on Wednesday, so we're going straight from one batch of tournaments into another. On the Challenger Tour, I've got Porto, Jingshan, Columbus and Mouilleron-le-Captif to keep an eye on, and on the WTA Tour there's Beijing too. So, you know. Just a small amount of tennis.

🖊 Writing:

A conversation with a friend on Tumblr about Jannik as a fox shifter completely derailed my Kinktober writing, which is frankly rude because we're basically at the point where we're about ready to start posting and I have only got a few days actually ready. 😬

Obviously, the fox shifter conversation was much more interesting than the writing I was supposed to be doing, so now there are fox-shifter thoughts happening. I have nobody to blame but myself.

Hopefully I'll have a super quiet work week next week and I'll be able to get some editing done during work time. Because apparently my writing schedule now depends partly on how much my employer gives me to do. 😂

🏫 Studying:

We've been zooming down from Empire to province to different types of settlements, and we've started properly looking at Viroconium and Hadrian's Wall. We're comparing what different types of sources can tell us, including the differences between different written sources and different types of material evidence, and what each of them can and can't tell us.

There's been a lot of work on evaluating the reliability of sources and thinking about what we can actually know from the evidence we have, rather than just treating a source as a straightforward window onto the past. Which is really interesting, particularly with archaeology, because there's so much interpretation involved in putting the pieces together.

I also attended a library skills workshop on “diverse voices”, which looked at why so many peer-reviewed published sources are from the Global North and how to find and use other types of sources to broaden the material we're working with. It was really interesting, particularly in terms of thinking about whose voices are represented in the scholarship we read and whose might be missing.

💼 Work:

I did my first payroll!

Which I then managed to almost screw up by setting payments to come out of the wrong account. Everything was caught before authorisation and fixed, but I was so mad at myself and so frustrated that I cried.

I know intellectually that I'm still learning, it was my first payroll, and nothing actually went wrong because the mistake was caught and corrected before anything happened. But that doesn't stop the immediate “OH GOD I HAVE BROKEN EVERYTHING” reaction when you realise you've made a mistake.

I also came very close to snapping at the person training me because she still doesn't seem to grasp the concept that if she doesn't tell me something, I don't know it. I am, therefore, perhaps not entirely devastated that she's going off on maternity leave next week. 😂

I'm actually looking forward to taking over and figuring things out properly without constantly having to discover that there was apparently some piece of information I was expected to know telepathically.

💭 Thinking About:

I think I'm starting to see the Roman Empire module sneaking into the rest of my life, because I've found myself applying all this stuff about sources and evidence to... tennis media. 😂

There are currently so many rumours and bits of speculation flying around about whether Darren will still be with Jannik next season, and about when Jannik is actually going to be back on court, including whether we'll see him in Shanghai. And I'm suddenly finding myself looking at all of it and thinking, “Okay, but what is the actual source for this? Is this something somebody has actually said, is it somebody interpreting something they've said, is it a journalist reporting what they've heard from a source, or is it just the tennis internet putting three things together and deciding they've found a pattern?”

Which is, frankly, a very strange way for my university course to improve my tennis fandom.

But I do think it's genuinely interesting. We're spending so much time learning about evaluating sources, considering who created them, why they were created, what they can tell us and what they can't tell us, and how different sources can give us completely different pictures of the same thing.

And now I'm apparently doing the same thing with tennis Twitter.

“Source: trust me bro” is not, unfortunately, quite enough for the historian in me anymore.

📅 Planning:

Next week feels like it might be a bit of a reset. My trainer is going off on maternity leave, so I’ll be properly settling into the job without having someone sitting alongside me who knows all the little things I’m still learning. I’m actually looking forward to that, even if there’s inevitably going to be a bit of “right, where did she keep the thing?” involved.

It’s also Welcome Week for the OU, which feels very strange when I’m already a week and a half into the actual module. 😂 But I’m looking forward to seeing what’s going on and settling a little more into being back in study mode.

And, ideally, I’d like to get some proper writing time in too. Kinktober is rapidly approaching, the fox-shifter brain has been unhelpful, and I need to get myself back on track with the editing. If work is quiet, I’m absolutely going to make use of those quieter periods.

💖 Loving:

Honestly, lots of little things this week.

New Taylor Swift songs. Autumn continuing to do its thing. Books. *Pointless*. Getting properly stuck into the Roman Empire module. The fact that I’m starting to understand my work well enough that the quieter periods don't feel quite so weird anymore.

And, despite being thoroughly derailed by fox-shifter Jannik, I’m still loving having lots of fic ideas buzzing around my head. There is something very satisfying about having too many stories wanting to be written, even when they are occasionally extremely inconvenient stories.

Also, I think I’m just loving this particular stage of the year. The slightly cooler weather, the beginning of autumn routines, university starting back up, and that feeling of everything slowly settling into place again.

badfalcon

📚 Reading:

I finished The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction and gave it a solid 3.75/5. It was a good introduction to the subject, and I’ve written a full review over here if you want my considerably more verbose thoughts.

Naturally, finishing one book immediately meant my brain found another rabbit hole to fall down. I picked up Religion For Dummies because I have become extremely interested in the question of why people believe in religions, where religions come from, how they develop, and generally how humans got from “the world is full of inexplicable things” to the absolutely enormous variety of religious traditions we have now. So apparently that’s what my brain is doing this week.

I’m also still working my way through The Silk Roads, because apparently I have decided that my recreational reading should occasionally resemble an undergraduate history syllabus.

And then there’s the ADHD preorder incident. I somehow managed to preorder BK Borison’s new book twice. TWO PREORDERS. facepalm I have no explanation beyond “my brain saw a book it wanted and apparently forgot it had already seen the book it wanted.” So if anyone wants a signed copy of Grim Tidings...

🎧 Listening To:

This week has involved a lot of musicals and a lot of Li and I serenading each other terribly with show tunes. There has been absolutely no concern for whether either of us knows the correct lyrics or tune. We are both fully committed to this being a feature of our relationship and not a bug.

I've also been listening to a lot of Hozier, Jewel, Josh Groban and Kelly Clarkson. Basically, my music taste has once again decided that genre is merely a suggestion.

Also really enjoying Miley Cyrus' new song!

📺 Watching:

We were very pleased that Anna won The Great British Sewing Bee final. There may have been happy dancing.

The Great British Bake Off is back this week, I believe, which always makes me want to bake. This lasts until the point where I actually try to bake something and remember that I hate it. And I think there's some celebrity Great Pottery Throwdown

We're still watching Pointless, obviously. Some things are simply constants.

🎾 Tennis:

Cruz Hewitt reached another Challenger quarter-final! Sadly he didn't make it any further, but he's starting to find his feet at Challenger level and that is very exciting. Watching these younger players start to work their way up is one of my favourite things about the lower levels of the tour.

And Darwin Blanch is in the final in Tiburon! Baby's first Challenger final! I am so excited for him and will be staying up late tonight to watch it!

This weekend has been Davis Cup, which has been wonderful. So many of my bebes playing, mostly winning, and, rudely, all playing at exactly the same time. So far Austria, Korea, Germany and Canada have qualified for the finals, so it's going to be another very different year. I think GB and Spain might be close to qualifying too, but honestly, the way this whole thing is worked out is baffling. LMAO.

Coming up this week is the start of the Asian swing, which means lots of early mornings rather than late nights. On the ATP side we've got Chengdu and Hangzhou, but also the Laver Cup in London.

And I am so torn about the Laver Cup. It's Team Europe versus Team World, and I basically cheer for Team Europe because we have Carlos, Flavio and Casper playing. But the captain for Team World is Andre Agassi, and I have been loyal to that man for approximately 35 years. LMAO. So this is going to be complicated.

On the women's side we've got Singapore, Korea and the Billie Jean King Cup Finals, with Italy, China, Ukraine, Belgium, Kazakhstan, Spain, Czechia and GB all competing. I'm probably cheering for Italy or Czechia to win.

And then on the Challenger Tour we've got Saint-Tropez and San Diego, plus a few others where, sadly, I don't have any players I'm following.

🖊 Writing:

The first draft of my bratty Jannik Kinktober fic is FINISHED! I’m about three-quarters of the way through editing it.

Kinktober Day 2 is also finished and just needs its final edit. The prompt is embarrassment, and I went with Andre/Steffi/Darren and a humiliation kink, because apparently my brain looked at “embarrassment” and said, “Yes, we can absolutely make this a whole thing.”

Day 3 is suspension bondage, and I’ve started writing Darren/Jannik for that one, with Darren putting Jannik in a sex swing. That one still needs finishing and editing, so there is a reasonable amount of Kinktober still sitting on my desk waiting for me.

And then, lurking behind all of that, is the Sincaraz first-time fic that I am getting increasingly itchy to write. I keep telling myself that I should finish the Kinktober backlog first, but the brain has opinions about this.

🏫 Studying:

I've done about the first week and a half of study now, and it's been a very gentle start to the module. We're looking at different ways of looking at the Roman Empire, starting with different types of narrative and chronology and now moving on to geography.

We've looked at the provinces and we're starting our first provincial site case study: Viroconium, or Wroxeter.

It's been really interesting so far, particularly because I'm coming into this module knowing comparatively little about the Roman Empire. There's something very satisfying about having all these new pieces to fit together.

💼 Work:

I’m starting to find my rhythm at work, too, which has been really nice. I’m getting a better idea of how the days and weeks tend to go, what I’m likely to have on my plate, and how everything fits together. I think that’s probably one of those things that takes a little while with any new job, but I’m finally beginning to feel like I can see the shape of my weeks.

I’m also starting to work out what I can actually fit into the quieter periods, rather than spending the whole time worrying that I need to be permanently poised over Teams in case someone messages me. Apparently the secret is just... replying when Teams actually pings? Revolutionary. As long as I’m available and respond when something comes through, everything seems to be absolutely fine.

Unfortunately, this week also involved taking Monday and Tuesday off sick because the shingles had reached the point where I simply wasn’t functioning. The itching was keeping me from sleeping, the antivirals were giving me sickness and diarrhoea, and I was just completely wiped out. I’m now down to “just” exhausted, which feels like a fairly substantial upgrade.

My manager actually told me to take a nap on Thursday because I’d had the two days off sick, so I feel like that was probably a fairly strong indication that I don’t need to feel guilty about taking things a little easier while I recover. 😂

So I’m slowly figuring out how to make the quieter parts of the working day work for me, while still being available when I’m actually needed. It’s making the whole thing feel much less like I’m sitting there waiting for Teams to explode and much more like I have some control over my time.

💭 Thinking About:

My brain's current obsession with religion has actually made me think quite a lot about how people make sense of the world around them.

I've gone from "I wonder why people believe in religions?" to "well, now I need to understand the history of religion, the development of belief systems, the relationship between religion and society, and probably approximately seventeen other things."

Which is probably why I'm now reading Religion For Dummies, with DK's The Religion Book and the VSI to World Religion cued up behind it

📅 Planning:

I think a lot of my planning at the moment is really about finding that rhythm across everything. I’m getting back into studying, I have a growing pile of fic that wants writing and editing, and I’m figuring out what I can reasonably fit around work without turning every week into an elaborate logistical exercise.

The current plan is basically to keep gently building those routines rather than trying to suddenly become a perfectly organised person overnight. Work is becoming more familiar, studying is underway again, the fic is happening, and I’m starting to get a better sense of how much time I actually have available.

And, importantly, I’m trying not to demand too much of myself while my body is still catching up. “Just exhausted” may be an improvement, but it is still, unfortunately, exhausted.

💖 Loving:

I had my first mince pies of the season, and my first Costa maple hazel hot chocolate, so I think we can officially declare autumn open.

Li also came home from Costa with Grillbert and Hazel, the new plushies, which was obviously a very important contribution to household happiness. And then she found THREE Philippa Gregory books in a charity shop, because apparently the universe has decided that my TBR was not yet sufficiently out of control.

And honestly, I’m loving the little signs that life is starting to settle into something resembling a rhythm again. Work is becoming familiar. The Roman Empire module is underway. There are books everywhere. There is fic happening. There are plushies. There are mince pies.

There are worse ways to start autumn.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Jason Donovan - Hang on your Love

badfalcon

The Book Blogger Hop was originally created by Jennifer from Crazy-For-Books in March 2010 and ended on December 31, 2012. With Jennifer's permission, Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer relaunched the meme on February 15, 2013. Check out the hop here!

Each week the hop will start on a Friday and end on Thursday. There will be a weekly prompt featuring a book related question. The hop's purpose is to give bloggers a chance to follow other blogs, learn about new books, befriend other bloggers, and receive new followers to your own blog.

The Question of the week is: If you could recommend one overlooked book, what would it be and why?
Last week, I admitted that I don't really pay enough attention to what's popular to know what counts as flying under the radar. Judging by the number of "I've never heard of any of these books!" comments I get on some of my reading lists, apparently quite a lot of what I read is flying under everyone else's radar anyway.

So naturally, this week I'm being asked to pick one overlooked book to recommend.
One.
I have four.
That's close enough, right?

They're also four wildly different recommendations, but the more I thought about them, the more I realised that each represents something different that I love about reading. So instead of forcing myself to choose, you're getting all four.

Poppy Z. Brite - Lost Souls
If you've ever heard me flailing about Lost Souls, there's a very good chance I've described it with the immortal words:

Gay incestuous vampires.

Which is wildly reductive and yet tells you quite a lot about what you're getting yourself into.

Lost Souls very much shaped teenage me.

I read a lot of horror when I was younger - mostly Stephen King and Anne Rice - but there was something about Lost Souls that hit differently. It was dark and decadent and queer and messy, full of outsiders, musicians, bars, road trips, sex, blood and people making spectacularly terrible decisions.

Naturally, teenage me adored it.

And I still do.

There's something almost feverish about the whole book. Its vampires are strange and beautiful and frequently horrible, and nobody is waiting around to be redeemed by the love of the right person. It was unlike anything I'd encountered at that point, and it lodged itself firmly in my brain.

It's also impossible for me to separate the book from when I discovered it. If I encountered Lost Souls for the first time today, would it affect me in quite the same way? Probably not. But some books become tangled up in who you were at a particular moment in your life, and this is one of mine.

Given how much love there is now for vampires, queer horror and gothic fiction, I'm always a little surprised I don't see Lost Souls talked about more.

So yes. My first recommendation is my dearly beloved, deeply problematic gay incestuous vampires.

A big content warning on this one: Lost Souls is very much not a recommendation I'd hand indiscriminately to everyone. It deals with some extremely dark material, including incest, sexual abuse and coercion, graphic sexual content, violence and blood, substance abuse, self-harm/suicidal themes and homophobic language. Definitely check detailed content warnings first if there are subjects you prefer to avoid.

Matthew Reilly. Just... Matthew Reilly
And now we encounter a problem.

How do I explain Matthew Reilly?

I genuinely don't know.

Imagine someone writing an action movie.

And I don't mean writing a novel that feels cinematic or something that could eventually be adapted into an action movie. I mean somehow taking the experience of watching an absolutely ridiculous, enormously expensive action movie and transferring it directly onto paper.

That's Matthew Reilly.

Everything happens at approximately nine thousand miles an hour. There are explosions. There are conspiracies. There are impossible situations followed by even more impossible escapes. Something is probably on fire. Someone is probably falling off something. A helicopter has almost certainly had a very bad day.

And just when you think things cannot possibly get any more ridiculous, they do.

These are not books I pick up when I'm looking for a quiet meditation on the complexities of existence.

These are books I pick up when I want BOOM.

And sometimes that's exactly what I want from a book.

I'd probably send a newcomer towards Ice Station or Temple, which is where I started. Strap yourself in, accept that subtlety has left the building and enjoy the ride.

I still cannot explain Matthew Reilly.

Perhaps Matthew Reilly should simply be experienced.

Ali McNamara - The St Felix Series
From gay incestuous vampires and enormous explosions, naturally we move on to a lovely Cornish seaside town.
Nobody said this list had to make sense.

The St Felix books are cosy romances, but there's something else about them that makes this series particularly special to me.

St Felix always feels a little bit magical, a little bit enchanted and a little bit whimsical.

There's this sense that something is bubbling just below the surface of ordinary life. Not necessarily enormous, dramatic magic with wizards running around throwing spells at one another. It's much gentler than that. It's the possibility that the world might be just a tiny bit stranger and more wonderful than you thought it was.

And apparently that's catnip to me.

There's also the pleasure of returning to St Felix itself. With each book, the place becomes more familiar. You recognise things. You know people. You feel as though you're returning somewhere rather than starting completely afresh.

They're warm and comforting and romantic, but it's that little hint of enchantment that makes St Felix stand out for me.

They make me want to pack a bag, go to Cornwall (I'm a Devonshire llama so... that's quite dramatic, you know?!) and find a little seaside town where something inexplicably lovely is definitely about to happen.

Christie Barlow - Love Heart Lane
And then there's Heartcross.

I've been trying to explain what I particularly love about Christie Barlow's Love Heart Lane series, and I think I've finally worked it out:

It gives me the same feeling as playing Stardew Valley.

Not because someone is going to hand me a hoe and tell me to go and plant twelve parsnips.

It's the community.

Heartcross isn't simply a backdrop for a succession of romances. The more books you read, the more the village fills in around you. People have families, friendships and businesses. Characters you've met before reappear. Someone who was important in one story might pop up in the background of another, getting on with their life.

Eventually, you know these people.

It's that same feeling I get wandering around Pelican Town. You know where everyone lives. You know who's connected to whom. You know their assorted dramas. You become invested in people even when they're not currently the main character.

And there's something wonderfully comforting about that.

Of course I want to know what happens with the romance in each book, but I also want to go back to Heartcross and see what everybody else is doing.

I'm not simply starting another story.

I'm going back to the village.

*****

One is a book that helped shape teenage me. One gives me several hundred pages of glorious BOOM. One lets me escape somewhere that feels as though a little bit of magic might be hiding around the next corner. And one gives me a fictional community I want to keep going home to.

And perhaps that's why I don't particularly care whether the books I read are currently popular, overlooked, hyped, underhyped or somewhere in between.
I care about what they give me.
Sometimes that's finding a book at exactly the right moment in my life.
Sometimes it's wonder.
Sometimes it's belonging.
And sometimes I want a helicopter to explode.

So there you have it. The question asked for one overlooked book, and I've somehow given you gay incestuous vampires, several major explosions, enchanted Cornwall and Stardew Valley in Scottish-romance form.

I feel this tells you considerably more about my reading habits than choosing one book ever could.

What about you? What's the book - or books, because clearly I'm not enforcing the rules here - that you wish more people would discover?

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Chopin - Nocturne No. 20 in C-Sharp Minor

yourlibrarian posting in

recs

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angrboda

Dear Americans.

You are probably about to be subjected to some propaganda regarding the deal about Greenland. That guy is laying it out like some massive victory.

Granted it hasn't actually been signed yet, and that guy is nothing if not unpredictable, and we don't know exactly what is in there. But the thing is, he's laying it out as some massive victory, while over here it's being interpreted as him having suffered a massive defeat.

Because what it SOUNDS like so far is that he landed basically the same deal that has been in effect since the 1950s. The one where he can make all the military shit in Greenland that he wants so long as he keeps the Danish government informed. It was there all along, the US government just wasn't using it much.

So, um. Congratulations, I guess. Well done. (Also, LOL!)

badfalcon

Top Ten Tuesday was created by The Broke and the Bookish and is now hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. It was born of a love of lists, a love of books, and a desire to bring bookish friends together. Each week a new theme is suggested for bloggers to participate in. Create your own Top Ten list that fits that topic – putting your unique spin on it if you want. Everyone is welcome to join but please link back to The Artsy Reader Girl in your own Top Ten Tuesday post.

This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic is Authors I’ve Met, which presents something of a problem: I haven’t met ten authors.

I could probably come up with increasingly tenuous interpretations of the word met, but instead I’m taking a fairly substantial sideways step from the prompt and looking at authors who have shaped my reading life.

These aren't necessarily my ten favourite authors, nor are they necessarily the authors I've read the most. They're the people whose books changed something about the way I read. Some were there right at the beginning, helping turn small!Cassie into someone who would grow up permanently surrounded by books. Others introduced me to genres that became favourites, shaped my taste in horror, made me buy a Kindle, or simply made me realise that my reading tastes were broader than I thought they were.

And, importantly, apparently authors can still come along in my forties and completely derail my established reading habits.

Janet & Allan Ahlberg
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where a lifelong love of reading begins, because by the time you're old enough to think about it, books are often just there. Janet and Allan Ahlberg are part of that earliest layer of reading for me: books before I really understood that I was becoming A Reader.

Their books belong to that hazy childhood period when being read to, looking at pictures and eventually reading for yourself all blur together. You have to start somewhere, and the Ahlbergs were part of my somewhere.

Enid Blyton
If the Ahlbergs belong to the beginning, Enid Blyton belongs to the point where I started devouring books.

There was always another adventure, another mystery, another group of children disappearing off somewhere without anything resembling adequate adult supervision. More importantly, there was always another book. Series reading meant finishing one story didn't have to mean leaving that world behind, and young!Cassie was very much here for that.

Whatever I might think about aspects of the books looking back at them as an adult, there's no separating Blyton from the story of how I became a voracious reader.

C.S. Lewis
Some childhood authors stay in childhood. C.S. Lewis didn't.

Narnia was part of my early reading, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in particular became one of those books I would continue returning to long after I was supposedly too old for it. I still reread it now.

I think there's something important in discovering that books don't have an expiry date. You don't have to leave the stories you loved behind simply because you've grown up; sometimes they grow into comfort reads instead.

Anne Rice
And then we get to horror.

Anne Rice is one of a handful of authors who had an enormous influence on what I would eventually want from the genre. Interview with the Vampire gave me horror that was gothic, atmospheric, messy and intensely character-driven - monsters who were allowed to be fascinating rather than simply frightening.

Decades later, it's another book I still reread, which probably says everything about how thoroughly it lodged itself in my brain.

Stephen King
Stephen King shaped a different side of my horror reading: the idea that the frightening thing doesn't necessarily live in some distant gothic castle. It can be waiting in an ordinary house, an ordinary town or inside an apparently ordinary person.

I've read King across a lot of years and a lot of pages - sometimes an awful lot of pages - and books like Firestarter and The Stand remain part of my reading landscape.

Between King, Rice and the next author on this list, you can probably trace quite a lot of the DNA of my taste in horror.

Poppy Z. Brite
If Anne Rice gave me gothic vampires and Stephen King gave me horror lurking beneath ordinary life, Poppy Z. Brite brought something stranger, darker and more transgressive into the mix.

Lost Souls is another of those books that has somehow survived all the different versions of me as a reader and remains something I return to.

Those three authors are very different from one another, but collectively they did a lot to establish what I love about horror — atmosphere, outsiders, complicated characters, darkness, and books that aren't particularly interested in being comfortable.

Kelley Armstrong
Kelley Armstrong gets one of the easiest places on this list to justify: she introduced me to urban fantasy.

Discovering the Women of the Otherworld books opened up an entire genre that I hadn't really known was there - contemporary worlds where werewolves, witches, vampires and other supernatural creatures existed alongside everything recognisably ordinary.

Urban fantasy remains one of my favourite genres, so that's not just an author I enjoyed reading. That's an author who opened a door to a whole section of the bookshop that I've happily been wandering around in ever since.

Marian Keyes
There was a point in the late '90s and early '00s when my reading life acquired a whole new branch, and Marian Keyes had a lot to do with it.

She introduced me to the world we generally called chick lit at the time: contemporary stories about women, relationships, families, careers and lives that were allowed to be funny and messy while still dealing with some genuinely serious subjects.

It became another genre I could move happily between, because apparently even then I was refusing to specialise.

Jaimie Admans
Jaimie is a slightly different entry because I've actually known her online for years - although somehow we have still never met in person - and she ended up changing not only what I read, but how I read.

She's the reason I got a Kindle.

Through her books, I also found my way into the late-2010s world of contemporary romance, which felt related to the books I'd loved during the chick-lit era but also distinctly its own thing. That opened up another enormous rabbit hole of authors and books, and the Kindle... well. We all know what happens once you can acquire another book without even getting off the sofa.

Financially irresponsible levels of convenience.

Matthew Reilly
Matthew Reilly is the outlier here because, compared with almost everyone else on this list, he's a very recent addition to my reading life.

He's also here precisely because his books are so different from what I would normally have considered my sort of thing.

Huge, ridiculous, breakneck action adventures? Elaborate set pieces? Ancient mysteries? Explosions? More explosions? Characters who apparently regard the laws of physics as polite suggestions?

And yet here we are.

Books like Temple and Ice Station reminded me that even after decades of reading across all sorts of genres, I can still stumble across something completely outside my established habits and discover a new thing I love. My reading life isn't finished being shaped yet.

*****

Looking at these ten authors, what strikes me most is that there isn't really a point where I became the reader I am now.

The Ahlbergs helped make books part of my world. Enid Blyton made me want to consume them in vast quantities. C.S. Lewis gave me stories I could carry out of childhood. Anne Rice, Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite helped shape my love of horror. Kelley Armstrong opened up urban fantasy. Marian Keyes led me into chick lit, and years later Jaimie Admans helped lead me into contemporary romance — and, perhaps just as significantly, onto a Kindle.

And then Matthew Reilly turned up comparatively recently and went, essentially, “Have you considered explosions?”

Apparently I had not.

So this isn't really a list of my favourite authors, and it definitely isn't a list of authors I've met. It's more like a very abbreviated map of my life as a reader: the people who opened doors, changed directions or left something behind that became part of what I looked for in the next book.

And I rather like the fact that, after more than four decades of reading, that map apparently still isn't finished.

Current Mood: thoughtful

badfalcon

I picked up The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction for a very specific reason: I'm about to start a university module on the Roman Empire and realised that, while I know a bit about the Roman Republic, I haven't really studied the Empire itself since primary school. I wanted something that would give me the basic framework before the course started, and this did that really well.

Trying to squeeze the Roman Empire into a Very Short Introduction is quite an undertaking. We're talking about centuries of history, enormous geographical changes, emperors, armies, politics, society, religion and culture, all in fewer than 200 pages. Christopher Kelly obviously can't cover everything, but he does manage to provide a useful sense of how the different pieces fit together.

I particularly appreciated that the book isn't simply an emperor-by-emperor chronology. There are obviously emperors, wars and political upheavals, but Kelly also looks at how the Empire functioned, how Rome governed such an enormous territory, what imperial power looked like, and what being part of the Roman Empire actually meant.

Coming into this without much knowledge of the imperial period, that broader approach was really useful. I wasn't looking for enormous amounts of detail yet; I wanted names, events, concepts and structures to start feeling familiar so that I'm not encountering absolutely everything for the first time when my module begins.

There were definitely moments when the amount of information being condensed made things quite dense, particularly when I didn't already have much context to hang that information on. Equally, some subjects that caught my attention were necessarily dealt with very quickly. That's largely unavoidable when you're trying to fit the Roman Empire into such a small book, but it did occasionally leave me wanting another few pages before moving on.

More importantly, though, I finished feeling like I now have a basic map of the territory. I know a little more about what I don't know, I've encountered some of the major people and ideas I'm likely to meet again, and there are already subjects I'm curious to explore in much more depth.

Which is pretty much exactly what I wanted this book to do.

A really useful entry point into an enormous period of history - and hopefully I'll be slightly less lost when the actual studying begins!

⭐️ 3.75/5

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