Christmas Sunday Fun (Reading 2021)

A longer, perhaps more involved Christmas update next week (or, I forget about it and we go into 2021 with broken promises from the off, which sounds more likely), but as a Boxing Day Christmas Sunday special, here’s a list of the books I read in 2021. Well, most of them. Things without ISBN numbers aren’t included, and you can mentally add “almost everything John Smith did at 2000AD, plus a bunch of other comics” as well.

Highlights of the list? As you can probably tell, I went deep on M. John Harrison’s work this year — I’d definitely recommend the Settling The World collection of short stories, or the post-Brexit The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again novel as starting points - much easier to get hold of than some of the out-of-print books I’ve spent the year tracking down. Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts was so compelling that I stayed up until 3am one night finishing it (always a great idea). And the finale of David Peace’s Tokyo Trilogy was so long in coming that it was a complete surprise to be a pretty straight-forward affair, with only a few echoes of “At home, at Anfield” in the text¹. Now, if only he’d finish UKDK.

(and there are a few classics that I should have read many years ago. At least I understood this week’s Necromancer discourse on Twitter having finally knocked that one out)

Hope you all had a great Christmas, and see you back here later in the week²!