US cover

I thought last Thursday was my linkage day—but then more happened! How does that work? 😉

So first off, I was alerted to the fact that The Gathering Of The Lost played a starring role in this week’s SF Signal Mind Meld — so OK, you have to scroll down a bit, but Gathering is there, all the same!

The Mind Meld theme is:

SFF Series That Hooked Us After the First Book

And Courtney Schafer—clearly a paragon of good taste and discernment—was of the view that although she enjoyed The Heir Of Night (phew!) The Gathering Of The Lost “leveled up the series to a whole new plane of awesome.” And there’s some cover love, too  — more awesome. 😉

Some of the other series mentioned were also of interest to me, particularly Steven Erikson’s the Malazan Book of the Fallen. A couple of contributors shook their heads over Gardens Of The Moon in relation to its immediate successors Deadhouse Gates and Memories Of Ice. While I agree that the latter are both excellent books and I am a huge fan of Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs in Deadhouse Gates, I also really loved Gardens Of The Moon. It definitely hooked me on the series. The world building blew my mind and I loved so many of the characters, Whiskeyjack and the Bridgebuilders, Tattersail, Anamander Rake, and Kruppe, to name just a few.

—

UK/AU/NZ mass market paperback

Speaking of The Heir Of Night, it’s among the many fabulous SFF titles in:

Hachette NZ’s Grand SFF Giveaway on The Realm

Several authors and titles I’ve featured here on the blog are in the giveaway, including (in alphabetical order by author surname):

Paolo Bacigalupi The Windup Girl (it was one of my Top Reads of 2010)

Iain M Banks The Hydrogen Sonata (Andrew Robins reviewed this in 2012)

Kristin Cashore Graceling (I interviewed Kristin when Bitterblue, the sequel to Graceling, was published in 2012.)

Justin Cronin The Passage (the link is to my own “What I’m Reading” post)

Charlaine Harris Dead Until Dark (although the book I was reading in mid 2010 was Definitely Dead — ca. No 6 on the Sookie Stackhouse series — Dead Until Dark was the title that kicked it all off. )

Kim Stanley Robinson 2312 (Andrew Robins reviewed this in 2012 as well.)

Brandon Sanderson The Way Of Kings (You may recall that I loved this book in 2011 and also interviewed Brandon Sanderson that same year.)

And of course it’s lovely to see The Heir Of Night in the giveaway, too, along with so many other books and authors I like and respect, including the wonderful Nalini Singh.

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment telling the good folk at The Realm who your favourite SFF author is: easy-peasy!

—

Now For What’s Coming Up:

First off, tomorrow I continue Living Fictionally and post the second instalment of Ithaca — the first of which posted last Sunday. (I know, spinning it out, but ya gotta make the goodness last — my goodness, anyway, in stretching to additional blog posts. 😉 )

While on Tuesday, I shall be guest editor on The Tuesday Poem Hub and featuring a new-to-you poem from my friend and fellow poet, Frankie McMillan, whose second poetry collection, There are no horses in heaven (Canterbury University Press) is being published this coming Thursday — the launch is at the University (of Canterbury)  Book Shop at 5.30 pm.

Sometime next week, I also hope to hope my reader’s report on Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life…

And that’s about it for the looking ahead, for now.