Stacking The Shelves (Reading Reality) and The Sunday Post (Caffeinated Reviewer) are both blog memes about sharing the books we're adding to the shelves and sharing news of the week ahead.
New Arrivals
First up this week, a pair of online purchases, an in-store impulse buy, and a used bookstore pick-up. The Forgetting Moon by Brian Lee Durfee and Age of Myth by Michael J. Sullivan were my online purchases, both prompted by some Reddit threads on current fantasy sagas with the feel of 80s/90s epic fantasy.
The Sword Defiant by Gareth Hanrahan was my impulse buy, a book that caught my eye with the glowing magical sword on the cover, intrigued me with the back cover blurb, and then won me over with a Goodreads reviewer calling it "Witcher meets Lord of the Rings, if both combined were a D&D campaign."
And my used bookstore pick-up is a slightly tattered copy of The Tree of Swords and Jewels by C. J. Cherryh. I really wanted the paperback edition of the duology, but this will tide me over until I can find one.
Currently Reading
I still have a few tough calls to trim 22 finalists down to 15 for my Gender Ever After anthology, but I'm done reading, so I've been dipping back into the shelves. The Sword Defiant by Gareth Hanrahan was kind of a reward for finishing those submissions, so I started it as soon as we got home.
Jungle of Stone by William Carlsen is a book I bought for vacation reading, but with that vacation being pushed to April, I decided I'm not waiting. So far, the story of rediscovering the lost civilization of the Maya, forgotten even by those who lived amid the ruins, is fantastic.
And, finally, a book I've been equally anxious and hesitant to read. The story of The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker is almost as legendary as the story within it. This is a book that Barker talked about for 12 years, first as the lead novella in a new short story collection, then as a full-length novel when it outgrew that. At one point, he announced the final draft as being 243k words long, but what eventually hit the shelves was heavily edited and ghostwritten by Mark Alan Miller. Key scenes that Barker teased were missing, the whole thing has significant stylistic shifts, it's missing the prose we're used to, and the 125k wordcount is half the 243k that Barker has talked about.
A purported 'final draft' has been floating around for a few years, and while the 2005 date suggests a first complete draft (perhaps the first typed copy of his handwritten manuscript), not the 2010 final draft, I've seen enough good things written about it (especially those saying it's more comparable to The Great and Secret Show and Imajica) to hope its 224k words are authentic.
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