12 months of Sword & Laser

This year I tried to read all the book assignments of the Sword & Laser book-club in order to dive into worlds that I otherwise never would have discovered. The 12 books of 2019 where the following:

• “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• “A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
• “An Unkindness of Ghosts” by Rivers Solomon
• “We are Legion We are Bob” by Dennis E. Taylor
• “Night’s Master” by Tanith Lee
• “Circe” by Madeline Miller
• “Mortal Engines” by Philip Reeve
• “Jade City” by Fonda Lee
• “Slan” by A.E. van Vogt
• “Lovecraft Country” by Matt Ruff
• “Zeroes” by Chuck Wendig
• “Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr” by John Crowley

While I enjoyed pretty much all of them but “Night’s Master”, “Circe” was absolutely my favourite. At school I loved everything related to Greek and Roman mythology and this book about the daughter of Helios and Perse revived that love! I totally forgot how intertwined the fates of Odysseus, Daedalus, the Minotaur, and Circe were!

That list also includes quite a few books that were already on my radar: “Mortal Engines” and “We are Legion, We are Bob” in particular. On the other hand “Lovecraft Country” and “Ka” were so far away from my normal comfort zone that I wouldn’t even have heard about them.

At first I also tried to write about each of these books in their own blog posts. Sadly, though, I stopped doing this around the time of moving into our new apartment and never picked it up again. I will try to do better next year, I promise!

This doesn’t mean that I will continue reading all Sword & Laser assignments, though. It was very entertaining and I read tons of great books that I otherwise wouldn’t have, but my backlog has continuously grown over the last 12 months and I want to do something about this 😅 That being said, I will still take a look at every new assignment 🙂