One of the things I love about living in Kamloops is the Music in the Park event. It runs for two months and is free concerts every night at one of the major parks in town. Every year since we moved here we’ve spent at least one night a week there (unless we are smoked out by wildfires). They always have some great local and regional bands including some fantastic cover bands. We enjoy the music, but the best part of it is getting to lay on a blanket in the dusk reading.
Yep, I go to concerts to read.
What it means is that during the summer I end up reading a lot more books because I have a two hour chunk a few times a week set aside just to read instead of only having the last 45 minutes before I go to bed. This means that I go from taking a few months to get through a book to completing them in a week or so.
Some books I read this summer that I’d recommend:
- The Interdependency trilogy by John Scalzi
- Interstellar politics with a lot of assassinations, machinations, and a threat only a physicist can save the empire from.
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
- If you like the tone of the Gormenghast series but with a bit more hope and a bit more happening, this one’s for you.
- Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
- Not every fantasy novel needs to be epic, sometimes they can just be about building and saving a coffee shop.
- Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
- Bringing together some of the tropiest tropes in YA dystopia but subverting them in new and innovative ways, add in some strong Chinese inspiration, giant mechs, and social commentary.
- The Sibyl’s War trilogy by Timothy Zahn
- I haven’t read the third book yet, but I love the idea of a book where the main character doesn’t know and can’t know everything. It leads to some very human interactions in a fast paced sci-fi.
I read a few other ones this summer, but those eight were the best.
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