It's March tomorrow - the year is slipping away fast and those deadlines are creeping up and snapping at my ass from all directions. My current reading list is not helping me feel uber-positive about actually reaching them but no matter. Here's what my current physical world reading list looks like:
Worthy of note here are the top two on the stack that Eleanor brought home from a swift trip to London yesterday and as soon as I'm done with Advent, I'll be diving in. Advent is actually well worth investigating - running along the same lines as Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising sequence, it's well put together, if not a little too similar to Dark to really sing - still, it wouldn't be the first time an entire plotline had been re-imagined for a generation that missed the original. How many of you have actually heard of Susan Cooper anyway?
(Note: if you're going to hunt it down, there's some great covers for the book from the original run which makes it look like exactly what it is (an original and exciting pagan-esque adventure - here's the cover for Over Sea, Under Stone) and a re-release which makes it look about as interesting and original as an empty soup tin that you should be ashamed to show up anywhere in public with. You can see that here. God only knows what they were thinking - I hope somebody at the office got suitably punished but probably not.)
I digress - Chris Holm: I read the first couple of chapters of Dead Harvest while I was waiting for Eleanor to finish up swimming. It looks great fun and I can't wait to really dig in. The covers look like this:
and I just noticed that the third book in the series, The Big Reap is due out in July. That cover look like this, so watch out for it:
When she handed them to me, I thought she had been lurking in back street junk shops again, but the idea to go back to a classic Penguin type design is not as easy to pull off as it might appear. I guess once you're rolling with the concept and you know it works, it's a different story. Anyway, the rather excellent work comes courtesy of a design company called Amazing15. That's a link their company right there but for a whole blog post on Holm's covers, simply go here. Mr Holm himself can be found here. Hats off to Angry Robot for harvesting the whole concept too.
Jealous? Just a little. Maybe.
How they managed to pass me by for all this time though... I'm not sure. Something is amiss there. It's not like me to not pick up on a book that's right up my street and has a killer cover. Weird. I think Mr Holm and I could become friends... maybe some day down the road when I too have navigated what seems to be a seven year right of passage onto the world's shelves (which isn't so far away now I look back - man, I took some hefty wrong turns along the way), we'll find out.
Or I could just say fuck it and drop him an email like I normally do...
That was longer than I intended. I'll post. Before I disappear to write some more - a shot in the dark: on the off chance that anybody passing by knows where I might be able to contact the illustrator Basil Gogos, please drop me a note... it's for something to do with the day job.