#amreading

I did an email interview with the Sunday Times for its "Bookends" column, which should appear in the papers tomorrow. If you're curious about why and what I read, and how it influences my writing, go take a look.

It's good timing because I've been on a reading spree lately. It started a couple of months ago when I was pushing myself to finish the first draft of the novel, because I realised that I needed to diligently feed the mind and the spirit with fiction, rather than my usual daily fodder of news and non-fiction. Then I kept reading crazily because there were all these books and book reviews that kept waving their hands at me for attention.

I finished three books in the last three days: one I started about a month ago, another I started a week or two ago, and Dave Chua and Xiao Yan's entertaining graphic novel The Girl Under the Bed in one sitting today. Which makes a few of the titles I name-dropped in my Sunday Times interview out of date, but never mind.

Already thinking about the next few books I'm going to read. One of them, I'm ashamed to admit, is The Crystal Shard, the first book in R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy, which I really should've read when I was a teenager during my heyday of science fiction and fantasy reading.

I've also been messing about with Goodreads lately, even though it's now an Amazon property and a friend in the book business has recommended LibraryThing instead. My Goodreads profile is hardly complete, but all my authory stuff is there and I've found it useful for keeping track of books that I want to read.

Okay, back to the books.