Book Club ~ recent reads.

At the moment I am reading more than ever. My reading took a dip in the past years but for whatever reason instead of listening to music on my train journeys to university I read instead now, so the second Recent Reads has come about pretty quickly. Now that I've rekindled my love of books the list that I want to read is growing pretty much exponentially, especially since I've discovered my university library actually has a lot of fiction if you know what you're looking for. Plus, the boyfriend's sister-in-law bought me American Gods which I am desperate to read but which is slightly too big for taking with me to university.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

I did a super long, in depth review here if you want to have a look, including a chat about the differences in the film as well. But in short; really liked it! Especially the middle bit. Briefly it involves six completely different stories, written in different styles, engendering different genres and some of those stories are crazy imaginative and generally it is just a really impressive, enjoyable book.

100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels by Stephen E. Andrews and Nick Rennison

For my Camp NaNoWriMo I've been writing a sci-fi story so I thought I would have a look at other sci-fi authors. I'd say reading Cloud Atlas triggered this renewed interest in science fiction literature since the last two stories in the book were both sci-fi. I really like this little book, there are loads of recommendations on top of the 100 as well as a crash course on the history of the genre. I'm actually thinking about buying it and ticking off each of the titles that I read.

Dark X-Men by Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk

My brother is the reason I am a fan Marvel (and comics), specifically the X-Men. The other day he told me I had to read this so I took it on the train with me and read it over two journeys. First of all this is one of those comics were the different aspects of the Marvel universe interact, so there were characters from X-Men, Spiderman and a few others. Personally I'm not a fan of that, I like my franchises isolated. Also, there was a lot of back story that I didn't understand, I know a fair amount of the original X-men's history but with all the alternate universes and curious variations on characters it is easy to get lost. I also felt the ending was dissatisfying and thought there should have been more to really close the story. However, I did like some of the ideas and the little titles under each character during the beginning of each chapter where interesting and funny.

That's it for Book Club. I'm currently reading The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and really enjoying it, so that will definitely be in the next episode of Book Club! As always I would love to know your opinions on any of the books mentioned, or any books you've read recently!