David Hebblethwaite has just done this on his blog, and I read his blog, so I guess I’ll have a go at it. Again. Because we’ve all done this before. But so what: it’s about books. Books are good, and reading them is even better. The only thing better than reading that you can do with books is, er building a fallout shelter with them and pretending World War III has happened. Or maybe a zombie apocalypse. And while the rest of the world succumbs to anarchy and chaos and radiation / undeadedness, you read the books you built your shelter from. Win.

Anyway, the meme: it goes like this:

1. the book I’m currently reading
Synthajoy, DG Compton – the best British science fiction writer of the 1970s, and his novels continue to be superb and very, er, 1970s. And that’s why I think they’re brilliant.

2. the last book I finished
Maul, Tricia Sullivan – this was October’s book for my reading challenge (see here), and I was expecting to like this a lot more than I did. Proper full write-up to follow soon-ish. For the present, I will say it has a slightly American Psycho vibe to it which, like that book, struggles to convince, and a near-future in which men are exceedingly rare, and correspondingly prized, due to a plague, which feels like an entirely different type of society.

3. the next book I want to read
The Unit, Ninni Holmqvist – the TBR actually numbers in the hundreds, but I have a sort of mini-TBR, a half-dozen books which will be my next immediate reads. And top of this list is The Unit, which Michaela Staton gave me ages ago and keeps on asking me what it’s like. It does look very interesting, in fact.

4. the last book I bought
Leviathan’s Deep, Jayge Carr – when I say “bought”, I didn’t pay any money for this. It was priced 50p but since we’d just given the Harewood House second-hand bookshop two carriers bags full of books, they let us have the handful we wanted for nothing. Which was pretty cool, as Leviathan’s Deep had been on the wants list since reading Carr’s story in Women of Wonder: the Contemporary Years (see here). It’s a shame about the slightly dodgy cover art, though.

5. the last book I was given
Blood Count, Robert Goddard – I have no excuse for this one. Goddard writes formulaic potboilers, but I’ve read every one of his books to date. My mother got this from the above-mentioned second-hand bookshop, and has passed it on to me. In their defence, they are very quick reads.