First in what is likely to be a short-lived series.

The Murderbot Diaries books 1-7 by Martha Wells, mostly good, mostly novellas and thus totally overpriced at around 10p per page (most other books I compared to came in at between 2 and 5 pence per page). They’re good but not that good. Get them from the library or borrow from a friend.

Lockwood and Co books 1 and 2 by Jonathan Stroud: The Screaming Staircase And The Whispering Skull. These are the two books which made up the first 8-episode season of the Netflix TV show directed by Joe Cornish (which was definitely cancelled before its time). The books were good fun, and the premise (ghosts are overrunning the UK, but only children can see or fight them) was novel and well-executed.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi – more boring than expected given that it won the Locus award and was nominated for the Hugo. Multiverse traversal and kaiju sounds like a good principle. It does not pay off.

Tell me an Ending by Jo Harkin – what happens if you can have memories selectively wiped? And what if you can have the memory of having your memory erased, erased? A good story that I enjoyed.

That’s 11 books in January supported by a whole bunch of novellas in the Murderbot series, and a pace I totally can’t sustain, but it felt good to be reading this number of books again!