Some random book thoughts for November 2014

For the fourth month in a row we enter into a new month and I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to be writing about in these monthly updates. Like last month (and the others before) I’ll just start typing and we’ll see what we come up with when I get to the end.

October was a slow month for bookstore visits as “real life” kept getting in the way, plus with the start of hockey season my weekend free time drops to nearly zero as I ramp up blogging over on Sharkspage.com. I’ve also been added to the staff of a local online newspaper (The Worcester Herald) so that’s a little less time for reading and such. I did manage to find a couple paperbacks worth grabbing, with Michael Connelly’s The Gods of Guilt making its anticipated release, and The Ascendant by Drew Chapman making its way on to my “to-read list”.

Seeing as that’s a nice segue, I changed the way I keep track of my seemingly ever-growing to-read list. I had been using a multi-page spread sheet with pages for what I’ve read, what was on my shelves to read, and what I was looking for. Switching between the pages was getting unwieldy (especially if I had a couple books in my hand while browsing), so I decided to make it a single spreadsheet page with different font colors to indicate the things I originally had on different pages. It works pretty good, or at least it does so far. We’ll see how it goes when I make a used book store run and am dealing with looking at/for multiple things.

Just before writing this post I saw the scheduled releases in the science fiction/fantasy genre and once again not a ton of paperbacks that grabbed my attention. Like last month there were a couple hardcovers that looked good so I will be watching for those in the upcoming months for their paperback releases. I still haven’t found a comprehensive listing of new releases for the thriller or mystery genres. If any one knows of one please post it in the comments and I will love you forever (or give you a mention in an upcoming blog posting, whichever you’d prefer and/or gets me in the least amount of trouble).

As for what I’m reading lately. I’m making a run through W.E.B. Griffin’s “Badge of Honor” series, which is his fictional account of the Philadelphia police department in the early 1970s. The books are pretty good, and both not what you’d expect and exactly what you’d expect. There will be more on that as I will review each book and not the whole series at once. When I finish all those books Connelly’s The Gods of Guilt will likely be next, and then it will be back to the science fiction/fantasy for awhile. I’m getting close to having to decide what author I’m going to focus on next summer. Two years ago it was Connelly, this summer was Griffin. If you have any ideas of an author I might like shout it out below.

Not really a bookish topic, but I’m thinking about a name change here. Right now it’s Random Thoughts of 210Darryl because that was really what it was going to be when I started, but this blog has turned into a books and entertainment blog as opposed to just a random assortment of things I was going to post. I think a new name that was more encompassing of what I’m doing here might attract more readers, so that would be a plus. One thing that would go into it is I’d need to drop the “Random” motif I’ve added to some topics.

It seems I did have enough for a decent blog post here. Now I have 30 days to figure out what to do for next month. Until next time…