Flippin' 'eck

Well, it's been a while since I even thought of updating, so bear with me. I may be a little rusty with this concept of writing about myself and what's going on at length.

Of late I've been somewhat inundated by work and stress. I've managed to overcome a knee injury to immediately find myself sidelined again by a back strain. I've also started to work on a new project, an epic space opera with a Dune influence (more updates on that when things really start to roll; thus far, I've been in the planning stage).

But what I really want to write about is the book list of must-read books I've been making of late. It would be fair to say that, for a supposedly educated twenty-year-old, I've missed out on a surprising amount of books. I've never read Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D'Urbervilles has never previously interested me, and I've never gone beyond the front cover of Catch-22.

I've broken this list down: SF is my preferred genre, and my 'must-reads' there have numbered 31. Works of non-fiction clock in at about a dozen. Modern classics aplenty (around 20) are there, alongside a slightly smaller number of older classics.

Perhaps the most surprising category of these 'must-reads' are the contemporary works I want to read over the coming months. The Da Vinci Code... Twilight... They're not exactly classics, so why bother with them? I've always found it interesting to broaden my horizons with works such as those as well as the many hundreds of actual classics.

I've already knocked the first book off the list. Iain M. Banks' Look To Windward was completed last week with the sound of me in awe in the background. I'm a big fan of Banks, and Windward didn't let me down in the slightest.

Just to sign off, if people want to make recommendations, I'm open to them. My horizons need broadening, and what better way to find new books than to have them suggested to me?