Introducing - Happy Endings?

Its fair to say I love reading but as with many of my friends there tends to be an accidental accumulation of books to read. Within Mount To Be Read lurk many treasures but I do sort of have a consisiant theme I don’t quite get around to ending series even ones I love very much.

Partly this is just time pressures. Especially now that I blog I tend to focus on what is published immediately and I think many bloggers will admit we tend to go for the shiny new ones while the backlists hang over there add in last year’s fantastic year of never moving and it’s no surprise my reading schedules went weird. I also suspect this is partly a desire not to let go. The joy of reading is plunging yourself into another world and the lives of characters we come to think of as real people living in our heads. Knowing that when I close the covers of a book this is the end - that’s …painful. There is finally the fear that the landing of the series won’t be everything I wanted it to be - the tasteless dessert that wipes the good memory of the meal.

But I think now I can turn around to me and say oi that’s stupid. A lot of TBR is all about delayed pleasure - I’m saving the book until the stars align in this way…or I get free time or when I’ve read the next blog release… and that’s not fair on ourselves; we are not giving ourselves the chance to enjoy a book and ultimately I blog for fun and usually these are books I would lobe to talk to you about. One of my favourite endings to a series is Terry Pratchett’s The Shepherd’s Crown - it has a beautiful ending to a beloved character’s arc; it manages to pay tribute to many others we met along the way and…..s a reader you realise that world is continuing. We can never see the future stories but it’s there bubbling in our subconscious. The other books in the sequence some I loved even more are not destroyed by a final book - they’re still there on my shelves and we also need to think about how in some series the author’s intention was always to finish the journey….eventually. I don’t expect all endings to series to be happy for those in the world we are reading about but the reader should be able to say yes I understand why that story ended in that way even while I dry my tears from my face and repair my broken heart.

So this section of the blog which I’m going to try and aim for a weekly occurrence is a chance to catch up on those series. Often the final or latest instalment (or sometimes more); sometimes a set of books I’ve been meaning to read for ages and just never got to start and now later books are already out. This is a chance for me to tell you about why these books have grabbed me (and yes this means I tempt for at least two for the price of one - what a shame!) and discuss how the book works on it’s own and in it’s wider series context. And in typical fashion ignoring some of that my first book next weekend will be something I’ve only recently got my hands on. Over the last three years I have become a huge fan of Anna Smith Spark’s The Empires of Dust series - a gorgeously written fantasy opera-style tale of the wrong kind of chosen one. The final volume The House of Sacrifice has got into my paws and it’s time to no doubt find how they all lived happily ever after…

See you soon! But feel free to talk below in comments on your favourite series and why - I will be making notes…