Well, this is belated, obviously. It turns out that pouring about four and a half weeks’ worth of day job work hours into the first three weeks of October is not very conducive to accomplishing anything even remotely blogging related. And continuing to work 50+ hours/week has not been helping with my non-day-job-related productivity. Getting this together also hasn’t been helped by the fact that–real talk–there’s just not that much going on in this final quarter of 2018, books-wise. In the couple of years I’ve been doing these reading lists, this is by far the shortest one, and this fall marks the first time in quite a while that I’ve found myself quite so much without a strict plan for what I’ll be reading in the coming months.

That’s not to say that the end of 2018 is completely without books that I’m excited about, but I’m also expecting to spend a good amount of time catching up on things that I’ve missed earlier in the year (and perhaps even on some 2017 titles that I never got around to). Here’s what’s on my list for the rest of this year.

Tor.com Publishing

It’s a light couple of months from Tor.com, but I’ve already read the newest Murderbot and can’t wait to read Finding Baba Yaga and Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne Arrives.

• Exit Strategy by Martha Wells – 10/2
  Martha Wells definitely nails the landing on this series, and I cannot wait to read Murderbot novels in the future.
• Finding Baba Yaga by Jane Yolen – 10/30
  A novel in verse by a legend. What’s not to be excited about?
• Static Ruin by Corey J. White – 11/6
  I never did get around to reading the second book in this trilogy, though I liked the first. Novellas have, in general, been exactly what I want to read lately, so I’m hoping to fit it in before the end of the year.
• Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield – 11/6
  I haven’t read a good time travel story in a long time, and I’ve got high hopes for this one.
• Bedfellow by Jeremy C. Shipp – 11/13
  I’m not very keen on horror, so I’ll probably skip this one, but surely it will be a great read for somebody.

Comics and Graphic Novels

• Saga, Vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples – 10/2
  I read this the day my pre-order arrived, and I still haven’t recovered. What a fucking time for a year-long hiatus.

Novels

• Zero Sum Game by S.L. Huang – 10/2
• There Before the Chaos by K.B. Wagers – 10/9
• The Phoenix Empress by K. Arsenault Rivera – 10/9
  One of the books I skipped in 2017 was The Tiger’s Daughter, but the release of its sequel and a couple of promising reviews prompted me to finally get a copy of it, which is currently on my shelf waiting to be opened sometime soon.
• The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi – 10/16
• The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson – 10/30
  The Traitor Baru Cormorant was a book that is so well-plotted and compulsively readable that I couldn’t put it down, but it’s also the worst sort of exploitative queer tragedy played for shock value that I’ve ever read.
• Empire of Sand by Tasha Suri – 11/13
• Creatures of Want and Ruin by Molly Tanzer – 11/13
• City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender – 11/20
• A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy by Alex White – 12/11

Realistically.

Because one must be realistic about these things.

I haven’t worked less than 50 hours in a week at my physically demanding day job in a couple of months, and I am wiped out. Between election stress and day job stress and sheer physical exhaustion, I haven’t had that much time for reading, and most of what I’ve been reading lately is novella-length. There are a few things on this list that I will definitely be making time for, but the most likely scenario between now and the end of 2018 (which is, natch, approximately a thousand years from now) is that I will be spending a lot of time reading backlist titles and catching up on things that I missed earlier this year (I’m coming for you, The Moons of Barsk).

Most of all, I’m hoping to just spend the rest of this year chilling the heck out and recharging so I can get back into some proper blogging in the new year.