This morning, WordPress sent me, for reasons best known to themselves, a list of the posts I’ve published on this blog on 28th May. The randomness of this list appealed to me, so I reread the posts.
These posts, which have no connection save the day of the month they were published on, reminded me of the samples scientists take by drilling into the permafrost to extract an ice core that traps the history of the tundra. So I selected six of them from 28th May 2024 to 28th May 2017 to repost here.
Drill down through the years with me and see what earlier versions of me were posting on this day.
2024
To my surprise, ‘My Murder’ was one of my favourite reads of 2024. I’d expected a pleasant but probably quirky and lightweight murder mystery given a twist by the use of cloning technology. That would have been fun, but I doubt I’d have remembered it two years later. It turned out this was a much more serious and interesting read. Here’s what I wrote about it at the time:
“‘My Murder‘ is an original, surprising, beautifully written and often unsettling novel about a woman trying to discover?/build? her own identity and gain agency in a world in which male violence against women is so ubiquitous it seems elemental. It’s not a polemic. It’s a compelling personal journey, told in the first-person, from the point of view of Lou (wife, mother, murder victim, clone) who is haunted by the sense that her life is inauthentic and that she is missing the information she needs to make herself real.”
Click on the link below to read the whole review.
2023
This post isn’t a book review. It’s about a poem that irritated me so much that I wrote a poem in the same style in response. The poem was ‘This Is Just To Say’ by William Carlos Williams. When I read it, it left a bad taste in my mouth that lingered long enough to prompt me to reply by writing a poem called ‘This Is Just To Gloat’. Click on the link below to see the post and the text of both poems.
2021
In 2021, I was using #FridayReads post to share details of the books I intended to read in the following week. This #FridayReads post happens to be about two of my favourite fantasy reads in 2021. Below, I’ve put a link to the #FridayReads post and a link to the reviews of wrote for the books. I recommend both books to you.
2019
Given that this was an uncurated list of posts, linked by nothing more than temporal alignment, I was surprised to find yet another post about a book that I rated highly. ‘Into The Drowning Deep’ was my first Mira Grant book, and I loved it. It’s hard-edged, exciting, original Science Fiction, tinged with more than a little horror and written with a confident mastery of tone and pace. Click on the link below to read my review, including an extract from the audiobook.
2018
‘Terminal Alliance’ was my first Jim Hines novel, and it made me an instant fan. It was another book that I expected to be a smile but not much more, a sort of ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ romp. What I got was a five-star Science Fiction novel that was funny, fast-paced, witty and original but that also had a clever and quite serious plot.
Since 2018, I’ve read another six Jim Hines novels, including the other two books in the Janitors of the Post-Apocalypsetrilogy and his wonderful standalone fantasy ‘Kitemaster’ (2025), which is my favourite so far.
2017
‘And the Rest Is History’ is another book that I can highly recommend. I read ‘Just One Damned Thing After Another’ (2014), the first book in this series, in the month it was published, and I fell in love with it. I reviewed it on 25th May 2014, three days later, and it would have made this list. It was one of my first reviews on this blog. I remember enjoying writing the review because I wanted to share my enthusiasm for something unique and exciting. Click on the link below to read my love letter to Saint Mary’s.
I had the eighth novel in the St Mary’s series, ‘And The Rest Is History’, on pre-order and dived into it as soon as it came out in April 2017. It was a tough but rewarding read. By then, the Saint Mary’s books had become darker and more emotionally challenging. The team was under strain, and muddling through with a stiff upper lip was no longer consequence-free. Click on the link below to read my review.
Mike Finn's Fiction 