I’ve been much enjoying David Black’s Harry Gilmour novels, about a young British submariner during World War II. It’s not my usual genre (I tend to read science fiction and fantasy), but it’s very nicely done.
I also recently finished Martha Wells’ latest in the Murderbot Diaries series of novels and novellas. The titular hero is a cyborg security unit in a far future; the books are fresh, fun, and engaging, and Wells is good at creating nonhuman but emotionally engaging characters (as in her Books of the Raksura series).
I’m rewatching the iZombie series with my wife (who hadn’t seen it before), and it’s as good the second time around. The short plot summary is: Young doctor turns zombie, gets a job at a morgue for obvious reasons, finds that eating a brain temporarily gives her some of the dead person’s memories and character traits, uses this to help a police officer solve murders. But what makes it work is the engaging set of characters (see if you can guess my favorite), coupled with the five-season story arc; let’s just say that a lot changes over those five seasons.
I haven’t been listening to much music recently, and the new items on my playlist are Russian songs by DDT (the one about the wreck of the Kursk, plus three about war: Умирали пацаны, Господь нас уважает, and Война бывает детская; Russian singer-songwriters, at least back to Bulat Okudzhava, have written much more really good material about war than I’ve heard in English). I realize that this isn’t much use to most of our readers.
Please feel free, though, to post your recommendations in any genre and medium. I think it’s more fun, and less likely to lead to repetition if I post this query again, if you focus on what you’ve been reading, watching, or listening to recently; but don’t feel tied down to that if you’re going through a dry spell.
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