Help, I’m in a reading slump

I’ve been in reading slump for months so you if you have any recommendations for fun science fiction and fantasy to lift my spirits, let me know! I still haven’t figured out how to turn on comments, so email me at raf @ rafmorgan dot com or visit my Facebook page.

I have been able to do some re-reading, so I gorged on Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen’s Thief series in anticipation of the newest and last book, The Return of the Thief, being released in March–and then the publication got pushed back to the end of August! WAH!

Still, I love these books and love re-reading them to figure out WHY. If you don’t know them, I think of them as heist books, except you don’t know what the heist is and instead of a team of thieves you have Gen, who is clever and annoying, but not too annoying because he really cares about other people, even ones (especially?) he probably shouldn’t. Then there’s the setting, which is a kind of fantasy Greece, but with guns and watches, which now that I think of is bordering on desert, isn’t it? It’s dry and the soil is thin and there’s a place called The Sea of Olives, which is endless olive trees shivering silver when the wind turns over their leaves. When The Thief came out in 1995, and even when I read it, sometime in the early 2000s I think, fantasy was still heavily northern European and medieval, and it was so fresh to read something different but familiar because of it’s base in Greek mythology (or Greek-like mythology). And then Megan Whalen Turner is just so clever. I wish I could write like she does–except I could never be as clever and smart and twisty as she is. (Twisty as cunning not twisty as dark.) I never see her endings coming (probably because I can’t slow down when I’m reading her books) but they’re an absolute delight to re-read, watching all the pieces click into place and lead inevitably to the end.