Music and Books: My 2010 Discoveries

Another New Year's Day, just like the day before
Same old sky of gray, same empty bottles on the floor....

Oops, sorry, I was singing with Slaid Cleaves, one of my 2010 Discoveries.

First off, a huge congrats to KELLY, who won the big 11-books-for-2011 giveaway! The regular blog will resume tomorrow with a giveaway of Margaret  Ronald's new urban fantasy, Soul Hunt. Stay tuned...

Today, I'll just throw out some of my favorite new finds of 2010:

In music: Slaid Cleaves and Gulf Morlix, both of whom are alt-folk-country singer-songwriters extraordinare from the Austin music scene. Gurf knows his way around a hook, and Slaid is sheer poetry.

In books: I read, by my last count, about 80 books in 2010--most fiction. Some of my favorites, off the top of my head:

* Alex Bledsoe's vampire novels Blood Groove and Girls with Games of Blood. Nothing romantic about these vamps; the end of Blood Groove is still giving me nightmares....

* The release of Lover Mine from the incomparable J.R. Ward, which of course prompted me to re-read the entire Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Again. Okay, it wasn't a discovery but I had to throw it in anyway...

* Steampunk, a new genre for me, especially Mark Hodder's The Strange Affair of Spring-Heeled Jack, a book so completely unlike anything I'd read that it blew the top of my head off. Which might explain a lot, now that I think about it.

* Great new British urban fantasy from Angry Robot, especially Mike Shevdon's Sixty-One Nails and The  Road to Bedlam...Okay, I'll stop here.

Back to business tomorrow...Wherever you are, have a Happy New Year!