Bookspotting and Finishing

Bookspotting is back this week with a George RR Martin sighting on the MTR. The battered paperback had a red cover, so I believe that means it was A Feast for Crows. I also spotted a schoolboy reading Rick Riordan's Son of Neptune on the train. In a coffee shop this weekend, two women were poring over notepads and a book about getting out of debt. A young man nearby was reading Eating Smoke, Chris Thrall's memoir of drug addiction and triads in 90s Hong Kong. On my way home from work today, a man walking in front of me was carrying Justin Cronin's The Twelve. My friends are getting into the whole bookspotting thing, too. One reported that she just finished reading First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung and she's about to start The Happiness Project. My fiance is listening to The Stand by Stephen King on his iPhone. I spotted two Hong Kong guidebooks this week, one in English and one in Chinese.

I've spent a fair bit of time haunting bookstores over the past few weeks waiting to get my copy of A Memory of Light, the final installment in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. The is a series of hefty epic fantasy novels that I've been reading since my dad introduced them to me in junior high. Think the entire Harry Potter series if all the books were as long as #7. Then multiply it by two. The 14th book came out two weeks ago, but the only two bookstores that had it on release day were sold out by the time I got there. I'm looking forward to finally finishing this journey that has, among other things, made it through the death of its original author (for whom I am still in mourning).

Speaking of finishing things, today I completed the second draft of the novel I wrote during National Novel Writing Month. I'm getting ready to send it off to beta readers and then start the second book in what I hope will be a 3-book series. I'm feeling rather optimistic today...

What are people reading in your town this week? Have you finished any big projects recently?

Forgot to mention that I also have a guest post about Marina Bay in Singapore over at Pens on a World Map.