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A depressing thought struck me as I was wandering through the Science Fiction and fantasy section of Borders in Preston - as an aside here I have to say that Borders doesn't feel like a proper book shop, but it's the biggest not-a-proper-bookshop nearby and, as such, is probably my best chance of finding something that whets my appetite.

The thought that struck me was this: no-one - or at least only a very, very small subset of all the authors in the world - is writing the novels that I want to read.

It's a conceit, true, and doubtless it's an inaccurate one, but the point remains: I'm having difficulty finding anything that interests me in the bookstores, particularly in the genres that I've spent most of my life reading in avid fashion.

I'm well aware that this isn't exactly the best way to go about following one of the cardinal rules of writing, which is 'read a lot.' Come to think about it, I might actually take a trip to Waterstones (which does feel like a proper bookshop, even if it is an overpriced one) and just buy four or five books whose covers or blurbs produce even a flicker of interest, just on the offchance that I'm being very snobbish about this whole thing.

I have a real desire right now to read some good, old fashioned 'hard' sci-fi. Clarke, Asimov, Dick et. al. are favourites of mine, and every once in a while I feel the need to read one of their works just to remind me how good good Sci Fi can be. Too much of the Sci Fi that I've been picking up and reading these days borders on fantasy, in the sense that there are certain deus ex machina elements of it that are the kind of thing that you'd expect to find in a fantasy novel where, importantly, they don't require a logical explanation. Sci Fi for me has to remain grounded in that most basic of literary foundations: truth.

I must confess that I've also got a hankering for writing some proper Sci Fi (for a given value of proper, obviously); to write a story that keeps us at once in the real world and at the same time uses fantastical - but logically plausible - elements to enhance its plot would be a fantastic bit of fun, I think.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I love Firefly and by extension Serenity so much. The story has classic elements of Sci Fi of course - spaceships, psychics, lasers and interplanetary alliances - but it stays honest and truthful by meshing those with the best elements of the Western, including the almost-antihero protagonists and the fact their life, in essence, is that of frontier tradesmen (and criminals). The fact that its creator is a raving genius may have something to do with its greatness, but let's not dwell on that too much. But before I churn out my SF masterwork-to-rival-the-imagination-of-Joss, I suppose I'd better get back into the habit of writing anything very much at all. Once again, blogging has been procrastination; I really should be writing.

My first reaction upon reading the news that the latest Harry Potter book had won the book of the year award was 'oh, please.' Then I read a bit further down the article and discovered that it was a publicly-voted win and thought 'oh, well that's alright then.'

It's not that I don't like Harry Potter. They're perfectly enjoyable and for the most part the story is pretty good, but there are things that just grate on me, particularly about the last few books in the series. Perhaps it's the success of the franchise that's done it (although if I remember correctly some of the problems were there from the beginning), but some of the faults with the stories are down to poor writing and, less forgivably, poor editing. I'm still at a loss to explain why someone armed with a blue pencil and a bit of a backbone didn't remove "'Snape!' Slughorn ejaculated" from Half Blood Prince. I wonder if Rowling has garnered the same status with editors that Tolkien had: Thou shalt not edit.

Or perhaps I'm just a bitter and twisted wannabe writer thinking 'I could do better than that.' Yes, that seems more likely. It doesn't help that the WordPress control panel seems to be running rather slowly this morning.

I am at a loss, dear reader, for a Good Book.

Now, before you leap to any unfortunate conclusions about me and my collection, let me tell you this: I own a lot of Good Books. A high percentage of the books on my shelves are Good Books. I am not, in the physical sense, at a loss for one.

Trouble is, I've read them all. Most of them several times. And after spending four months in the company of my own imagination trying to create what I hope will, in turn, grow to be a Good Book, I'm looking for new ground to tread. You'll have already seen this last week that I've been reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Well, I was reading Neverwhere, but now I've finished it and Sarah's reading it, so there goes one idea (it was, I must tell you, a Good Book. Just so you know).

I've also read Anansi Boys, which I've owned since it came out (much to my chagrin Ottaker's are now selling autographed copies for twenty quid a pop; I bought the original non-autographed version for not much less, not including postage) but have never quite managed to get around to reading. I read it in a day and a bit and, unsurprisingly, found it also to be a Good Book.

I do have an only partially-read copy of Susannah Clarke's epic tome Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I bought quite cheaply in Dublin they year before last, but which I have again never got around to reading. I'm not too sure on this score. I know that many people, including the apparently omnipresent Mr Gaiman, have heaped plaudits upon it, but I found it a bit plodding and to be honest the fact that you could happily beat a man to death with it rather puts me off picking it up again; reading it in bed would require forearms like ones I don't have, and am unlikely to develop in the near future.

And the more I look on Amazon for Good Books (d'you think I can drop the capitalisation now? Good) the more I struggle to find them. There's no substitute, when looking for your next read, for picking a book up and reading its first few pages. That, after all, is why we were all taught the value of opening lines when we were first taught about writing stories.

Perhaps, then, a trip to Waterstones is in order tomorrow. Yes, that seems quite likely.