So in the past year I got relatively serious about amusing myself with reading, and using goodreads to keep track of books I have seen recommended that sounded interesting. They have this feature where stuff you've read ends up on a virtual shelf. Let's have a look, shall we?
Ed. note: plz to excuse any spurious double spacing you see... my keyboard's old and various keys like to emit two strokes when they're poked once. Lately the space bar has gotten in on the action.
It seems I opened the year in the midst of reading NK Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy, consisting of first, The Fifth Season, secondly The Obelisk Gate, and wrapping up with The Stone Sky. Oh my, what rich world-building and vivid characters! I've recently finished her novel The City We Became, which is a totally different, but richly imagined, world. She's definitely an author to return to. She has a way of revealing the weirdness of her worlds as the characters themselves figure out how it works and how to use it.
Another author of fantasy or science fiction (or both in one book!) who's a delight to meet is Charlie Jane Anders. I started on City in the Middle of the Night, set on a tide-locked planet as the human colonists in the twilight zone are forgetting how their earth-based tech works, and getting acquainted with the natives. On the strength of enjoying that, I read All the Birds in the Sky, which is a delightful mix of fantasy (one of the two main characters is a nature witch, who can talk to the birds) and science fiction (the other is a tech nerd who creates an artificial computerized intelligence). Both of the threads ring true to their genres. Later in the year I returned to her, reading a young adult novel called Victories Greater than Death. Really convincing teenage nerd characters.
A one-off, new-author-to-me delight called Among Others, by Jo Walton. Read this, you'll like it, says my official BFF. He's not wrong about this one. The flavor can be imagined from the disclaimer in the intro, to the effect that this is a work of fiction. Girls are never sixteen, Wales is an imaginary country, children are never sent away to boarding schools... but the fairies are real. Must read more of her stuff.
A couple YA things by Lauren Myracle, called ttyl and ttfn. Epistolary novels told in text messages.
Huh. Goodreads claims I read Cat's Cradle this past year. I remember it not at all. Perhaps I fat-fingered putting it on my want-to-read list and it ended up on the already-read one instead.
I read the entire Expanse saga, allegedly by one S. A. Corey. Good stuff, strong characters, most of the threads gathered in the end. I think there's one more prequel short story coming out in March 2022 called Drive.
Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds. A really gripping world-jumping tale.
Everywhere She's Not, by N. John Shore. I helped kickstart this one. The characters are real enough that I had to put the book down for months in the middle because the protag is just too much like me and clueless. He does grow some, though. And I found myself wondering what became of him so I finished the book to find out. When we were kids we had a story book of The Ugly Duckling, which my sister was unable to sit through, feeling sorry for the title character and never getting to the happy ending. This one's like that.
The above-mentioned official BFF J. (who has appeared elsewhere in this diary as BFF J. Brewpub, which is not far wrong) organized a small book club. There are 4 of us. He and another guy came up with an elaborate voting system for choosing new books to read, and among other series we've sampled are the first 5 of the Laurie R. King detective novels featuring a young (as old as the 20th century) woman named Mary Russell who meets a retired detective named Sherlock Holmes. Titles so far are The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor, and O Jerusalem. Good stuff. Groping for the titles I see there are also interstitial short stories. I should read them.
Gene Wolfe, The Borrowed Man. As in, checked out of a library. The narrator comes right out and tells you he's not telling you everything. And I think some of what he does tell us is wrong, though perhaps he believes it.
Another book club thing, Robertson Davies. We've read two of his trilogies, Salterton and Deptford. I once surprised myself by saying that if he could write as fast as I read, I'd never read anything else. He's that good. And then he went and croaked 2/3 of the way through his fourth trilogy. Bummer.
One real treasure from this past year (I created a "favorites" list on goodreads, just for this book) is Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers. Young woman of color trying to please her insatiable father (called Colonel, even by his family) gets a PhD in Astronomy (!) goes to Las Vegas to celebrate and while drunk marries a woman she's just met and can't remember when she sobers up. And then she has to figure out what drunk!Grace saw in her and how to be a responsible wife. Much fun.
A couple re-visits each to my own books, whilst composing a sequel... Necessary Lies and Ravynscroft by some guy named Richard Edgar. You might want to skip these (though of course I hope you don't).
Tess Sharpe's book The Girls I've Been. Kid grows up with a mom who's a grifter and con woman, and has been at least five characters invented for long cons. Now she's a hostage in a bank robbery gone bad.
Sam Cohen's Sarahland, a collection of short stories threaded together around characters named Sarah. Interesting stuff.
Book club again, and I slid into the middle of Dorothy Sayers, with Five Red Herrings and then Strong Poison.
Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem. I'm not sure what to say about this. The prose is kind of stiff and stilted, though it's in translation so hard to say if it's the author or the translator (Ken Liu, apparently no relation) who's written award-winning sci-fi of his own. I'm putting it down to the customs of Chinese sci-fi with a main character who was a dissident during various phases of the People's Republic.
Califia's Daughters by Leigh Richards, a pseudonym of Laurie R. King. Near-future post-apocalyptic tale in which the plague killed (and continues to kill) most of the male population. Well worth the read.
A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel. Mother-daughter team nudges humanity toward the stars while avoiding a band of brothers bent on doing them in. First of a series.
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey. Could be in the Wild West of Califia's Daughters. Coming of age and gritty survival with casualties. Our heroine runs away to join the librarians.
I re-read Lord of the Rings for the first time in decades. It holds up remarkably well.
In preparation for the long-awaited second volume of my cousin's Viking saga, I re-read volume one: Anno Draconis by Steve Bivans. It's a rip-roaring tale of the Viking invasion of Frankia and siege of Parisia in 885 AD, written by a military historian of the early middle ages. Highly recommended (but I'm a bit partial). Check him out at SteveBivans.com.
And that's pretty much it.
Ed. note: plz to excuse any spurious double spacing you see... my keyboard's old and various keys like to emit two strokes when they're poked once. Lately the space bar has gotten in on the action.
It seems I opened the year in the midst of reading NK Jemison's Broken Earth trilogy, consisting of first, The Fifth Season, secondly The Obelisk Gate, and wrapping up with The Stone Sky. Oh my, what rich world-building and vivid characters! I've recently finished her novel The City We Became, which is a totally different, but richly imagined, world. She's definitely an author to return to. She has a way of revealing the weirdness of her worlds as the characters themselves figure out how it works and how to use it.
Another author of fantasy or science fiction (or both in one book!) who's a delight to meet is Charlie Jane Anders. I started on City in the Middle of the Night, set on a tide-locked planet as the human colonists in the twilight zone are forgetting how their earth-based tech works, and getting acquainted with the natives. On the strength of enjoying that, I read All the Birds in the Sky, which is a delightful mix of fantasy (one of the two main characters is a nature witch, who can talk to the birds) and science fiction (the other is a tech nerd who creates an artificial computerized intelligence). Both of the threads ring true to their genres. Later in the year I returned to her, reading a young adult novel called Victories Greater than Death. Really convincing teenage nerd characters.
A one-off, new-author-to-me delight called Among Others, by Jo Walton. Read this, you'll like it, says my official BFF. He's not wrong about this one. The flavor can be imagined from the disclaimer in the intro, to the effect that this is a work of fiction. Girls are never sixteen, Wales is an imaginary country, children are never sent away to boarding schools... but the fairies are real. Must read more of her stuff.
A couple YA things by Lauren Myracle, called ttyl and ttfn. Epistolary novels told in text messages.
Huh. Goodreads claims I read Cat's Cradle this past year. I remember it not at all. Perhaps I fat-fingered putting it on my want-to-read list and it ended up on the already-read one instead.
I read the entire Expanse saga, allegedly by one S. A. Corey. Good stuff, strong characters, most of the threads gathered in the end. I think there's one more prequel short story coming out in March 2022 called Drive.
Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds. A really gripping world-jumping tale.
Everywhere She's Not, by N. John Shore. I helped kickstart this one. The characters are real enough that I had to put the book down for months in the middle because the protag is just too much like me and clueless. He does grow some, though. And I found myself wondering what became of him so I finished the book to find out. When we were kids we had a story book of The Ugly Duckling, which my sister was unable to sit through, feeling sorry for the title character and never getting to the happy ending. This one's like that.
The above-mentioned official BFF J. (who has appeared elsewhere in this diary as BFF J. Brewpub, which is not far wrong) organized a small book club. There are 4 of us. He and another guy came up with an elaborate voting system for choosing new books to read, and among other series we've sampled are the first 5 of the Laurie R. King detective novels featuring a young (as old as the 20th century) woman named Mary Russell who meets a retired detective named Sherlock Holmes. Titles so far are The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor, and O Jerusalem. Good stuff. Groping for the titles I see there are also interstitial short stories. I should read them.
Gene Wolfe, The Borrowed Man. As in, checked out of a library. The narrator comes right out and tells you he's not telling you everything. And I think some of what he does tell us is wrong, though perhaps he believes it.
Another book club thing, Robertson Davies. We've read two of his trilogies, Salterton and Deptford. I once surprised myself by saying that if he could write as fast as I read, I'd never read anything else. He's that good. And then he went and croaked 2/3 of the way through his fourth trilogy. Bummer.
One real treasure from this past year (I created a "favorites" list on goodreads, just for this book) is Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers. Young woman of color trying to please her insatiable father (called Colonel, even by his family) gets a PhD in Astronomy (!) goes to Las Vegas to celebrate and while drunk marries a woman she's just met and can't remember when she sobers up. And then she has to figure out what drunk!Grace saw in her and how to be a responsible wife. Much fun.
A couple re-visits each to my own books, whilst composing a sequel... Necessary Lies and Ravynscroft by some guy named Richard Edgar. You might want to skip these (though of course I hope you don't).
Tess Sharpe's book The Girls I've Been. Kid grows up with a mom who's a grifter and con woman, and has been at least five characters invented for long cons. Now she's a hostage in a bank robbery gone bad.
Sam Cohen's Sarahland, a collection of short stories threaded together around characters named Sarah. Interesting stuff.
Book club again, and I slid into the middle of Dorothy Sayers, with Five Red Herrings and then Strong Poison.
Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem. I'm not sure what to say about this. The prose is kind of stiff and stilted, though it's in translation so hard to say if it's the author or the translator (Ken Liu, apparently no relation) who's written award-winning sci-fi of his own. I'm putting it down to the customs of Chinese sci-fi with a main character who was a dissident during various phases of the People's Republic.
Califia's Daughters by Leigh Richards, a pseudonym of Laurie R. King. Near-future post-apocalyptic tale in which the plague killed (and continues to kill) most of the male population. Well worth the read.
A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel. Mother-daughter team nudges humanity toward the stars while avoiding a band of brothers bent on doing them in. First of a series.
Upright Women Wanted, by Sarah Gailey. Could be in the Wild West of Califia's Daughters. Coming of age and gritty survival with casualties. Our heroine runs away to join the librarians.
I re-read Lord of the Rings for the first time in decades. It holds up remarkably well.
In preparation for the long-awaited second volume of my cousin's Viking saga, I re-read volume one: Anno Draconis by Steve Bivans. It's a rip-roaring tale of the Viking invasion of Frankia and siege of Parisia in 885 AD, written by a military historian of the early middle ages. Highly recommended (but I'm a bit partial). Check him out at SteveBivans.com.
And that's pretty much it.
| < Not the lazy Sunday I wanted | To The Emperor! > |
