Another year, another summary from GoodReads. I thought this might be a banner year for reading, what with being at home 24/7 for most of the year, but it was pretty in line with the last few years. Some themes for this year: finishing the Expanse series (so far) and the Steerswoman series; reading the entire Murderbot series (so far), which is delightful; the Children of Time books (evolved intelligent spiders, and then evolved intelligent squids); starting on Discworld (about 14 books this year, and there are many more); starting in on Robin Hobb with the Farseer and Liveship Traders series; and a handful of random YA books, some great and some awful.

– Martha Wells – The Murderbot Diaries
– Robin Hobb – Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin’s Quest, Ship of Magic
– Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Time, Children of Ruin
– Ellis Avery – The Teahouse Fire
– Becky Chambers – To Be Taught, if Fortunate
– Dexter Palmer – Version Control
– Rosemary Kirstein – The Lost Steersman, The Language of Power
– James S.A. Corey – Books 7-8 of the Expanse series
– Terry Pratchett – Going Postal, The Light Fantastic, Small Gods, etc

Thanks to GoodReads for keeping track of what I read in 2019. This year I apparently read a book every 4.3 days, and 93 pages a day, slightly less than 2018. My favorite book of the year had to be Le Guin’s The Other Wind. The whole Earthsea hexology is fantastic, but I hadn’t read books 4-6 before and they’re all great. The Farthest Shore was also a great reread; I didn’t appreciate it as much when I was younger. I know everyone is aware of the Expanse books, which I’m working my way through, but a lesser-known epic series I’ve also been enjoying is Miles Cameron’s “Red Knight” books. They’re sort of the fantasy equivalent of those SF books that focus closely on details of engineering and technology; here, there’s a lot about armor, logistics, the economy, and firing rates of various kinds of archers, and it’s surprisingly engaging. A couple more suggestions some may have missed: Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman books, where the hero is a sort of adventurer/scientist/librarian; and Minae Mizumura’s “A True Novel”, generally billed as a sort of Japanese “Wuthering Heights”.

– Ursula Le Guin – The Other Wind, read/reread Earthsea and a bunch of her other books
– Miles Cameron – The Red Knight & most of its sequels
– James S.A. Corey – Books 2-6 of the Expanse series
– Becky Chambers – A Closed and Common Orbit, my favorite of that trilogy
– Rosemary Kirstein – The Steerswoman, The Outskirter’s Secret
– Ann Leckie – The Raven Tower
– Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman
– Minae Mizumura – A True Novel
– Sylvain Neuvel – Sleeping Giants & sequels
– Jessica Amanda Salmonson – Tomoe Gozen
– Iain M. Banks – Look to Windward
– Ellen Kushner – read/reread the Riverside books

And what I read in 2018. It was a very good year for reading, and I read a bunch of books I really enjoyed. I mostly continued my recent trend of reading writers who are not white dudes, and enjoying a lot of new perspectives (like fantasy/sf grounded in African rather than European mythology); then again, I read a ridiculous number of Alastair Reynolds books this year and liked (almost) all of them. Weirdest books of the year have to be Yoon Ha Lee’s “Ninefox Gambit” and sequels. After the first book, I thought a lot of the technobabble was meaningless (albeit poetic), but deeper connections are made by the third book. At any rate, the books are very strange, with a basic concept that is more fantasy than science fiction in some ways (in short: a civilization can warp reality if it can get all of its citizens to believe in the same things). The words and the concepts sort of flow past the reader without entirely making sense, but working on a poetic level.

– Tamora Pierce – all the books
– Nnedi Okorafor – Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, and the Binti books
– Alastair Reynolds – Revelation Space, and a bunch of other books set in that universe
– Yoon Ha Lee – Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem, Revenant Gun
– Ursula K. Le Guin – A Wizard Of Earthsea, The Tombs Of Atuan
– Malka Ann Older – Infomacracy, Null States
– Min Jin Lee – Pachinko
– Nalo Hopkinson – Midnight Robber
– S.A. Chakraborty – The City Of Brass
– Issui Ogawa – The Next Continent
– Robert Jackson Bennett – City Of Stairs (and its not-quite-as-good sequels)
– Seth Dickinson – The Traitor Baru Cormorant
– Naomi Novik – Spinning Silver
– Pierce Brown – Red Rising, Golden Sun, Morning Star

Totally forgot to do this last year, so here’s what I read in 2017.

I can’t really say there was much of a theme to 2017. It was kind of a mishmash of me trying to find new writers to follow, after exhausting Cixin Liu and N.K. Jemisin in 2016. When I look back over the list, I can’t remember what half of these books were about, or whether I liked them. The one I hit on is Tamora Pierce; I read her “Alanna” series in 2017 and have read most of her other stuff since, sharing some of it with Nora (though she’s not ready for all of the books). I read and enjoyed Naomi Novik’s “Uprooted” and then, hungry for more Novik, slogged my way through several of her Temeraire books (thing Hornblower or Aubrey/Maturin but there are dragons) before giving up. They’re not terrible, but they’re not great either.

But here are some favorites:
– Tamora Pierce – Song of the Lioness quartet (Alanna)
– N.K. Jemisin – Stone Sky
– Kazu Kibuishi – Amulet graphic novels
– Mary Doria Russell – Children of God
– Naomi Novik – Uprooted
– Hiroshi Yamamoto – The Stories Of Ibis
– Ada Palmer – Too Like The Lightning, Seven Surrenders
– Lian Hearn – The Tale Of Shikanoko quartet
– Neal Stephenson – Seveneves (the first part anyway)