Time for another year-end book list. Here’s my summary from Goodreads. Probably my biggest theme of the year was finishing off Robin Hobb‘s 16-book “Realm of the Elderlings” world (about 11 books this year, the others in 2020). The whole series is good, some of it great. Probably my favorite thing about the books, aside from the many interesting characters, is the way the separate stories relate and tie together, sometimes with the payoff or a-ha moment not coming for another 6 or 8 books; she obviously thought through the world she was constructing before writing any of it, and there are some beautiful moments of realization scattered throughout the series. My least favorite thing about Robin Hobb is her penchant for layering misery after misery onto her poor protagonists; sometimes it feels like too much. I did some rereading this year, returning to the Douglas Adams books I first read long ago and the N.K. Jemisin books I first read 5-6 years ago. Those were both good. Jemisin, in particular, held up well on a second reading; I forgot just enough to enjoy it all over again. Other than that, I’ll call out Sayaka Murata for the most disturbing book I read this year, Earthlings, and Yoko Ogawa for The Memory Police, which inspired me to write my longest review [spoiler alert] of the year.

Favorites:
– Robin Hobb – All the assassin and liveship things
– N.K. Jemisin – The Fifth Season, and the rest of that series, and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and so on
– Jane Austen – Mansfield Park (yes, another reread)
– Martha Wells – The Element of Fire
– T. Kingfisher – A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
– JRRT – The Hobbit (another reread that holds up well)
– Austin Channing Brown – I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
– Susanna Clarke – Piranesi
– Deonn Tracy – Legendborn
– Tamsyn Muir – Gideon the Ninth

For fun let’s also talk about the 1/2-stars and DNFs. First, there’s The Wheel of Time. I read the first three books and that’s as much as I can manage. I didn’t think they were terrible, but the characters’ immaturity (have you ever spoken to an actual girl or boy?) and nonsensical thinking (why do you all hate the woman who keeps saving your lives and is nothing but decent to you?), as well as all the gender essentialism, were just too much for me to feel like trudging through another 11ish books with them.

Nopes:
– Robert Jordan – The Wheel of Time I could have spent reading something else
– Shannon Messenger – Keeper of the Lost Cities. Every YA cliche made as dumb as possible.
– Deborah Tannen – You Just Don’t Understand. A reread that did not hold up (DNF).
– Elizabeth Knox – The Absolute Book
– Fuminori Nakamura – Cult X. I started this, then read the reviews and decided it was not for me (DNF).
– Robin Hobb – Forest Mage. Sorry, Robin. This did not start great, and then I read reviews and realized it would get much worse (DNF).
– Tamsyn Muir – Harrow the Ninth. Remove everything that made Gideon the Ninth fun, add a bunch of meh, and then try to save it with an exciting finish. No.

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