Reading roundup and year-end book meme
Clearing the decks, the last reading roundup of 2019 and the years' book meme:
40. Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man -- This was cute and fun but also drove home the point that, much as I love this world and the magic, I'm mostly here for the characters around Peter. Because I had this book sitting on my Kindle for weeks before I opened it, and then it took me months to write it up, and I still don't have a ton to say about it. Tobias seems like a nice guy? and a fun narrator, though I might've wished for a slightly more distinct narrative voice. I like that his background is, like, dynastic police, and I like that, like Peter, he has a family which is part of his life. I also find it really amusing that apparently the international counterparts of the Folly have heard about Peter, and if Tobias is any indication, are all jealous of him, LOL. And Abigail is known in international circles as "absolutely terrifying", even more LOL XD Also, apparently Tobias is not into SFF the way Peter is -- he doesn't even recognize Harry Potter references! -- which I guess by definition makes him a bit less fun for me. But the Director of the KDA sounds intriguing, and I'd like to see more of her!
From a worldbuilding perspective, it was neat to see that, unlike the Folly, modern-day "weird bollocks" in Germany has all the paperwork checklists they need, without Peter having to develop them from scratch (I do wonder if they never stopped using them as magic went out of the world, or someone developed them just in case, or they just moved more quickly, or?) And that all the magic stuff has its own very official-sounding names in German :D
I enjoyed the case -- I think BA has gotten better at plotting, or maybe a novella is better for his kind of plots -- and there was a lot of nicely creepy stuff. Also, there's now been an explicit asexual character mention (with Uwe), which I think is a first for this universe.
45. Action at a Distance (RoL graphic novel) -- something something SPOILERS! ex-nazi serial killer who collects "exotic" female victims in ethnic restaurants, Nightingale's army buddy that Molly has a crush on, the first meeting between Nightingale and Asterid (also featuring her getting her hands on his service revolver; apparently it's their little tradition), and Nightingale preventing a nuclear reactor meltdown, as well as destroying some planes. My main takeaways from this intallment, however, are:
1. Nightingale had a bloodhound named Hesperus, in 1957.
2. At one point army buddy calls him Tom (which felt super jarring).
3. Molly writes Peter/Nightingale slash on Peter's laptop and posts it on AO3. I don't actually know if mini-comics are meant to be canon or just crack or canon-plausible crack, but Im 100% accepting this as canon, and in fact want all the associated fic. Not Molly's fic, I mean. Fic wherein Peter discovers what she's been using his laptop for and reads some of the fic.
44. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire -- (sync read with ikel89 which I was semi-delinquent in finishing on time, because I got to like 80% and wandered away towards other books). This book will almost certainly show up when I do my end-of-year book meme and have to answer the "most disappointing book" question. Not because I disliked the book -- I actually did not dislike it -- and there are a lot of books on my list which I liked a lot less than this one -- but god, there was SO MUCH POTENTIAL HERE for it to be something I would love, and it fell short of that in a lot of small, preventable ways. Last year I felt similar about Six Wakes -- such a cool premise (country house mystery on a spaceship, with clones having to solve their own murders!), with such underwhelming execution. With that book, I kept wishing a different author had taken on the same high-concept premise (Sarah Pinsker, for preference, or maybe Ann Leckie). With this one, honestly, I think even this author could've written a book I would have liked a lot, with some serious editing, or maybe a couple of novels under her belt (this is a debut novel).
I still really love the pitch for this book, which sold me instantly on tracking it down: ambassador of tiny Lsel Station comes to the capital of the vast space empire she loves, with the (outdated) ~ghost of her predecessor in her head, and has to figure out what happened to her actual predecessor and stop said vast space empire from gobbling up her tiny independent station. And there are poetry battles and poetry ciphers! This all sounded incredibly cool! Plot-relevant poetry, culture clash, the tension between loving the cultural output of a thing and fearing its worldly influence, and also ghosts of dead predecessors in your head is kind of a niche kink of mine, so. Oh, and I love sci-fi mysteries, too, and it seemed like this was likely to be one, in part. Unfortunately, I found the execution of pretty much every aspect of what I described disappointing, or at least not satisfying. Spoilers from here!
I did actually like the ~ghost of Yskandr in Mahit's head: Lsel station keeps imagos (mind-maps) of people with valuable skills, and implants them in compatible individuals to preserve their knowledge. This is a really cool idea, and I loved everything we got to see about it, both the infrastructure around imagos on Lsel, and a look at Mahit integrating with her newly implanted imago -- the way she found it hard to tell, sometimes, which emotions/endocrine reactions were her own, etc. And I enjoyed what interplay we got between her and Yskandr(s), and Yskandr himself -- he was, I think, my favorite character, even though (or maybe because) you only see him in glimpses, obliquely. Unfortunately, one of the plot points of the book is that Mahit's imago is sabotaged, and she loses access to the Yskandr in her imago for most of the novel, which was very disappointing given that this was the part I was enjoying the most. (She does recover not one, but TWO Yskandrs eventually, but by then I was pretty annoyed with the book as a whole.)
The mystery didn't really work as a mystery for me -- the story doesn't have the ARC of a mystery, and the whodunit comes in a random scene with no real payoff, and further revelations don't really end up mattering, either. (It also doesn't work as a political thriller, because the politics felt too simplistic, and also not thrilling enough.)
The poetry was one of the most frustrating things, because I loved the IDEA of what it was trying to do -- poetry as worldbuilding! poetry as plot! poetry as a way of getting to know a culture not your own! -- there is nothing about this I do not love! -- but kept itching to fix the execution, because I feel the book sets itself up for failure here. Because, look. First of all, unless you are actually a brilliant poet, when you have your characters write what is supposed to be brilliant poetry, you should probably not quote it in your story. This was a thing I discovered when, in high school, I had some ideas for a story cycle about a brilliant poet. Like with anything where you need to demonstrate a character's brilliance, you can cheat a bit and have them come up with the thing in seconds and while dangling upsidedown over a lava pit or something, while you as the author come up with the brilliance at leisure and with the aid of research -- but this is harder to do with poetry, I think. But even that problem aside, poetry is so steeped in the culture milieu that produces it, that it's really hard to work with it for a secondary world/nonexistent culture. I mean, Tolkien managed, but he also made up his languages and cosmology from scratch, which is definitely not a level of worldbuilding commitment I'm seeing here (more on which below). And here, in particular, you have someone from one culture, who is educated in but not native to the poetry tradition, trying to write poetry for the local audience. AND it is meant to be a secret signal, AND it is meant to go viral -- there is so much story burden loaded onto this poem, and it just doesn't stand up to the weight. There are things that could've worked for me in this space! I'm actually a firm believer that a non-native speaker can sometimes come up with a striking turn of phrase precisely BECAUSE they engage with the language in a different way than a native speaker, more consciously, or because they have their ear tuned to a different set of morphemes or meters or metaphors or foundational sources to crib from. Or Mahit could be familiar with some erstwhile classic of space Aztec literature which is hopelessly passe or out of favor in modern Teixcalaan (the way I've read a lot more Jack London than most of my peers who grew up in the US, and was the only person in my AP US History class to have read Uncle Tom's Cabin -- in Russian, but still). If the book had gone somewhere like that with its poetry plots, I would've been completely on board! But no: we get three poems, two of which are supposedly brilliant, and while both contain a couple of lines I liked a lot, I do think it would've been much better to show the EFFECT of the poetry on people (and maybe quote those particularly strong lines, or a metaphor or two), rather than trying to reproduce it. I was willing to accept that Twelve Azalea's poem, which is almost literally "Roses are red/Violets are blue/Have you been kidnapped?/Not signed, you know who" was not MEANT to be good, because he was just having a lark. But Mahit and Three Seagrass's poem, calling on Nineteen Adze to come rescue them, is about equually subtle, and not particularly amazing as poetry. I did like the "Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun" line -- which the Emperor ends up echoing as the last thing he says, and crowds start chanting -- but. But. This is space aztecs we're talking about. Suns and spears are like the FOUNDATION of their #aesthetic. I just cannot suspend disbelief that "spear in the hand of the sun" is not a hoary old cliche in their canon, like "brave as a lion" or rhyming love/dove.
And that, I think, touches on my fundamental problem with the book: it is about the clash of cultures and yearning for a culture not your own, which you can almost but never quite fake being part of (that scene, where Mahit listens to Three Seagrass participating in a poetry battle with her friends and realizes she couldn't be part of it, much as she wants to -- which not! does not attempt to QUOTE any of the poetry produced -- was the poetry scene that worked best for me, btw), but the worldbuilding never quite felt real to me. I think that for a book like this to work, you, the reader, have to find Teixcalaan irresistible, or at least attractive, and a secondary world has to feel real enough to do that to me. But I never got a solid, lived-in sense of it, beyond the aesthetic of colors and spears. Oh, there were ELEMENTS I loved a lot -- the names were fabulous! I kind of want to read fic set in this world just to get more names, and some of the terms, like the interstellar fleet being referred to as Six Outstretched Palms. But the city did not feel real. Just, something about the place felt nebulous -- I never wanted to stay, or explore further.
In fact, the only place that DID feel interesting was Lsel Station. Glimpses of it appealed to me more than all the color-coded pomp of Teixcalaan. Early on in the book I wondered if this was intentional: if the point was that Lsel Station WAS the more interesting place, and Mahit just failed to appreciate it, dazzled, as she was, by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism the sparkle and metaphor of the space empire. Having finished, I'm afraid I no longer believe that Martine is a brilliant enough writer (at least yet) to do so intentionally, but I am curious whether book 2, which will be set on Lsel, presumably, will change my mind on that.
I wonder if a big part of my problem with Teixcalaan not feeling sufficiently real is the POV of the book, which felt... shallow. Like, we spend most of the book in Mahit's head, but I was never fully convinced that we were seeing the world through her eyes. One of the first things I noticed that gave me pause was the prose: a Lsel station POV observing a departing shuttle in a way that I don't think a space station dweller would think about it. I'm not sure I would've noticed all the fungal metaphors if ikel89 hadn't started complaining first, but afterwards there was no unseeing this. I would be perfectly willing to accept it if Mahit had reason to compare everything to fungi -- are they a source of protein on Lsel and did she have to work in hydroponics as a side gig? But there's no in-universe, in-character explanation for it, and so I felt disconnected from the character and the universe whenever it came up. And the more disconnected I felt, the more I frowned at the small details of the worldbuilding. Printed pamphlets (of something like fanfic, which I found very cute in theory) are very popular on Lsel -- really? A remote space station is going to have excess paper/paper equivalent for this rather than distributing their fanfic digitally? Which started me wondering -- why doesn't Mahit seem to have even the equivalent of a modern cell phone? Sure, Lsel has its imagos, but that would give you deep, specialized knowledge and intuition -- it does not appear that they have a secondary function of remembering people's phone numbers (or whatever) or looking up stuff on space google? (And if Mahit did have a Lsel station equivalent of a smartphone, why is she not missing it while among the space Aztecs?! Actually, even the Teixcalaan version of this technology is weird from a worldbuilding perspective: everybody has cloudhooks, right? (I won't even wonder, for the moment, why there don't seem to be any security measures around other people using yours, as Mahit does with Three Seagrass's, or why that wouldn't be the first thing you'd take away or disable when keeping someone prisoner -- having to rely on your antagonists to be incompetent is not great form...) Ok then, if everone has cloudhooks, which are integrated into the infrastructure of the city, why are people handing out physical pamphlets and advertisements?? Just for the #aesthetics? In general the worldbuilding felt like an odd mix of retro/modern with just a few sci-fi touches, and not in a way that made sense to me (like, horses and daggers on Barrayar make sense because of the Time of Isolation. What's the deal here?) Possibly this was to help suspend disbelief for things like Mahit et al managing to evade pursuit by ducking into a departing train, but no, that didn't help -- what is this, the 1940s?
I might've been more willing to overlook these complaints if the characters had grabbed me, but they did not. Mahit is... OK? But for someone completely on her own on a new planet, unable to trust her own reactions, and possibly the only thing standing between her home and annexation, she just didn't engage me much, mostly because I never felt like she was in any jeopardy. Everyone she met seemed to like and admire her (for conclusions that didn't seem that brilliant, or that I would've expected to occur to someone other than a stranger who barely understood the current political climate -- which is a separate complaint; I quite like the handwave that she mostly learned from literature and literature tends to focus on non-standard cases in antiquity, not how things are supposed to work, but surely there's space Wikipedia, at least?), and when she met someone who didn't, then someone else came along and rescued her. Everything felt very low stakes, until Twelve Azalea's death, but that didn't feel jarring in a profound way, more out of character for the rest of the book. Or maybe just 'cos he wasn't the protagonist, magically protected against all harm.
There were some things I liked! The epigraphs for the chapters, excerpts from primary documents, were quite fun, especially the ones from Lsel and anything to do with Eleven Lathe. I also liked the parts where the book clearly committed to cultural differences -- smiling with our mouth, the Lsel station way, vs smiling with your eyes, and people trying out each other's ways. Language differences -- space Aztecs having multiple words for different birds and Station-born Mahit having trouble telling them apart, because there are no birds on a space station. Different ways Mahit reacts to a planetary environment, not used to weather and open sky. I liked the resoltuion between Mahit and Three Seagrass, Three Seagrass's confession, meant to be inclusive, actually being othering and making Mahit see things in perspective. I was genuinely surprised by Mahit choosing to go back to Lsel Station, in a good way. And there are some genuinely lovely lines, like "Like a flower turns to the sun or a person takes in oxygen, Teixcalaan reaches again towards the stars" in the Emperor's declaration of war and other official announcements, or the last paragraph/line, "Not, in the end, quite home" But, honestly, these things just made me pine for what this book could've been, and wasn't.
Finally, a thing that struck me as not so much bad as odd about the book was the tone of it. Mahit just didn't feel conflicted enough about Teixcalaan? People didn't seem angry enough in general? Not even the one who was hoping to feed the space Aztecs to the mysterious brutal aliens -- almost none of it was visceral enough. I actually went out and picked up The Traitor Baru Cormorant while still reading the book, because I was feeling this negative space so acutely.
Oh wait, no. Finally finally, SO MANY ITALICS for emphasis! I actually usually like it as a technique, but there was so much of it here, and sometimes it was stressing things that didn't need to be stressed, and around the 50% mark I developed a twitch every time I saw part of the line italicized, and let me tell you, this did not improve my reading experience :/
46. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language -- now THIS book I actually liked, but it's hard to talk about nonfiction in a write-up.
I found the central premise, of internet writing as having given us an informal writing mode like there had always been formal and informal speaking modes quite eye-opening (though obvious in retrospect). The aside on code-mixing was especially interesting, because it's definitely something that I notice myself doing on LJ, because it just feels... weirdly limiting not to. I enjoyed the chapter on the early history of internet slang, especially the origin of ":)" and "lol" -- I didn't realize either of those things were actually known! -- and the different cohorts of "internet people". The chapter on adding nuance and emotion to writing was very neat; a lot of it I'd sort of internalized inuitively, like the ~sarcasm tildes~ (and I like the observation that the ~ looks kind of like the songy sarcastic mock-pronunciation of the word would sound -- swoopy-like), and some I'd never stopped to think about, like which letters get repeated for emphasis -- including that it can be letters that are acutally silent, like "dumbbbbb" or "sameeee" (although I personally wouldn't do that -- I always go with "saaaaame") -- and especially the observation that "speech elongation" in writing (even in dialogue) doesn't start showing up until around the time recording devices became commonplace. Oh, and putting people saying "hashtag [whatever]" out loud in the context of people pronouncing OTHER ~punctuation marks historically -- "those quote-unquote experts", "we have given our best offer, period" -- sort of reconciled me to it, a little bit. Also fascinating was the revelation (to me, anyway) that complaints about all lower case typing became way more common when smartphones with autocorrect made it so that typing in lower case was actually the HARDER option -- i.e. in reaction to it as a statement, not as laziness/efficienccy. I never knew that!
The most interesting chapter to me was the one on emoji: the history, which I didn't know; the difference between smileys (the mouth is expressive) vs kaomoji (the eyes are the expressive bit); emoji as gesture (emblem an co-speech); and especially emoji responses as part of chat which serve in place of sympathetic "I'm listening" noises (like if someone says "I went to the beach this weekend" and you text them back the emoji for palm tree and fish or whatever -- they don't carry any actual content, but I've been doing that and it feels weirdly necessary in chat). I don't use GIFs myself, but it was still interesting to read about their role in internet language, and especially the reference to an article "We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs". (One thing McCulloch didn't touch on at all and I wish she had was icons as part of internet communication on LJ/clones. I know those types of platforms are passe, but I feel like icons served a similar but different role to emoji. They're not in-line commentary, so it's more that they flavor the whole reply, while maybe underlying a specific part of it, but also, I used to miss having the extra layer of meaning accessible to me via icons when trying to communicate online without them, and I've started feeling similarly about emoji (and the specific ideolect of Best Chat) now that I've been using them more.
The idea of social meadia as "the third place" was also interesting; I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, LJ/DW absolutely fulfills that need for me. I wasn't as fond of the chapter on memes, but it was just less interesting to me, or maybe wasn't as reflective of my meme experience, IDK.
Quotes:
"Men tend to follow a generation later: in other words, women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers." (!)
On why sarcasm punctuation proposals all failed: "If we wanted to make all our messages completely lucid, we already have a very effective tool for that, and it's called Not Being Sarcastic." (Fair XD)
"Irony is a linguistic trust fall."
[For] "the future of technolinguistic tools, like speech to text or predictive smart replies, we nee to ask not just how they can be use, but how they can be subverted; not just how esigners can help users communicate their intentions, but how users can help them communicate more than the designers intended."
"If you've ever foun yourself unable to get a wor in edgewise, or doing all that talking around someone frustratingly taciturn, it's probably because your cultural timings [how long you subconsciously wait to tell if your interlocutor is done with his turn talking - ~0.2 seconds] are ever so slightly miscalibrated for each other."
On social media: "Airports are no longer impersonal, insomnia is no longer isolating, and the most mundane grocery run can be livened up by a quick exchange with a pocket friend." (<3!)
On a cross-stitch she made: "After all, this is my personal field in which to grow my fucks, and htis is my juxtaposition of old an new, of oral culture and igital culture, of domestic an profane, of the aspiration to give fewer fucks and the reality that delicate stitchwork requires many fucks indeed."
"Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project."
On network as a new metaphor for language: "But there is no pristine first edition of a network. A network is not debase as it changes; its flexibility is a key part of its strength."
47. Holly Black, The Wicked King -- Honestly I couldn't even tell you why I read it. There were things I liked about The Cruel Prince, about 95% of them to do with the relationship between Jude and murderdad Madoc plus the possibility that it was actually meant to be Jude's villain origin story. But now, apparently we are playing this straight, and also Jude/Cardan and their mutual self-loathing kink was the only thing this book was really about, and words cannot describe how little I care about their mutual self-loathing kink. At least the dubcon in the first book was a little interesting. This is just pathetic. I have so few thoughts on this book, I will leave you with these two incidental ones:
1) When ikel89 was reading this book, before I even started, she sent along screenshots, and I manifested a haiku:
"I hate you!" I sigh.
"Yes mortal, hate me harder!"
Insouciant lounge.
It turns out this encompasses all I have to say even after finishing the book.
2) The text I sent to Best Chat immediately upon finishing: "Yuri on Ice sighting in epilogue might be my favorite thing about this book and I've never even watched YoI."
The fact that Holly Black is writing this nonsense is still breaking my heart. But K says there's lots of murderdad in book 3, though, so I guess I'm reading that at some point XD
48. C.S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage -- definitely not what I expected my introduction to C.S.Lewis's writing to be, but I learned about this book from perpetual, picked it up, and actually... reasonably enjoyed chunks of it? The pastoral and mythological bits seem to owe a heavy homage to Milton (even before I got to the overt homage), but, like, I can't fault a body for that. Far more interesting, though, were the dark poems from the trauma of war, which actually had some pretty powerful lines:
The ancient hope that still will rise again--
Of a just God that cares for earthly pain,
Yet far away beyond our labouring night,
He wanders in the depths of endless light,
Singing alone his musics of delight;
Only the far, spent echo of his song
Our dungeons and deep cells can smite along,
And Thou art nearer. Thou art very strong.
[Satan Speaks]
They hate my world! Then let that other God
Come from the outer spaces glory-shod,
And from this castle I have built on Night
Steal forth my own thought's children into light.
And the rather different from all the rest "In Praise of Solid People" ("Thank God that there are solid folk [...] Who pass untroubled nights and days/Full-fed and sleepily content/Rejoicing in each other's praise/Respectable and innocent [...] And think in well-worn grooves of thought/Whose honest spirits never reel/Before man's mystery, overwrought.") made me think of Tolkien's Hobbits and smile (though I know this precedes Hobbits by quite a bit). The lines "And still no nearer to the Light/And still no further from myself" were pretty good, too.
49. Emily McGovern, Bloodlust & Bonnets -- not something I would've ever picked up without ikel89's rec, but it was cute enough, I guess. My favorite was Napoleon the long-suffering eagle who speaks in French-accented cursive. Lord Byron was amusing, but really, there's just the one joke there, and some times it landed better than others for me on repetition. Lucy's attempts at romance were also occasionally amusing, but ultimately the plot to jokes-that-worked ratio was off for what I wanted (and I didn't care about the plot, like, AT ALL), and the art style was decidedly not my thing.
50. The Snow Queen (illustrated by Bargam Ibatoulline) -- I first picked up the book for familiar imagery and only then noticed that the illustrator was from Russia, which explains why the images called out to me -- probably based on the same fairy tale imagery I'm used to. Whoever did the adapting of Andersen's plot, I liked this retelling, with a minimum of Christian piety and whatnot.
51. Hansel and Gretel (Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattoti) -- I picked this up thanks the the striking b&w negative space drawings, but I enjoyed Gaiman's creepy retelling, too.
And that's it for the year:
1. Lois McMaster Bujold, The Flowers of Vashnoi
2. S.L.Huang, Zero Sum Game
3. Runaways, vol.1: Find Your Way Home (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka)
4. Steven Brust, Good Guys
5. Saga vol.9 (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples)
6. John Scalzi, The Consuming Fire
7. Runaways, vol.2: Best Friends Forever (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka
8. Skyward vol.1: My Low-G Life (Joe Henderson, Lee Garbett)
9. Water Weed (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel)
10. R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War
11. Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths
12. Paper Girls, vol 5, (Brian K Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang)
13. Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning
14. Ann Leckie, Raven Tower
15. By Night (John Allison, art by Christine Larsen)
16. Black Panther: Long Live the King (Nnedi Okorafor, Aaron Covington
17. Abbott (Saladin Ahmed, art by Sami Kivela
18. Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing
19. Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective
20. P. Djeli Clark, The Black God's Drums
21. Kelly Robson, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
22. Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside
23. Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children 3)
24. Monstress, v3, Marjorie Liu, art by Tana Sakeda
25. Ursula LeGuin, David Naimon, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing
26. Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Night Maskerade
27. Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam
28. Little Girls, Nicholas Aflleje and Sarah DeLaine
29. Becky Chambers, A Close and Common Orbit
30. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
31. Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few
32. Charles Stross, The Concrete Jungle
33. Dhonielle Clayton, The Belles
34. Cat Valente, Space Opera
35. Malka Older, Infomocracy
36. Justina Ireland, Dread Nation -
37. Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road
38. Jonathan Kellerman, The Wedding Guest
39. F.C.Yee, The Epic Crush of Genie Lo
40. Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man
41. Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle
42. Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone
43. S. A. Chakraborty, City of Brass
44. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire
45. Action at a Distance (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmell)
46. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
47. Holly Black, The Wicked King
48. C.S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage
49. Emily McGovern, Bloodlust & Bonnets
50. The Snow Queen (illustrated by Bargam Ibatoulline)
51. Hansel and Gretel (Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattoti)
*
End of year book meme (kind of desultory this year):
The first book you read in 2019:
The Flowers of Vashnoi, and it was one of the books I liked best this year (which I say without claiming that it's a particlarly epic book), which kind of describes my reaing trajectory honestly.
The last book you finished in 2019:
A Hansel and Gretel retelling by Neil Gaiman, in (dark) picture book form. I was going to make a final push and finish T.Kingfisher's Minor Mage (I was 80% done with it, and it's a novella, so it would've taken me like half an hour), but... didn't en up bothering just to make 52 books a year. It certainly doesn't FEEL like I've read a significant number of books this year so I guess I didn't feel like ~padding the numbers.
The first book you will finish (or did finish!) in 2020:
Presumably Minor Mage. Or possibly the Fred Pohl autobiography that I'm also >50% done with.
How many books read in 2019?
51. Way down from last year, and a lot of these are graphic novels and novellas and even a couple of picture books. Way down from last year's 81, and the lowest it's been in a while. I did read a bunch of short fiction again (for Hugos homework and at nominations), though I think not as much as last year. I did half-read a lot of books? Does that count?
Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
I read in full 3 nonfiction things -- LeGuin interview and Astounding bio for Hugos homework, and Because Internet for fun -- as well as ~half of two other things: the Pohl bio mentioned above and Vereteno Vasilisy (a Russian book about psychorama, after ikel89 was talking about it during her visit). I do intend to finish both, at some point, or at least to keep reaing them. I also skimmed/leafed through some other non-fiction things for the Hugos (and may want to buy myself a copy of the Tolkien Boleian exhibit one to peruse at leisure). And I'm still firm in my intent to read Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, despite a complete lack of progress this year (I snagged myself on a poem exercise there and haven't continued beyond that).
Male/Female authors?
I actually didn't keep track with charts this year because meh, I guess? But tallying up from my reading list:
Books: 27 books written by female authors, 2 books written by male authors; 1 written by authors who I believe are non-binary (or at least use 'they' pronouns), and 2 with too much of a mix to count. That's a very ifferent ratio from past years, which were usually >2:1 female :male (although I don't think it has anything to do with my meh-ness...)
Authors: for this one, I'm counting just individual authors I've read, so that the effect of being swamped by series is factored out somewhat (although this year there was no serious series reading). I read 31 female authors and 13 male authors (more of each than last year, because I was reading broader due to Hugos, but %-wise, a lot more men than women, as last year's numbers were 28 F / 8 M).
Also, because it's interesting, I tried to keep track of the gender of *protagonists*, too. The result (counting each book, not series) is 40 female protagonists and 24 male protagonists -- which is the FIRST time since I started tracking this that I had more female than male protags, even with a heavily female author line-up. Huh! Also, usually I see a lot of female-authored books with male protagonists, but not so much this year -- just the Penrics, the Dragonbreaths, and Terra Ignota. And there's the reverse, too -- the Paper Girls books have male author and female protagonists, which helps balance it out a little. Compared to last year, the number of male protagonists went down only slightly, but the number of female protagonists nearly quadrupled! Now, granted, Harriet is responsible for a bunch of this, but not only her.
Breakdown by author:
Female:
- Chambers -- 2
- Rowell -- 2 (comics)
- Okorafor -- 2 (really more like 1.3)
- Bujold -- 1(.5, counting a partial reread of Cetaganda)
- Kuang* -- 1(.5, counting the Dragon Republic I read)
- Bolander* -- 1 (+, counting some short fiction)
- Huang* -- 1
- Roanhorse
- Leckie
- de Bodard
- Kelly Robson*
- Seanan McGuire
- Marjorie Liu
- LeGuin
- Walden*
- Clayton*
- Valente
- Older*
- Ireland*
- Hartman
- Adeyemi*
- Chakraborty*
- Martine*
- McCulloch*
- Black
- McGovern*
Male:
- Aaronovitch -- 3
- Vaughan -- 2
- Brust
- Kellerman -- 1
- Scalzi -- 1
- Henderson* -- 1
- John Allison*
- Ahmed
- P. Djeli Clark*
- Bennet(* -- not first thing I read, but first thing I finished) -- 1
- Affleje*
- Nevala-Lee*
- Stross(* -- not first thing I read, but first thing I finished)
- Yee*
- Andrew Smith*
- C.S.Lewis*
- Gaiman -- 0.5
NB/"they" pronouns:
- Rowland* -- 1
* = new-to-me author this year. 8-10 new-to-me male authors, a little higher than last year's 7 (and only 3 of them due to Hugos homework). And 13 new female authors (down from 17 last year, but my overall numbers are down); 8 were for Hugo homework. Sadly, not too many of the new authors are authors I'd happily read again, though a few are, and a couple more are authors that I definitely see enough of a spark with to keep trying.
Most books read by one author this year?
Technically Aaronovitch, but the "3" books were two (co-creited) GNs and a novella. So for real it's actually Becky Chambers with two novels. It's a super weird year for me from that perspective, as I almost always have either a large swath of books by one author, when I'm binge-reading someone new or catching up on a series, or a couple of authors with ~3 books each. There was no author to dominate the year for me, which probably goes towards explaining why it felt so meh.
Favorite books read?
Um, yeah, it's slim pickings this time around. Flowers of Vashnoi; Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach; both the Wayfarers books; The Poppy War (for a, uh, given value of "favorite"), and Because Internet are probably it.
Best books you read in 2019?
I thought Tess of the Road was very good and filling an unusual niche ditto for Recor of a Spaceborn Few. I thought The Poppy War was very impressive for a debut. GMatLP was not flawless, but I thought it did AMAZING things with character and worldbuilding in the space of a in the space of a novella (and I still don't know what the Hugo voters were smoking to rank it so low).
And, not as much to my personal taste (zombies, meh) but I think an objectively good book: Dread Nation.
Least favorite?
THIS ONE'S EASY! Children of Bloo and Bone (speaking of not knowing what the awards people were smoking). If offbrand Zukos didn't exist, this answer might have been Space Opera or (sob) The Wicked King.
Most disappointing book/Book you wished you loved more than you did?
This one is also quite easy: A Memory Called Empire -- on paper, everything I could possibly want from a SF book, blurbed exuberantly by some of my favorite SFF authors and generating a lot of buzz on my flist. I didn't hate it, but I idn't think it was particularly great, either, and it certainly did not live up to my expectations.
Second place goes to: Foundryside, actually. I liked parts of this book! But I had wante to like all of it, because the worldbuilding idea is very neat, and several flisters liked it a whole lot. But I found the characterization too... broad? and the dialogue cringey, which is the point at which I realized that I can overlook a lot of bad prose, but bad dialogue is much harder for me to get over when it comes to redaing enjoyment.
Other books that disappointed me to various degrees were: Zero Sum Game (which I had hoped would be both cooler and more palatable to my prospective sync read folks), The Consuming Fire (a marked step down from the Collapsing Empire for me), A Conspiracy of Truths (it's not that I was expecting to like it, based on my divergence from Serpent!Alex's tastes, but it would've been nice to like it more than I did), On a Sunbeam (the blurbs had led me to expect something a lot more impressive than sleepovers in space; the art was pretty but not really my thing).
I was also a little bit disappointed by Trail of Lightning, which was a perfectly servicieable, even good urban fantasy book, but I had been hoping for more from Roanhorse.
Also, Saga 9 went in a direction I'm quite unhappy with, which is a different type of disappointment.
Best series you discovered in 2019?
Therein lies the rub. I guess it's new series that shape my reading experience for the year, and this was a pretty lackluster year for that, after a couple of really good ones.
Uh... Daevabad, I guess? In that I enjoyed book 1 for the most part and definitely intend to continue with the series? (though to be honest it's the fact that I have several other fans on my flist that gives this one the edge over several other books I liked to approximately this degree, too).
As for other new series for me (defined as I read at least one book in a series I've not read before and I haven't ruled out reading more -- or, alternatively, have finished the whole series): I will probably keep reading The Poppy War sequels (I loved the first book, but am boggd down in the middle of book 2, and it's missing all the things I like about the first one); I will probably keep reading Roanhorse's Sixth World books in the hope that they'll get more interesting; I'm curious enough to check out the sequels to Foundryside and A Memory Called Empire despite my disappointment (probably); I'm not sure I would've bothered tracking own the sequels to Imfomocracy, but since I have them available, I'll probably read them. I may also read the sequl to Dread Nation, despite the zombies, because that was a pretty good book. I have the sequel to Grasshopper Jungle, so presumably I'll read it, and will probably also read the sequel to The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (hopefully in a non-college-app year).
Oh, and I read my first book (novella) of the Laundry Files this year, and may give that another shot. I actually checke out another title from the library and returned it unopened, but... maybe? in a less meh year?
Favorite new author you discovered this year?
Kelly Robson, I guess? And actually if I can count the short fiction reading for the Hugos, then also Daryl Gregory and Alix E. Harrow, who wrote the novelette and short story I liked a lot, and Tina Connolly maybe a notch below.
And I guess I'm looking forwar to reading more Kuang, Chakraborty, and Ireland, though I wouldn't call them favorite authors outright, at least not yet.
I also like a lot of P.Djeli Clark's worlbuiling ideas, and am eagerly awaiting a point where he'll start writing them into stories I like as stories an not just places to put his worlbuilding.
Oldest book read?
Spirits in Bonage is from 1919. After that comes The Concrete Jungle (2004), and then it's all stuff from just the last couple of years.
Newest?
Action at a Distance -- the trade paperback is from Nov 12, 2019.
Longest book title?
Nevala-Lee's "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction" -- which, OK, in fairness it is a bio of four people with fairly long names but still, that's 16 words, not counting the initials. Because Internet, with its full 8 word title, is nowhere close.
Longest fiction title: tie between The Tea Master and the Detective and Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (6 words, but not all wors are the same length, so I guess the de Board would probably win).
Shortest title?
Saga, 4 letters, followed by Abbott with 5.
How many re-reads?
None in full, but I did reread chunks of the Hamster Princess books as part of Yuletide canon review, and reread half of Cetagana when ikel89 was reading it.
Any in translation?
Nope, not this year... And only half a book in Russian (Vereteno Vasilisy) which is at least progress vs last year.
How many of this year's books were from the library?
I should've kept better track this year, but I didn't... I did use the library a lot, though so let's see if I can reconstruct it.
- 2 were online freebies -- a TOR.com books of the month and a Project Gutenberg book
- 3 were (ahem) of dubious online provenance, though I subsequently got a legal copy through no effort of my own
- 7 were books I bought for myself (2 in hard copy (both GNs) and 5 in ebook) -- this continued the downward trend from last year.
- 8 were from the Hugos packet (although some of them I'd previously started by other means)
- 32 from the library -- 22 in hard copy, 9 in ecopy (mostly the novellas), and 2 books that I checked out in both across different holds and renewals -- the thing here is that the queue for ebooks is generall longer/moves more slowly than the hard copy one at this point.
That's 24 books in hard copy, 22 in e-copy, and 2 in both -- still pretty close, but the pendulum has actually swung towards hard copies again from the 40 hard/41 ebook tally last year.
And while I'm counting up stuff, I might as well mention here that 22 books on the list were part of Hugos homework, and 7 books were sync reads (pretty much the same as last year, a little more Hugo reading).
Book that most changed my perspective:
The Astounding bio certainly taught me a lot of things about Campbell, Heinlein, and L.Ron Hubbard, though I don't know that my perspective on any of them really changed (I didn't know anything about Heinlein's background until the book, had heard Campbell was problematic -- though not about how odd he was -- and learning that Hubbard was EVEN MORE TERRIBLE was not really a change in perspective). It did change my understanding of the field and impact of the Golden Age of SF, and changed my perspective on Dianetics (I hadn't realized how huge a fad it had been, before Scientology).
But I think Because Internet has it beat because it changed my perspective on emoji, which are much more relevant to my day-to-day life.
Favorite character:
Hmmm. I'd liked Rin a lot in The Poppy War -- she is a really fascinating character, very consistent, and in such a dark way. I think she's probably more "memorable" than "favorite" though. Ditto for Strength and Patience of the Hill in Raven Tower, and Tess in Tess of the Road.
I dunno, I liked Ghassan and Muntadhir in City of Brass, so possibly them? Chenevert the hologram dead king/sentient ship from The Consuming Fire, too, I guess, although I had to look up his name. Oh, and Orso in Foundryside. This was not a favorite character heavy year, I'm afraid.
Most memorable character:
Let's go with Rin, Tess, SaPotH, an the crew of the Lucky Peach.
Favorite scene:
Honestly it might be the Molly mini-comic in Action at a Distance. While there were some serious scenes I liked in Tess of the Road and maybe a few others, I can't think of anything I'd call a favorite. Maybe the scene of Ekaterin and Enrique talking about fiction and parental lies in Flowers of Vashnoi?
Favorite quote:
I usually answer this question by going through all of my write-ups and excerpting the quotes I'd marked down that still ping me. So here are a few:
"It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all." (Flowers of Vashnoi)
"We should have been a feeble soldier and a terrible priest. [...] Now the world is afflicted with an incapable monk and an arguably excellent axe-lieutenant, which is much, much worse." (Tess of the Road)
(Not a great year for quotes, either...)
Most inspirational in terms of own writing?
None of this lot.
How many you'd actually read again?
The Vorkosigan novella, probably. Probably not anything else.
A book that you never want to read again:
Well, offbrand Zukos for quality reasons. But of the books I actually liked, probably not The Poppy War (at least not cover to cover), and probably not Tess of the Road, either. It was tough enough getting through the first time.
Book you recommended most to others in 2019?
From this list? Um... I guess GMatLP, which was one of the very few standalones that I liked this year. I also mentioned Infomocracy to my Terra Ignota-reading friends, not because they're really similar, but because the worldbuilding pushes similar buttons in my brain, a bit. Oh, and I recommende both Wayfarers 2 and Wayfarers 3 to people who had prior experience with Chambers -- i.e. mentioned that I liked them both a lot more than book 1 to people who had similar feelings about book 1 that I did (or had chosen not to read it because they'd heard things along those lines), and reassured several people whose friends had been disappointe by book 3 that I liked it a lot.
I can easily answer which book I ANTI-rec'd the most, too. (Hint: I made charts.)
The book series you read the most volumes of in 2019:
Eh. I read 3 things that are loosely part of the Rivers of London universe (two GNs, one of which barely has any Peter in it, and a novella with a brand new cast), and two linked-by-the-same-universe-but-not-characters Wayfarers books. That's honestly it for my series reading, unless you go down to the level of stuff I half-finished.
The genre you read the most in 2019:
- 23 fantasy (including 11 urban fantasy, 8 secondary world, and 4 ~historical fantasy)
- 16 sci-fi (maybe 17? one was too close to call between SF an urban fantasy)
- 3 superhero
- 3 non-fiction
- 2 kidlit / fairytale
- 1 mystery
- 1 poetry
(interestingly, no non-genre YA this year; I kind of miss it...)
Some other stuff I kept track of this year tallied up after the fact:
- 14 were graphic novels (definitely boosted by Hugos homework, and also trying to fin something to nominate) -- a bit less than last year, because I wasn't catching up massively on series -- but I do think I read more individual titles, probably.
- 9 were novellas (like last year) -- mostly still due to Hugos homework, but the LMB an October Man were not (I did nominate 'Vashnoi', though it didn't make the ballot)
Your favorite "classic" you read in 2019:
I didn't read anything approaching a classic this year, unless you count the C.S.Lewis poems.
Most surprising (in a good way) book of the year?
Maybe Dread Nation, because I enjoyed it despite the zombies? Beneath the Sugar Sky, which I had expected to hate, and instead was mildly annoyed by, in the normal Seanan McGuire fashion?
Wait, no, I actually have a real, positive answer: Abbott, which seemed like very much not my thing from both the setting/aesthetic and the fact that I was quite meh on Ahmed's other GN that I rea, but I really liked this one and may choose to continue reading.
The hardest book you read in 2019 (topic or writing style):
Tess of the Road was toughest emotionally -- mothers and 'difficult' daughters, and Tess's self-destructive self-loathing at the start -- though markedly easier when I picked it up again this year than when I started it last year.
I also had to wait until after all of L's college stuff was settled to finish The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, as that thread was too stressful otherwise, though I didn't realize that consciously until later.
The funniest book you read in 2019:
Definitely not Space Opera :P Um, I think The Epic Crush of Genie Lo probably made me laugh the most, though it wasn't a super funny book. Bloodlust & Bonnets, some of the prose in Grasshopper Jungle (early on, anyway) and Jane's narration in Dread Nation and some of the Flowers of Vashnoi and Tess of the Road quotes also made me smile.
The saddest book you read in 2019:
I don't think any of the books I read were "sad" per se, but Tess of the Road and A Close and Common Orbit (the Jane POV thread) engaged me the most emotionally in terms of sympathy. The Poppy War was full of terrible things depicted powerfully, but the tone of it didn't grab me emotionally to the same degree.
The shortest book you read in 2019:
I guess the Hansel and Gretel retelling -- it was ~50 pages, and about half of them were art with no words at all.
The longest book that you read in 2019:
The Poppy War is 544 pages according to Goodreads, as is Tess of the Road. And so is the Astounding bio, LOL (although some of that is surely footnotes). I don't think anything else came close in length, except Children of Blood and Bone (which was 531 pages, for all that it felt interminable).
Best book that was outside your comfort zone/a new genre for you?
Of the ones I finished, I guess Dread Nation, on account of zombies, or maybe The Belles, on account of being the least relevant to my interests (though I enjoyed it, actually). But really the Russian non-fiction. It's been AGES since I read any non-fiction in Russian, and that was all memoirs, which are a different style.
Most thrilling, unputdownable book of 2019?
The Kellermans are usually pretty good for this, and The Wedding Guest worked fine in that regard. Also Zero Sum Game was a pretty good thriller, for the most part?
Most beautifully written book in 2019?
No standouts this year that I can think of... Dread Nation had a fun narrative voice, and Tess of the Road and Flowers of Vashnoi both had prose I liked a lot. I feel like the books that aimed for "great prose" fell well short for me.
Book you most anticipated in 2019?
It was Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota 3), which was pushed to 2020 and now (sob) to 2021. Baron of Magister Valley (the new Paarfi book) also pushed, though we should be getting that one in 2020. Of books that actually got published, The October Man (which it took me several weeks to get around to reading once it did come out) and Philosopher's War (which I started promptly as soon as I got a copy of the ARC and then never went back to because the Hugos snowed me under or something). So, yeah, not so much with the anticipated books track record this year :P
Favorite cover of a book you read in 2019?
I like the butterbugs on the cover of Flowers of Vashnoi:
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach gets a special shoutout because the protagonist's epiction on the cover is both accurate and awesome (and also kudos for having a badass old lady on the cover, period):
I did not enjoy A Conspiracy of Truths all that much as a book, but it did have a beautiful (embossed!) cover:
And I quite like the stylistic choices of The Poppy War:
Book that had the greatest impact on you this year?
It's possible that offbrand Zukos winning all the things put me off reading for the rest of the year...
Book you can't believe you waited till 2019 to finally read?
Flowers of Vashnoi, just because it was the book I had waited for for YEARS and I'd owned it for several months (since it came out mid-May, so, over half a year!) by the time I finally read it (first thing this year). Similarly, Tess of the Road, which I had started more than a year before I finished it.
Book that had a scene that left you reeling and dying to talk to someone about it?
The climactic scene in The Poppy War probably comes closest, I guess. And maybe the scene in Infomocracy where the BCP telegraph starts transmitting SOS, because that was some nicely done tension!
Looking Ahead:
One book you didn't read this year that will be your #1 priority in 2020?
I have completely failed at reading any of the books I put on this list last year, some of which have been carryovers from prior years -- I STILL have not read Sorcerer to the Crown, any of the Craft books I've started, or made any progress on Crooked Kingdom, read any Magnus Chase books, or any more Maggie Stiefvater books, or The Night Circus, or the Clou Roads sequels. Or any Hardinges, though I do intend to rectify that with Deeplight soonish. Also, I want to read the Pinsker book(s) that came out this year.
I i read 2 out of 3 sync read books -- Zero Sum Game and A Conspiracy of Truths, and we mutually gave up on Forbidden Parabatai Het, so at least that one's dispositioned.
We haven't figured out future sync reads yet, so I guess for now my other priorities will be reading two books I'd looked forward to and own: Philosopher's War and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
New book you are most anticipating for 2020?
- False Value the next Peter Grant book - Feb, on pre-order
- Baron of Magister Valley (Paarfi's Monte Cristo) - April, on pre-order
- Peace Talks, which finally has a pub date! - June
- Thorn of Emberlain - Sept??
And I'm not sure any other books I'm looking forward to have confirmed publication dates *sigh* They are, in order of likelihood of appearance:
- Warboy (Warchild #4)
- Doors of Stone (Kvothe #3) LOL, who are we even kidding
- and ditto for Winds of Winter (and hopefully I will still care by the time it comes along, which seems increasingly unlikely)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1117275.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).
40. Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man -- This was cute and fun but also drove home the point that, much as I love this world and the magic, I'm mostly here for the characters around Peter. Because I had this book sitting on my Kindle for weeks before I opened it, and then it took me months to write it up, and I still don't have a ton to say about it. Tobias seems like a nice guy? and a fun narrator, though I might've wished for a slightly more distinct narrative voice. I like that his background is, like, dynastic police, and I like that, like Peter, he has a family which is part of his life. I also find it really amusing that apparently the international counterparts of the Folly have heard about Peter, and if Tobias is any indication, are all jealous of him, LOL. And Abigail is known in international circles as "absolutely terrifying", even more LOL XD Also, apparently Tobias is not into SFF the way Peter is -- he doesn't even recognize Harry Potter references! -- which I guess by definition makes him a bit less fun for me. But the Director of the KDA sounds intriguing, and I'd like to see more of her!
From a worldbuilding perspective, it was neat to see that, unlike the Folly, modern-day "weird bollocks" in Germany has all the paperwork checklists they need, without Peter having to develop them from scratch (I do wonder if they never stopped using them as magic went out of the world, or someone developed them just in case, or they just moved more quickly, or?) And that all the magic stuff has its own very official-sounding names in German :D
I enjoyed the case -- I think BA has gotten better at plotting, or maybe a novella is better for his kind of plots -- and there was a lot of nicely creepy stuff. Also, there's now been an explicit asexual character mention (with Uwe), which I think is a first for this universe.
45. Action at a Distance (RoL graphic novel) -- something something SPOILERS! ex-nazi serial killer who collects "exotic" female victims in ethnic restaurants, Nightingale's army buddy that Molly has a crush on, the first meeting between Nightingale and Asterid (also featuring her getting her hands on his service revolver; apparently it's their little tradition), and Nightingale preventing a nuclear reactor meltdown, as well as destroying some planes. My main takeaways from this intallment, however, are:
1. Nightingale had a bloodhound named Hesperus, in 1957.
2. At one point army buddy calls him Tom (which felt super jarring).
3. Molly writes Peter/Nightingale slash on Peter's laptop and posts it on AO3. I don't actually know if mini-comics are meant to be canon or just crack or canon-plausible crack, but Im 100% accepting this as canon, and in fact want all the associated fic. Not Molly's fic, I mean. Fic wherein Peter discovers what she's been using his laptop for and reads some of the fic.
44. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire -- (sync read with ikel89 which I was semi-delinquent in finishing on time, because I got to like 80% and wandered away towards other books). This book will almost certainly show up when I do my end-of-year book meme and have to answer the "most disappointing book" question. Not because I disliked the book -- I actually did not dislike it -- and there are a lot of books on my list which I liked a lot less than this one -- but god, there was SO MUCH POTENTIAL HERE for it to be something I would love, and it fell short of that in a lot of small, preventable ways. Last year I felt similar about Six Wakes -- such a cool premise (country house mystery on a spaceship, with clones having to solve their own murders!), with such underwhelming execution. With that book, I kept wishing a different author had taken on the same high-concept premise (Sarah Pinsker, for preference, or maybe Ann Leckie). With this one, honestly, I think even this author could've written a book I would have liked a lot, with some serious editing, or maybe a couple of novels under her belt (this is a debut novel).
I still really love the pitch for this book, which sold me instantly on tracking it down: ambassador of tiny Lsel Station comes to the capital of the vast space empire she loves, with the (outdated) ~ghost of her predecessor in her head, and has to figure out what happened to her actual predecessor and stop said vast space empire from gobbling up her tiny independent station. And there are poetry battles and poetry ciphers! This all sounded incredibly cool! Plot-relevant poetry, culture clash, the tension between loving the cultural output of a thing and fearing its worldly influence, and also ghosts of dead predecessors in your head is kind of a niche kink of mine, so. Oh, and I love sci-fi mysteries, too, and it seemed like this was likely to be one, in part. Unfortunately, I found the execution of pretty much every aspect of what I described disappointing, or at least not satisfying. Spoilers from here!
I did actually like the ~ghost of Yskandr in Mahit's head: Lsel station keeps imagos (mind-maps) of people with valuable skills, and implants them in compatible individuals to preserve their knowledge. This is a really cool idea, and I loved everything we got to see about it, both the infrastructure around imagos on Lsel, and a look at Mahit integrating with her newly implanted imago -- the way she found it hard to tell, sometimes, which emotions/endocrine reactions were her own, etc. And I enjoyed what interplay we got between her and Yskandr(s), and Yskandr himself -- he was, I think, my favorite character, even though (or maybe because) you only see him in glimpses, obliquely. Unfortunately, one of the plot points of the book is that Mahit's imago is sabotaged, and she loses access to the Yskandr in her imago for most of the novel, which was very disappointing given that this was the part I was enjoying the most. (She does recover not one, but TWO Yskandrs eventually, but by then I was pretty annoyed with the book as a whole.)
The mystery didn't really work as a mystery for me -- the story doesn't have the ARC of a mystery, and the whodunit comes in a random scene with no real payoff, and further revelations don't really end up mattering, either. (It also doesn't work as a political thriller, because the politics felt too simplistic, and also not thrilling enough.)
The poetry was one of the most frustrating things, because I loved the IDEA of what it was trying to do -- poetry as worldbuilding! poetry as plot! poetry as a way of getting to know a culture not your own! -- there is nothing about this I do not love! -- but kept itching to fix the execution, because I feel the book sets itself up for failure here. Because, look. First of all, unless you are actually a brilliant poet, when you have your characters write what is supposed to be brilliant poetry, you should probably not quote it in your story. This was a thing I discovered when, in high school, I had some ideas for a story cycle about a brilliant poet. Like with anything where you need to demonstrate a character's brilliance, you can cheat a bit and have them come up with the thing in seconds and while dangling upsidedown over a lava pit or something, while you as the author come up with the brilliance at leisure and with the aid of research -- but this is harder to do with poetry, I think. But even that problem aside, poetry is so steeped in the culture milieu that produces it, that it's really hard to work with it for a secondary world/nonexistent culture. I mean, Tolkien managed, but he also made up his languages and cosmology from scratch, which is definitely not a level of worldbuilding commitment I'm seeing here (more on which below). And here, in particular, you have someone from one culture, who is educated in but not native to the poetry tradition, trying to write poetry for the local audience. AND it is meant to be a secret signal, AND it is meant to go viral -- there is so much story burden loaded onto this poem, and it just doesn't stand up to the weight. There are things that could've worked for me in this space! I'm actually a firm believer that a non-native speaker can sometimes come up with a striking turn of phrase precisely BECAUSE they engage with the language in a different way than a native speaker, more consciously, or because they have their ear tuned to a different set of morphemes or meters or metaphors or foundational sources to crib from. Or Mahit could be familiar with some erstwhile classic of space Aztec literature which is hopelessly passe or out of favor in modern Teixcalaan (the way I've read a lot more Jack London than most of my peers who grew up in the US, and was the only person in my AP US History class to have read Uncle Tom's Cabin -- in Russian, but still). If the book had gone somewhere like that with its poetry plots, I would've been completely on board! But no: we get three poems, two of which are supposedly brilliant, and while both contain a couple of lines I liked a lot, I do think it would've been much better to show the EFFECT of the poetry on people (and maybe quote those particularly strong lines, or a metaphor or two), rather than trying to reproduce it. I was willing to accept that Twelve Azalea's poem, which is almost literally "Roses are red/Violets are blue/Have you been kidnapped?/Not signed, you know who" was not MEANT to be good, because he was just having a lark. But Mahit and Three Seagrass's poem, calling on Nineteen Adze to come rescue them, is about equually subtle, and not particularly amazing as poetry. I did like the "Released, I am a spear in the hands of the sun" line -- which the Emperor ends up echoing as the last thing he says, and crowds start chanting -- but. But. This is space aztecs we're talking about. Suns and spears are like the FOUNDATION of their #aesthetic. I just cannot suspend disbelief that "spear in the hand of the sun" is not a hoary old cliche in their canon, like "brave as a lion" or rhyming love/dove.
And that, I think, touches on my fundamental problem with the book: it is about the clash of cultures and yearning for a culture not your own, which you can almost but never quite fake being part of (that scene, where Mahit listens to Three Seagrass participating in a poetry battle with her friends and realizes she couldn't be part of it, much as she wants to -- which not! does not attempt to QUOTE any of the poetry produced -- was the poetry scene that worked best for me, btw), but the worldbuilding never quite felt real to me. I think that for a book like this to work, you, the reader, have to find Teixcalaan irresistible, or at least attractive, and a secondary world has to feel real enough to do that to me. But I never got a solid, lived-in sense of it, beyond the aesthetic of colors and spears. Oh, there were ELEMENTS I loved a lot -- the names were fabulous! I kind of want to read fic set in this world just to get more names, and some of the terms, like the interstellar fleet being referred to as Six Outstretched Palms. But the city did not feel real. Just, something about the place felt nebulous -- I never wanted to stay, or explore further.
In fact, the only place that DID feel interesting was Lsel Station. Glimpses of it appealed to me more than all the color-coded pomp of Teixcalaan. Early on in the book I wondered if this was intentional: if the point was that Lsel Station WAS the more interesting place, and Mahit just failed to appreciate it, dazzled, as she was, by the glittering tinsel of neo-fascism the sparkle and metaphor of the space empire. Having finished, I'm afraid I no longer believe that Martine is a brilliant enough writer (at least yet) to do so intentionally, but I am curious whether book 2, which will be set on Lsel, presumably, will change my mind on that.
I wonder if a big part of my problem with Teixcalaan not feeling sufficiently real is the POV of the book, which felt... shallow. Like, we spend most of the book in Mahit's head, but I was never fully convinced that we were seeing the world through her eyes. One of the first things I noticed that gave me pause was the prose: a Lsel station POV observing a departing shuttle in a way that I don't think a space station dweller would think about it. I'm not sure I would've noticed all the fungal metaphors if ikel89 hadn't started complaining first, but afterwards there was no unseeing this. I would be perfectly willing to accept it if Mahit had reason to compare everything to fungi -- are they a source of protein on Lsel and did she have to work in hydroponics as a side gig? But there's no in-universe, in-character explanation for it, and so I felt disconnected from the character and the universe whenever it came up. And the more disconnected I felt, the more I frowned at the small details of the worldbuilding. Printed pamphlets (of something like fanfic, which I found very cute in theory) are very popular on Lsel -- really? A remote space station is going to have excess paper/paper equivalent for this rather than distributing their fanfic digitally? Which started me wondering -- why doesn't Mahit seem to have even the equivalent of a modern cell phone? Sure, Lsel has its imagos, but that would give you deep, specialized knowledge and intuition -- it does not appear that they have a secondary function of remembering people's phone numbers (or whatever) or looking up stuff on space google? (And if Mahit did have a Lsel station equivalent of a smartphone, why is she not missing it while among the space Aztecs?! Actually, even the Teixcalaan version of this technology is weird from a worldbuilding perspective: everybody has cloudhooks, right? (I won't even wonder, for the moment, why there don't seem to be any security measures around other people using yours, as Mahit does with Three Seagrass's, or why that wouldn't be the first thing you'd take away or disable when keeping someone prisoner -- having to rely on your antagonists to be incompetent is not great form...) Ok then, if everone has cloudhooks, which are integrated into the infrastructure of the city, why are people handing out physical pamphlets and advertisements?? Just for the #aesthetics? In general the worldbuilding felt like an odd mix of retro/modern with just a few sci-fi touches, and not in a way that made sense to me (like, horses and daggers on Barrayar make sense because of the Time of Isolation. What's the deal here?) Possibly this was to help suspend disbelief for things like Mahit et al managing to evade pursuit by ducking into a departing train, but no, that didn't help -- what is this, the 1940s?
I might've been more willing to overlook these complaints if the characters had grabbed me, but they did not. Mahit is... OK? But for someone completely on her own on a new planet, unable to trust her own reactions, and possibly the only thing standing between her home and annexation, she just didn't engage me much, mostly because I never felt like she was in any jeopardy. Everyone she met seemed to like and admire her (for conclusions that didn't seem that brilliant, or that I would've expected to occur to someone other than a stranger who barely understood the current political climate -- which is a separate complaint; I quite like the handwave that she mostly learned from literature and literature tends to focus on non-standard cases in antiquity, not how things are supposed to work, but surely there's space Wikipedia, at least?), and when she met someone who didn't, then someone else came along and rescued her. Everything felt very low stakes, until Twelve Azalea's death, but that didn't feel jarring in a profound way, more out of character for the rest of the book. Or maybe just 'cos he wasn't the protagonist, magically protected against all harm.
There were some things I liked! The epigraphs for the chapters, excerpts from primary documents, were quite fun, especially the ones from Lsel and anything to do with Eleven Lathe. I also liked the parts where the book clearly committed to cultural differences -- smiling with our mouth, the Lsel station way, vs smiling with your eyes, and people trying out each other's ways. Language differences -- space Aztecs having multiple words for different birds and Station-born Mahit having trouble telling them apart, because there are no birds on a space station. Different ways Mahit reacts to a planetary environment, not used to weather and open sky. I liked the resoltuion between Mahit and Three Seagrass, Three Seagrass's confession, meant to be inclusive, actually being othering and making Mahit see things in perspective. I was genuinely surprised by Mahit choosing to go back to Lsel Station, in a good way. And there are some genuinely lovely lines, like "Like a flower turns to the sun or a person takes in oxygen, Teixcalaan reaches again towards the stars" in the Emperor's declaration of war and other official announcements, or the last paragraph/line, "Not, in the end, quite home" But, honestly, these things just made me pine for what this book could've been, and wasn't.
Finally, a thing that struck me as not so much bad as odd about the book was the tone of it. Mahit just didn't feel conflicted enough about Teixcalaan? People didn't seem angry enough in general? Not even the one who was hoping to feed the space Aztecs to the mysterious brutal aliens -- almost none of it was visceral enough. I actually went out and picked up The Traitor Baru Cormorant while still reading the book, because I was feeling this negative space so acutely.
Oh wait, no. Finally finally, SO MANY ITALICS for emphasis! I actually usually like it as a technique, but there was so much of it here, and sometimes it was stressing things that didn't need to be stressed, and around the 50% mark I developed a twitch every time I saw part of the line italicized, and let me tell you, this did not improve my reading experience :/
46. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language -- now THIS book I actually liked, but it's hard to talk about nonfiction in a write-up.
I found the central premise, of internet writing as having given us an informal writing mode like there had always been formal and informal speaking modes quite eye-opening (though obvious in retrospect). The aside on code-mixing was especially interesting, because it's definitely something that I notice myself doing on LJ, because it just feels... weirdly limiting not to. I enjoyed the chapter on the early history of internet slang, especially the origin of ":)" and "lol" -- I didn't realize either of those things were actually known! -- and the different cohorts of "internet people". The chapter on adding nuance and emotion to writing was very neat; a lot of it I'd sort of internalized inuitively, like the ~sarcasm tildes~ (and I like the observation that the ~ looks kind of like the songy sarcastic mock-pronunciation of the word would sound -- swoopy-like), and some I'd never stopped to think about, like which letters get repeated for emphasis -- including that it can be letters that are acutally silent, like "dumbbbbb" or "sameeee" (although I personally wouldn't do that -- I always go with "saaaaame") -- and especially the observation that "speech elongation" in writing (even in dialogue) doesn't start showing up until around the time recording devices became commonplace. Oh, and putting people saying "hashtag [whatever]" out loud in the context of people pronouncing OTHER ~punctuation marks historically -- "those quote-unquote experts", "we have given our best offer, period" -- sort of reconciled me to it, a little bit. Also fascinating was the revelation (to me, anyway) that complaints about all lower case typing became way more common when smartphones with autocorrect made it so that typing in lower case was actually the HARDER option -- i.e. in reaction to it as a statement, not as laziness/efficienccy. I never knew that!
The most interesting chapter to me was the one on emoji: the history, which I didn't know; the difference between smileys (the mouth is expressive) vs kaomoji (the eyes are the expressive bit); emoji as gesture (emblem an co-speech); and especially emoji responses as part of chat which serve in place of sympathetic "I'm listening" noises (like if someone says "I went to the beach this weekend" and you text them back the emoji for palm tree and fish or whatever -- they don't carry any actual content, but I've been doing that and it feels weirdly necessary in chat). I don't use GIFs myself, but it was still interesting to read about their role in internet language, and especially the reference to an article "We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs". (One thing McCulloch didn't touch on at all and I wish she had was icons as part of internet communication on LJ/clones. I know those types of platforms are passe, but I feel like icons served a similar but different role to emoji. They're not in-line commentary, so it's more that they flavor the whole reply, while maybe underlying a specific part of it, but also, I used to miss having the extra layer of meaning accessible to me via icons when trying to communicate online without them, and I've started feeling similarly about emoji (and the specific ideolect of Best Chat) now that I've been using them more.
The idea of social meadia as "the third place" was also interesting; I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, LJ/DW absolutely fulfills that need for me. I wasn't as fond of the chapter on memes, but it was just less interesting to me, or maybe wasn't as reflective of my meme experience, IDK.
Quotes:
"Men tend to follow a generation later: in other words, women tend to learn language from their peers; men learn it from their mothers." (!)
On why sarcasm punctuation proposals all failed: "If we wanted to make all our messages completely lucid, we already have a very effective tool for that, and it's called Not Being Sarcastic." (Fair XD)
"Irony is a linguistic trust fall."
[For] "the future of technolinguistic tools, like speech to text or predictive smart replies, we nee to ask not just how they can be use, but how they can be subverted; not just how esigners can help users communicate their intentions, but how users can help them communicate more than the designers intended."
"If you've ever foun yourself unable to get a wor in edgewise, or doing all that talking around someone frustratingly taciturn, it's probably because your cultural timings [how long you subconsciously wait to tell if your interlocutor is done with his turn talking - ~0.2 seconds] are ever so slightly miscalibrated for each other."
On social media: "Airports are no longer impersonal, insomnia is no longer isolating, and the most mundane grocery run can be livened up by a quick exchange with a pocket friend." (<3!)
On a cross-stitch she made: "After all, this is my personal field in which to grow my fucks, and htis is my juxtaposition of old an new, of oral culture and igital culture, of domestic an profane, of the aspiration to give fewer fucks and the reality that delicate stitchwork requires many fucks indeed."
"Language is humanity's most spectacular open source project."
On network as a new metaphor for language: "But there is no pristine first edition of a network. A network is not debase as it changes; its flexibility is a key part of its strength."
47. Holly Black, The Wicked King -- Honestly I couldn't even tell you why I read it. There were things I liked about The Cruel Prince, about 95% of them to do with the relationship between Jude and murderdad Madoc plus the possibility that it was actually meant to be Jude's villain origin story. But now, apparently we are playing this straight, and also Jude/Cardan and their mutual self-loathing kink was the only thing this book was really about, and words cannot describe how little I care about their mutual self-loathing kink. At least the dubcon in the first book was a little interesting. This is just pathetic. I have so few thoughts on this book, I will leave you with these two incidental ones:
1) When ikel89 was reading this book, before I even started, she sent along screenshots, and I manifested a haiku:
"I hate you!" I sigh.
"Yes mortal, hate me harder!"
Insouciant lounge.
It turns out this encompasses all I have to say even after finishing the book.
2) The text I sent to Best Chat immediately upon finishing: "Yuri on Ice sighting in epilogue might be my favorite thing about this book and I've never even watched YoI."
The fact that Holly Black is writing this nonsense is still breaking my heart. But K says there's lots of murderdad in book 3, though, so I guess I'm reading that at some point XD
48. C.S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage -- definitely not what I expected my introduction to C.S.Lewis's writing to be, but I learned about this book from perpetual, picked it up, and actually... reasonably enjoyed chunks of it? The pastoral and mythological bits seem to owe a heavy homage to Milton (even before I got to the overt homage), but, like, I can't fault a body for that. Far more interesting, though, were the dark poems from the trauma of war, which actually had some pretty powerful lines:
The ancient hope that still will rise again--
Of a just God that cares for earthly pain,
Yet far away beyond our labouring night,
He wanders in the depths of endless light,
Singing alone his musics of delight;
Only the far, spent echo of his song
Our dungeons and deep cells can smite along,
And Thou art nearer. Thou art very strong.
[Satan Speaks]
They hate my world! Then let that other God
Come from the outer spaces glory-shod,
And from this castle I have built on Night
Steal forth my own thought's children into light.
And the rather different from all the rest "In Praise of Solid People" ("Thank God that there are solid folk [...] Who pass untroubled nights and days/Full-fed and sleepily content/Rejoicing in each other's praise/Respectable and innocent [...] And think in well-worn grooves of thought/Whose honest spirits never reel/Before man's mystery, overwrought.") made me think of Tolkien's Hobbits and smile (though I know this precedes Hobbits by quite a bit). The lines "And still no nearer to the Light/And still no further from myself" were pretty good, too.
49. Emily McGovern, Bloodlust & Bonnets -- not something I would've ever picked up without ikel89's rec, but it was cute enough, I guess. My favorite was Napoleon the long-suffering eagle who speaks in French-accented cursive. Lord Byron was amusing, but really, there's just the one joke there, and some times it landed better than others for me on repetition. Lucy's attempts at romance were also occasionally amusing, but ultimately the plot to jokes-that-worked ratio was off for what I wanted (and I didn't care about the plot, like, AT ALL), and the art style was decidedly not my thing.
50. The Snow Queen (illustrated by Bargam Ibatoulline) -- I first picked up the book for familiar imagery and only then noticed that the illustrator was from Russia, which explains why the images called out to me -- probably based on the same fairy tale imagery I'm used to. Whoever did the adapting of Andersen's plot, I liked this retelling, with a minimum of Christian piety and whatnot.
51. Hansel and Gretel (Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattoti) -- I picked this up thanks the the striking b&w negative space drawings, but I enjoyed Gaiman's creepy retelling, too.
And that's it for the year:
1. Lois McMaster Bujold, The Flowers of Vashnoi
2. S.L.Huang, Zero Sum Game
3. Runaways, vol.1: Find Your Way Home (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka)
4. Steven Brust, Good Guys
5. Saga vol.9 (Brian K. Vaughan, Fiona Staples)
6. John Scalzi, The Consuming Fire
7. Runaways, vol.2: Best Friends Forever (Rainbow Rowell, Kris Anka
8. Skyward vol.1: My Low-G Life (Joe Henderson, Lee Garbett)
9. Water Weed (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel)
10. R.F. Kuang, The Poppy War
11. Alexandra Rowland, A Conspiracy of Truths
12. Paper Girls, vol 5, (Brian K Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang)
13. Rebecca Roanhorse, Trail of Lightning
14. Ann Leckie, Raven Tower
15. By Night (John Allison, art by Christine Larsen)
16. Black Panther: Long Live the King (Nnedi Okorafor, Aaron Covington
17. Abbott (Saladin Ahmed, art by Sami Kivela
18. Brooke Bolander, The Only Harmless Great Thing
19. Aliette de Bodard, The Tea Master and the Detective
20. P. Djeli Clark, The Black God's Drums
21. Kelly Robson, Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach
22. Robert Jackson Bennett, Foundryside
23. Seanan McGuire, Beneath the Sugar Sky (Wayward Children 3)
24. Monstress, v3, Marjorie Liu, art by Tana Sakeda
25. Ursula LeGuin, David Naimon, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing
26. Nnedi Okorafor, Binti: Night Maskerade
27. Tillie Walden, On a Sunbeam
28. Little Girls, Nicholas Aflleje and Sarah DeLaine
29. Becky Chambers, A Close and Common Orbit
30. Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction
31. Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few
32. Charles Stross, The Concrete Jungle
33. Dhonielle Clayton, The Belles
34. Cat Valente, Space Opera
35. Malka Older, Infomocracy
36. Justina Ireland, Dread Nation -
37. Rachel Hartman, Tess of the Road
38. Jonathan Kellerman, The Wedding Guest
39. F.C.Yee, The Epic Crush of Genie Lo
40. Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man
41. Andrew Smith, Grasshopper Jungle
42. Tomi Adeyemi, Children of Blood and Bone
43. S. A. Chakraborty, City of Brass
44. Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire
45. Action at a Distance (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmell)
46. Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language
47. Holly Black, The Wicked King
48. C.S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage
49. Emily McGovern, Bloodlust & Bonnets
50. The Snow Queen (illustrated by Bargam Ibatoulline)
51. Hansel and Gretel (Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattoti)
*
End of year book meme (kind of desultory this year):
The first book you read in 2019:
The Flowers of Vashnoi, and it was one of the books I liked best this year (which I say without claiming that it's a particlarly epic book), which kind of describes my reaing trajectory honestly.
The last book you finished in 2019:
A Hansel and Gretel retelling by Neil Gaiman, in (dark) picture book form. I was going to make a final push and finish T.Kingfisher's Minor Mage (I was 80% done with it, and it's a novella, so it would've taken me like half an hour), but... didn't en up bothering just to make 52 books a year. It certainly doesn't FEEL like I've read a significant number of books this year so I guess I didn't feel like ~padding the numbers.
The first book you will finish (or did finish!) in 2020:
Presumably Minor Mage. Or possibly the Fred Pohl autobiography that I'm also >50% done with.
How many books read in 2019?
51. Way down from last year, and a lot of these are graphic novels and novellas and even a couple of picture books. Way down from last year's 81, and the lowest it's been in a while. I did read a bunch of short fiction again (for Hugos homework and at nominations), though I think not as much as last year. I did half-read a lot of books? Does that count?
Fiction/Non-Fiction ratio?
I read in full 3 nonfiction things -- LeGuin interview and Astounding bio for Hugos homework, and Because Internet for fun -- as well as ~half of two other things: the Pohl bio mentioned above and Vereteno Vasilisy (a Russian book about psychorama, after ikel89 was talking about it during her visit). I do intend to finish both, at some point, or at least to keep reaing them. I also skimmed/leafed through some other non-fiction things for the Hugos (and may want to buy myself a copy of the Tolkien Boleian exhibit one to peruse at leisure). And I'm still firm in my intent to read Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, despite a complete lack of progress this year (I snagged myself on a poem exercise there and haven't continued beyond that).
Male/Female authors?
I actually didn't keep track with charts this year because meh, I guess? But tallying up from my reading list:
Books: 27 books written by female authors, 2 books written by male authors; 1 written by authors who I believe are non-binary (or at least use 'they' pronouns), and 2 with too much of a mix to count. That's a very ifferent ratio from past years, which were usually >2:1 female :male (although I don't think it has anything to do with my meh-ness...)
Authors: for this one, I'm counting just individual authors I've read, so that the effect of being swamped by series is factored out somewhat (although this year there was no serious series reading). I read 31 female authors and 13 male authors (more of each than last year, because I was reading broader due to Hugos, but %-wise, a lot more men than women, as last year's numbers were 28 F / 8 M).
Also, because it's interesting, I tried to keep track of the gender of *protagonists*, too. The result (counting each book, not series) is 40 female protagonists and 24 male protagonists -- which is the FIRST time since I started tracking this that I had more female than male protags, even with a heavily female author line-up. Huh! Also, usually I see a lot of female-authored books with male protagonists, but not so much this year -- just the Penrics, the Dragonbreaths, and Terra Ignota. And there's the reverse, too -- the Paper Girls books have male author and female protagonists, which helps balance it out a little. Compared to last year, the number of male protagonists went down only slightly, but the number of female protagonists nearly quadrupled! Now, granted, Harriet is responsible for a bunch of this, but not only her.
Breakdown by author:
Female:
- Chambers -- 2
- Rowell -- 2 (comics)
- Okorafor -- 2 (really more like 1.3)
- Bujold -- 1(.5, counting a partial reread of Cetaganda)
- Kuang* -- 1(.5, counting the Dragon Republic I read)
- Bolander* -- 1 (+, counting some short fiction)
- Huang* -- 1
- Roanhorse
- Leckie
- de Bodard
- Kelly Robson*
- Seanan McGuire
- Marjorie Liu
- LeGuin
- Walden*
- Clayton*
- Valente
- Older*
- Ireland*
- Hartman
- Adeyemi*
- Chakraborty*
- Martine*
- McCulloch*
- Black
- McGovern*
Male:
- Aaronovitch -- 3
- Vaughan -- 2
- Brust
- Kellerman -- 1
- Scalzi -- 1
- Henderson* -- 1
- John Allison*
- Ahmed
- P. Djeli Clark*
- Bennet(* -- not first thing I read, but first thing I finished) -- 1
- Affleje*
- Nevala-Lee*
- Stross(* -- not first thing I read, but first thing I finished)
- Yee*
- Andrew Smith*
- C.S.Lewis*
- Gaiman -- 0.5
NB/"they" pronouns:
- Rowland* -- 1
* = new-to-me author this year. 8-10 new-to-me male authors, a little higher than last year's 7 (and only 3 of them due to Hugos homework). And 13 new female authors (down from 17 last year, but my overall numbers are down); 8 were for Hugo homework. Sadly, not too many of the new authors are authors I'd happily read again, though a few are, and a couple more are authors that I definitely see enough of a spark with to keep trying.
Most books read by one author this year?
Technically Aaronovitch, but the "3" books were two (co-creited) GNs and a novella. So for real it's actually Becky Chambers with two novels. It's a super weird year for me from that perspective, as I almost always have either a large swath of books by one author, when I'm binge-reading someone new or catching up on a series, or a couple of authors with ~3 books each. There was no author to dominate the year for me, which probably goes towards explaining why it felt so meh.
Favorite books read?
Um, yeah, it's slim pickings this time around. Flowers of Vashnoi; Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach; both the Wayfarers books; The Poppy War (for a, uh, given value of "favorite"), and Because Internet are probably it.
Best books you read in 2019?
I thought Tess of the Road was very good and filling an unusual niche ditto for Recor of a Spaceborn Few. I thought The Poppy War was very impressive for a debut. GMatLP was not flawless, but I thought it did AMAZING things with character and worldbuilding in the space of a in the space of a novella (and I still don't know what the Hugo voters were smoking to rank it so low).
And, not as much to my personal taste (zombies, meh) but I think an objectively good book: Dread Nation.
Least favorite?
THIS ONE'S EASY! Children of Bloo and Bone (speaking of not knowing what the awards people were smoking). If offbrand Zukos didn't exist, this answer might have been Space Opera or (sob) The Wicked King.
Most disappointing book/Book you wished you loved more than you did?
This one is also quite easy: A Memory Called Empire -- on paper, everything I could possibly want from a SF book, blurbed exuberantly by some of my favorite SFF authors and generating a lot of buzz on my flist. I didn't hate it, but I idn't think it was particularly great, either, and it certainly did not live up to my expectations.
Second place goes to: Foundryside, actually. I liked parts of this book! But I had wante to like all of it, because the worldbuilding idea is very neat, and several flisters liked it a whole lot. But I found the characterization too... broad? and the dialogue cringey, which is the point at which I realized that I can overlook a lot of bad prose, but bad dialogue is much harder for me to get over when it comes to redaing enjoyment.
Other books that disappointed me to various degrees were: Zero Sum Game (which I had hoped would be both cooler and more palatable to my prospective sync read folks), The Consuming Fire (a marked step down from the Collapsing Empire for me), A Conspiracy of Truths (it's not that I was expecting to like it, based on my divergence from Serpent!Alex's tastes, but it would've been nice to like it more than I did), On a Sunbeam (the blurbs had led me to expect something a lot more impressive than sleepovers in space; the art was pretty but not really my thing).
I was also a little bit disappointed by Trail of Lightning, which was a perfectly servicieable, even good urban fantasy book, but I had been hoping for more from Roanhorse.
Also, Saga 9 went in a direction I'm quite unhappy with, which is a different type of disappointment.
Best series you discovered in 2019?
Therein lies the rub. I guess it's new series that shape my reading experience for the year, and this was a pretty lackluster year for that, after a couple of really good ones.
Uh... Daevabad, I guess? In that I enjoyed book 1 for the most part and definitely intend to continue with the series? (though to be honest it's the fact that I have several other fans on my flist that gives this one the edge over several other books I liked to approximately this degree, too).
As for other new series for me (defined as I read at least one book in a series I've not read before and I haven't ruled out reading more -- or, alternatively, have finished the whole series): I will probably keep reading The Poppy War sequels (I loved the first book, but am boggd down in the middle of book 2, and it's missing all the things I like about the first one); I will probably keep reading Roanhorse's Sixth World books in the hope that they'll get more interesting; I'm curious enough to check out the sequels to Foundryside and A Memory Called Empire despite my disappointment (probably); I'm not sure I would've bothered tracking own the sequels to Imfomocracy, but since I have them available, I'll probably read them. I may also read the sequl to Dread Nation, despite the zombies, because that was a pretty good book. I have the sequel to Grasshopper Jungle, so presumably I'll read it, and will probably also read the sequel to The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (hopefully in a non-college-app year).
Oh, and I read my first book (novella) of the Laundry Files this year, and may give that another shot. I actually checke out another title from the library and returned it unopened, but... maybe? in a less meh year?
Favorite new author you discovered this year?
Kelly Robson, I guess? And actually if I can count the short fiction reading for the Hugos, then also Daryl Gregory and Alix E. Harrow, who wrote the novelette and short story I liked a lot, and Tina Connolly maybe a notch below.
And I guess I'm looking forwar to reading more Kuang, Chakraborty, and Ireland, though I wouldn't call them favorite authors outright, at least not yet.
I also like a lot of P.Djeli Clark's worlbuiling ideas, and am eagerly awaiting a point where he'll start writing them into stories I like as stories an not just places to put his worlbuilding.
Oldest book read?
Spirits in Bonage is from 1919. After that comes The Concrete Jungle (2004), and then it's all stuff from just the last couple of years.
Newest?
Action at a Distance -- the trade paperback is from Nov 12, 2019.
Longest book title?
Nevala-Lee's "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction" -- which, OK, in fairness it is a bio of four people with fairly long names but still, that's 16 words, not counting the initials. Because Internet, with its full 8 word title, is nowhere close.
Longest fiction title: tie between The Tea Master and the Detective and Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach and The Epic Crush of Genie Lo (6 words, but not all wors are the same length, so I guess the de Board would probably win).
Shortest title?
Saga, 4 letters, followed by Abbott with 5.
How many re-reads?
None in full, but I did reread chunks of the Hamster Princess books as part of Yuletide canon review, and reread half of Cetagana when ikel89 was reading it.
Any in translation?
Nope, not this year... And only half a book in Russian (Vereteno Vasilisy) which is at least progress vs last year.
How many of this year's books were from the library?
I should've kept better track this year, but I didn't... I did use the library a lot, though so let's see if I can reconstruct it.
- 2 were online freebies -- a TOR.com books of the month and a Project Gutenberg book
- 3 were (ahem) of dubious online provenance, though I subsequently got a legal copy through no effort of my own
- 7 were books I bought for myself (2 in hard copy (both GNs) and 5 in ebook) -- this continued the downward trend from last year.
- 8 were from the Hugos packet (although some of them I'd previously started by other means)
- 32 from the library -- 22 in hard copy, 9 in ecopy (mostly the novellas), and 2 books that I checked out in both across different holds and renewals -- the thing here is that the queue for ebooks is generall longer/moves more slowly than the hard copy one at this point.
That's 24 books in hard copy, 22 in e-copy, and 2 in both -- still pretty close, but the pendulum has actually swung towards hard copies again from the 40 hard/41 ebook tally last year.
And while I'm counting up stuff, I might as well mention here that 22 books on the list were part of Hugos homework, and 7 books were sync reads (pretty much the same as last year, a little more Hugo reading).
Book that most changed my perspective:
The Astounding bio certainly taught me a lot of things about Campbell, Heinlein, and L.Ron Hubbard, though I don't know that my perspective on any of them really changed (I didn't know anything about Heinlein's background until the book, had heard Campbell was problematic -- though not about how odd he was -- and learning that Hubbard was EVEN MORE TERRIBLE was not really a change in perspective). It did change my understanding of the field and impact of the Golden Age of SF, and changed my perspective on Dianetics (I hadn't realized how huge a fad it had been, before Scientology).
But I think Because Internet has it beat because it changed my perspective on emoji, which are much more relevant to my day-to-day life.
Favorite character:
Hmmm. I'd liked Rin a lot in The Poppy War -- she is a really fascinating character, very consistent, and in such a dark way. I think she's probably more "memorable" than "favorite" though. Ditto for Strength and Patience of the Hill in Raven Tower, and Tess in Tess of the Road.
I dunno, I liked Ghassan and Muntadhir in City of Brass, so possibly them? Chenevert the hologram dead king/sentient ship from The Consuming Fire, too, I guess, although I had to look up his name. Oh, and Orso in Foundryside. This was not a favorite character heavy year, I'm afraid.
Most memorable character:
Let's go with Rin, Tess, SaPotH, an the crew of the Lucky Peach.
Favorite scene:
Honestly it might be the Molly mini-comic in Action at a Distance. While there were some serious scenes I liked in Tess of the Road and maybe a few others, I can't think of anything I'd call a favorite. Maybe the scene of Ekaterin and Enrique talking about fiction and parental lies in Flowers of Vashnoi?
Favorite quote:
I usually answer this question by going through all of my write-ups and excerpting the quotes I'd marked down that still ping me. So here are a few:
"It seems hypocritical to criticize a woman for doing badly a task no one else was willing to do at all." (Flowers of Vashnoi)
"We should have been a feeble soldier and a terrible priest. [...] Now the world is afflicted with an incapable monk and an arguably excellent axe-lieutenant, which is much, much worse." (Tess of the Road)
(Not a great year for quotes, either...)
Most inspirational in terms of own writing?
None of this lot.
How many you'd actually read again?
The Vorkosigan novella, probably. Probably not anything else.
A book that you never want to read again:
Well, offbrand Zukos for quality reasons. But of the books I actually liked, probably not The Poppy War (at least not cover to cover), and probably not Tess of the Road, either. It was tough enough getting through the first time.
Book you recommended most to others in 2019?
From this list? Um... I guess GMatLP, which was one of the very few standalones that I liked this year. I also mentioned Infomocracy to my Terra Ignota-reading friends, not because they're really similar, but because the worldbuilding pushes similar buttons in my brain, a bit. Oh, and I recommende both Wayfarers 2 and Wayfarers 3 to people who had prior experience with Chambers -- i.e. mentioned that I liked them both a lot more than book 1 to people who had similar feelings about book 1 that I did (or had chosen not to read it because they'd heard things along those lines), and reassured several people whose friends had been disappointe by book 3 that I liked it a lot.
I can easily answer which book I ANTI-rec'd the most, too. (Hint: I made charts.)
The book series you read the most volumes of in 2019:
Eh. I read 3 things that are loosely part of the Rivers of London universe (two GNs, one of which barely has any Peter in it, and a novella with a brand new cast), and two linked-by-the-same-universe-but-not-characters Wayfarers books. That's honestly it for my series reading, unless you go down to the level of stuff I half-finished.
The genre you read the most in 2019:
- 23 fantasy (including 11 urban fantasy, 8 secondary world, and 4 ~historical fantasy)
- 16 sci-fi (maybe 17? one was too close to call between SF an urban fantasy)
- 3 superhero
- 3 non-fiction
- 2 kidlit / fairytale
- 1 mystery
- 1 poetry
(interestingly, no non-genre YA this year; I kind of miss it...)
Some other stuff I kept track of this year tallied up after the fact:
- 14 were graphic novels (definitely boosted by Hugos homework, and also trying to fin something to nominate) -- a bit less than last year, because I wasn't catching up massively on series -- but I do think I read more individual titles, probably.
- 9 were novellas (like last year) -- mostly still due to Hugos homework, but the LMB an October Man were not (I did nominate 'Vashnoi', though it didn't make the ballot)
Your favorite "classic" you read in 2019:
I didn't read anything approaching a classic this year, unless you count the C.S.Lewis poems.
Most surprising (in a good way) book of the year?
Maybe Dread Nation, because I enjoyed it despite the zombies? Beneath the Sugar Sky, which I had expected to hate, and instead was mildly annoyed by, in the normal Seanan McGuire fashion?
Wait, no, I actually have a real, positive answer: Abbott, which seemed like very much not my thing from both the setting/aesthetic and the fact that I was quite meh on Ahmed's other GN that I rea, but I really liked this one and may choose to continue reading.
The hardest book you read in 2019 (topic or writing style):
Tess of the Road was toughest emotionally -- mothers and 'difficult' daughters, and Tess's self-destructive self-loathing at the start -- though markedly easier when I picked it up again this year than when I started it last year.
I also had to wait until after all of L's college stuff was settled to finish The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, as that thread was too stressful otherwise, though I didn't realize that consciously until later.
The funniest book you read in 2019:
Definitely not Space Opera :P Um, I think The Epic Crush of Genie Lo probably made me laugh the most, though it wasn't a super funny book. Bloodlust & Bonnets, some of the prose in Grasshopper Jungle (early on, anyway) and Jane's narration in Dread Nation and some of the Flowers of Vashnoi and Tess of the Road quotes also made me smile.
The saddest book you read in 2019:
I don't think any of the books I read were "sad" per se, but Tess of the Road and A Close and Common Orbit (the Jane POV thread) engaged me the most emotionally in terms of sympathy. The Poppy War was full of terrible things depicted powerfully, but the tone of it didn't grab me emotionally to the same degree.
The shortest book you read in 2019:
I guess the Hansel and Gretel retelling -- it was ~50 pages, and about half of them were art with no words at all.
The longest book that you read in 2019:
The Poppy War is 544 pages according to Goodreads, as is Tess of the Road. And so is the Astounding bio, LOL (although some of that is surely footnotes). I don't think anything else came close in length, except Children of Blood and Bone (which was 531 pages, for all that it felt interminable).
Best book that was outside your comfort zone/a new genre for you?
Of the ones I finished, I guess Dread Nation, on account of zombies, or maybe The Belles, on account of being the least relevant to my interests (though I enjoyed it, actually). But really the Russian non-fiction. It's been AGES since I read any non-fiction in Russian, and that was all memoirs, which are a different style.
Most thrilling, unputdownable book of 2019?
The Kellermans are usually pretty good for this, and The Wedding Guest worked fine in that regard. Also Zero Sum Game was a pretty good thriller, for the most part?
Most beautifully written book in 2019?
No standouts this year that I can think of... Dread Nation had a fun narrative voice, and Tess of the Road and Flowers of Vashnoi both had prose I liked a lot. I feel like the books that aimed for "great prose" fell well short for me.
Book you most anticipated in 2019?
It was Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota 3), which was pushed to 2020 and now (sob) to 2021. Baron of Magister Valley (the new Paarfi book) also pushed, though we should be getting that one in 2020. Of books that actually got published, The October Man (which it took me several weeks to get around to reading once it did come out) and Philosopher's War (which I started promptly as soon as I got a copy of the ARC and then never went back to because the Hugos snowed me under or something). So, yeah, not so much with the anticipated books track record this year :P
Favorite cover of a book you read in 2019?
I like the butterbugs on the cover of Flowers of Vashnoi:
Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach gets a special shoutout because the protagonist's epiction on the cover is both accurate and awesome (and also kudos for having a badass old lady on the cover, period):
I did not enjoy A Conspiracy of Truths all that much as a book, but it did have a beautiful (embossed!) cover:
And I quite like the stylistic choices of The Poppy War:
Book that had the greatest impact on you this year?
It's possible that offbrand Zukos winning all the things put me off reading for the rest of the year...
Book you can't believe you waited till 2019 to finally read?
Flowers of Vashnoi, just because it was the book I had waited for for YEARS and I'd owned it for several months (since it came out mid-May, so, over half a year!) by the time I finally read it (first thing this year). Similarly, Tess of the Road, which I had started more than a year before I finished it.
Book that had a scene that left you reeling and dying to talk to someone about it?
The climactic scene in The Poppy War probably comes closest, I guess. And maybe the scene in Infomocracy where the BCP telegraph starts transmitting SOS, because that was some nicely done tension!
Looking Ahead:
One book you didn't read this year that will be your #1 priority in 2020?
I have completely failed at reading any of the books I put on this list last year, some of which have been carryovers from prior years -- I STILL have not read Sorcerer to the Crown, any of the Craft books I've started, or made any progress on Crooked Kingdom, read any Magnus Chase books, or any more Maggie Stiefvater books, or The Night Circus, or the Clou Roads sequels. Or any Hardinges, though I do intend to rectify that with Deeplight soonish. Also, I want to read the Pinsker book(s) that came out this year.
I i read 2 out of 3 sync read books -- Zero Sum Game and A Conspiracy of Truths, and we mutually gave up on Forbidden Parabatai Het, so at least that one's dispositioned.
We haven't figured out future sync reads yet, so I guess for now my other priorities will be reading two books I'd looked forward to and own: Philosopher's War and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.
New book you are most anticipating for 2020?
- False Value the next Peter Grant book - Feb, on pre-order
- Baron of Magister Valley (Paarfi's Monte Cristo) - April, on pre-order
- Peace Talks, which finally has a pub date! - June
- Thorn of Emberlain - Sept??
And I'm not sure any other books I'm looking forward to have confirmed publication dates *sigh* They are, in order of likelihood of appearance:
- Warboy (Warchild #4)
- Doors of Stone (Kvothe #3) LOL, who are we even kidding
- and ditto for Winds of Winter (and hopefully I will still care by the time it comes along, which seems increasingly unlikely)
This entry was originally posted at https://hamsterwoman.dreamwidth.org/1117275.html. Comment wherever you prefer (I prefer LJ).