My Top 10 Reads of 2011
I *think* this completes my end-of-year wrap-up. Maybe. ;)
1. The Habitation of the Blessed, by Catherynne M. Valente. Once I've read her early work, assuming I will at least like it a lot, I think I'm going to have to admit that Valente has passed Lois McMaster Bujold as my favorite author.* And while this is more difficult than The Orphan's Tales (which topped my favorites list of 2010) it also stuck with me for longer, infecting how I read everything that came after it. It had so much that hits my particular narrative kinks exactly: crises of faith, conflicts between asceticism and sensuality, the poignancy of magic in full bloom, just before the first sere of frost (to paraphrase and reappropriate something Phedre said in Kushiel's Avatar). I think it's a perfect book, without even reading the other two in the series.
2. The Masqueraders, by Georgette Heyer. This one really stands for all my favorite Heyer novels of 2011: The Grand Sophy, The Corinthian, Black Sheep, The Talisman Ring. But I list The Masqueraders first because it actually made me resurrect one of my dead-in-the-water stories, something I always value in a novel. I really should not have waited so long to try Heyer; so many of them are so utterly delightful, and given my tendency to angst and depression, delightfulness is a characteristic I prize highly.
3. Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. Science Fiction was my first genre love, and this book reminded me of how much I've missed it. It's one thing to discover old SF novels that I can adore wholeheartedly (see #4 just below) but I feel an additional frisson of joy to discover SF written in my lifetime that pairs all of the rigorous world-building I love with more modern representation. (Every character a woman! And that's not actually the point! Lesbians! And they're not actually the point!)
4. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I waffled for a long time on where to rank Ammonite and The Dispossessed; I ended up nudging Ammonite up just because it resonated slightly more emotionally for me. But the two books share one quality I encounter too rarely: when I finished them, I did NOT want to pick up another book immediately. They both required time for me to muse on them, and the more time I spent thinking about them the more I loved them. But technically, The Dispossessed is just so well-built (something papersky talked about coincidentally at the same time I was reading it), Le Guin leaves me awed.
5. The Changeling Sea, by Patricia A. McKillip. Every time I conclude YA just isn't for me, I encounter something that reminds me why I keep coming back. Most of McKillip's fiction, much though I love it, is set just slightly at a remove, one that requires me to sympathize for the characters rather than empathize with them. But this novel, though not the brilliant first-person of Winter Rose, has such an immediately engaging protagonist in Peri that 137 pages seemed far too short to spend with her, and I actually wanted a sequel. (I *never* want sequels.) It also paired a beautiful meditation on grief with a delightful solution to the stock YA love triangle, and made the sea a central character.
6. Meat: A Benign Extravagance, by Simon Fairlie. It's a rare thing for a nonfiction work to make any favorites list of mine, but this was as life-changing a read for me as Peter Singer's Animal Liberation apparently is for a lot of my compatriots, so it belongs here. It's paradigm-shifting in terms of my relationship with environmentalism, advocating the sort of systems-based approach that I missed so when I flirted with the Urban and Environmental Planning major in college; plus so many of the details of how things work are just so completely cool.
7. Embassytown, by China Miéville. I never had any desire to read Miéville's fantasy, but after really liking The City & The City and outright loving Embassytown I'm going to have to revisit that position. It's just so meaty, so solidly SF and so sneakily colonial. Plus some days when people challenge me about reading only women I only have the energy to provide male counter examples rather than seriously challenging them on why that's not a bad thing, and having another male author I actually like in my arsenal helps then. This may make me a bad feminist, but there you have it.**
8. The Bone Palace, by Amanda Downum. I think over the past couple years I've really been developing a taste for messiness in fiction, partial resolutions and endings that occur on the cusp of a major change. I must have caught that dreaded "realism" bug. But I like my messy endings best when they take place against a backdrop that acknowledges absolutes, ideals that no one can live up to but lots of people try to live up to nonetheless. Those sorts of worlds and characters speak to me, because that's how I navigate my own world, and Downum gave me a wonderful entry into that body of literature with this book.
9. Mockingbird, by Sean Stewart. Stewart's novels always have so much character, such an idiosyncratic voice about them, and this is no exception. Another year I would have put Passion Play in this spot, but I think this year I was looking more for warmth and humor and the possibility of joy than bleakness and tragedy, so Mockingbird suited me. It was also deeply personal for me in ways I did not expect, the narrator so much in the same place I am right now. And like Nobody's Son it is very much about families, the way that parents shape children and those children then shape their own children in turn.
10. Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente. Yes, that's the second book by Valente in my top 10. It's the fault of Deathless that I came up one book short on my 2011 Fantasy Challenge; I started it on the 28th planning to squeeze both it and Miéville's The Scar into the last three days of the year. But Deathless took up all three of them, and I'm still processing it. I think I don't like the ending, and I grant the flaws Matt Denault points out over at Lingua Fantastika; but like Matt I think the problems in the novel come from being too ambitious, and that's a fault I can easily forgive.
And now, in what is becoming traditional for me, #11 through #15, to round out my top 10. ;)
11. Fledgling, by Octavia Butler. At first I was not tremendously impressed by this one. It did not speak to me the way Wild Seed did in 2010, and that was only partly because I've never been much into vampires. But it's the book out of all the ones I read last year that I wanted to talk about the most, that I sought out the most discussions and reviews of; it's a book I absolutely delighted in chewing on, and like the Le Guin and Griffith the more I chewed on it the more I loved it. Along with my increasing appetite for messiness has come an increasing awareness of and interest in power dynamics, and Butler explores the subtle shadings of power better than anyone else I've ever read.
12. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. Weirdly, this is a novel I approach almost exactly oppositely: I read it and loved it, but have resisted examining it too closely for fear that I will like it less. It's beautiful. . . but as I eventually got to in this rambly, naval-gazing post, women are so othered in pursuit of Beagle's theme that I felt alienated from it. If I had read it ten years ago I would not have noticed, and I'm afraid I'm still working on my sensitivity to the same sort of treatment of other minority characters, but today I do have to hold the gender politics against the novel.
13. Commitment Hour, by James Alan Gardner. This one is like The Last Unicorn; I devoured it and loved it immediately, then the more I thought about it the more it bothered me. Though at first I was kind of shocked, on second thought I'm glad that it was only long-listed for the Tiptree Award, because its focus on gender while completely ignoring sexuality just doesn't seem a deep enough treatment to me. But there is so much joy in the book, and I love the religion of Tover Cove so much, so it still gets a spot on this list.
14. The Fox Woman, by Kij Johnson. This was an incredibly hard read for me. Partly it was hard because I was in an emotional slump that corresponded to a reading slump, but mostly it was hard because Johnson wrote her dysfunctional characters so very well. All three major characters spend the entire novel wanting things they cannot have, and wanting them in such an immediately recognizable and relatable way. It was a novel that ground my heart down, rather than outright breaking it like Deathless did, but both succeeded in wrecking all of my attempts at emotional balance. And strange though it is, I relish that.
15. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente. Because two spots in the top 10 just wasn't enough. This is one of the books that inspired my "Why I Don't Like YA" post (linked to in the entry on The Changeling Sea) but while I didn't want to crush this book to my breast and pet it I did find it kind of perfect. If faux-Victorian YA (technically middle-grade, but I willfully and routinely conflate those two categories) portal fantasies were my thing, this would have been my favorite read of 2011, and while it doesn't (really can't, in something aimed at that age group) have the focus on the pleasures and pains of the flesh that resonates so much with me in Valente's adult fare, it still has a great deal of emotional depth and breadth, and that's what I look for in any novel.
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*When asked for my favorite author, if I'm not allowed to answer "there are too many!" I generally give the author whose body of work as a whole I rate highest -- Bujold has been my favorite author for years, because I've read everything she's written multiple times, love about half of her catalog to pieces, and wouldn't rate any of her books lower than 4-stars. But while I haven't reread any Valente yet, so far the only book by her that I have read that I've given lower than 5 stars to is Palimpsest, which got a downright embarrassingly low 4 1/2 stars. ;)
**Also, I am highly amused (because the alternative is screaming frustration) that when I recommended Embassytown to my dad and he hated it he kept insisting that Miéville must be a woman.
1. The Habitation of the Blessed, by Catherynne M. Valente. Once I've read her early work, assuming I will at least like it a lot, I think I'm going to have to admit that Valente has passed Lois McMaster Bujold as my favorite author.* And while this is more difficult than The Orphan's Tales (which topped my favorites list of 2010) it also stuck with me for longer, infecting how I read everything that came after it. It had so much that hits my particular narrative kinks exactly: crises of faith, conflicts between asceticism and sensuality, the poignancy of magic in full bloom, just before the first sere of frost (to paraphrase and reappropriate something Phedre said in Kushiel's Avatar). I think it's a perfect book, without even reading the other two in the series.
2. The Masqueraders, by Georgette Heyer. This one really stands for all my favorite Heyer novels of 2011: The Grand Sophy, The Corinthian, Black Sheep, The Talisman Ring. But I list The Masqueraders first because it actually made me resurrect one of my dead-in-the-water stories, something I always value in a novel. I really should not have waited so long to try Heyer; so many of them are so utterly delightful, and given my tendency to angst and depression, delightfulness is a characteristic I prize highly.
3. Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith. Science Fiction was my first genre love, and this book reminded me of how much I've missed it. It's one thing to discover old SF novels that I can adore wholeheartedly (see #4 just below) but I feel an additional frisson of joy to discover SF written in my lifetime that pairs all of the rigorous world-building I love with more modern representation. (Every character a woman! And that's not actually the point! Lesbians! And they're not actually the point!)
4. The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I waffled for a long time on where to rank Ammonite and The Dispossessed; I ended up nudging Ammonite up just because it resonated slightly more emotionally for me. But the two books share one quality I encounter too rarely: when I finished them, I did NOT want to pick up another book immediately. They both required time for me to muse on them, and the more time I spent thinking about them the more I loved them. But technically, The Dispossessed is just so well-built (something papersky talked about coincidentally at the same time I was reading it), Le Guin leaves me awed.
5. The Changeling Sea, by Patricia A. McKillip. Every time I conclude YA just isn't for me, I encounter something that reminds me why I keep coming back. Most of McKillip's fiction, much though I love it, is set just slightly at a remove, one that requires me to sympathize for the characters rather than empathize with them. But this novel, though not the brilliant first-person of Winter Rose, has such an immediately engaging protagonist in Peri that 137 pages seemed far too short to spend with her, and I actually wanted a sequel. (I *never* want sequels.) It also paired a beautiful meditation on grief with a delightful solution to the stock YA love triangle, and made the sea a central character.
6. Meat: A Benign Extravagance, by Simon Fairlie. It's a rare thing for a nonfiction work to make any favorites list of mine, but this was as life-changing a read for me as Peter Singer's Animal Liberation apparently is for a lot of my compatriots, so it belongs here. It's paradigm-shifting in terms of my relationship with environmentalism, advocating the sort of systems-based approach that I missed so when I flirted with the Urban and Environmental Planning major in college; plus so many of the details of how things work are just so completely cool.
7. Embassytown, by China Miéville. I never had any desire to read Miéville's fantasy, but after really liking The City & The City and outright loving Embassytown I'm going to have to revisit that position. It's just so meaty, so solidly SF and so sneakily colonial. Plus some days when people challenge me about reading only women I only have the energy to provide male counter examples rather than seriously challenging them on why that's not a bad thing, and having another male author I actually like in my arsenal helps then. This may make me a bad feminist, but there you have it.**
8. The Bone Palace, by Amanda Downum. I think over the past couple years I've really been developing a taste for messiness in fiction, partial resolutions and endings that occur on the cusp of a major change. I must have caught that dreaded "realism" bug. But I like my messy endings best when they take place against a backdrop that acknowledges absolutes, ideals that no one can live up to but lots of people try to live up to nonetheless. Those sorts of worlds and characters speak to me, because that's how I navigate my own world, and Downum gave me a wonderful entry into that body of literature with this book.
9. Mockingbird, by Sean Stewart. Stewart's novels always have so much character, such an idiosyncratic voice about them, and this is no exception. Another year I would have put Passion Play in this spot, but I think this year I was looking more for warmth and humor and the possibility of joy than bleakness and tragedy, so Mockingbird suited me. It was also deeply personal for me in ways I did not expect, the narrator so much in the same place I am right now. And like Nobody's Son it is very much about families, the way that parents shape children and those children then shape their own children in turn.
10. Deathless, by Catherynne M. Valente. Yes, that's the second book by Valente in my top 10. It's the fault of Deathless that I came up one book short on my 2011 Fantasy Challenge; I started it on the 28th planning to squeeze both it and Miéville's The Scar into the last three days of the year. But Deathless took up all three of them, and I'm still processing it. I think I don't like the ending, and I grant the flaws Matt Denault points out over at Lingua Fantastika; but like Matt I think the problems in the novel come from being too ambitious, and that's a fault I can easily forgive.
And now, in what is becoming traditional for me, #11 through #15, to round out my top 10. ;)
11. Fledgling, by Octavia Butler. At first I was not tremendously impressed by this one. It did not speak to me the way Wild Seed did in 2010, and that was only partly because I've never been much into vampires. But it's the book out of all the ones I read last year that I wanted to talk about the most, that I sought out the most discussions and reviews of; it's a book I absolutely delighted in chewing on, and like the Le Guin and Griffith the more I chewed on it the more I loved it. Along with my increasing appetite for messiness has come an increasing awareness of and interest in power dynamics, and Butler explores the subtle shadings of power better than anyone else I've ever read.
12. The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. Weirdly, this is a novel I approach almost exactly oppositely: I read it and loved it, but have resisted examining it too closely for fear that I will like it less. It's beautiful. . . but as I eventually got to in this rambly, naval-gazing post, women are so othered in pursuit of Beagle's theme that I felt alienated from it. If I had read it ten years ago I would not have noticed, and I'm afraid I'm still working on my sensitivity to the same sort of treatment of other minority characters, but today I do have to hold the gender politics against the novel.
13. Commitment Hour, by James Alan Gardner. This one is like The Last Unicorn; I devoured it and loved it immediately, then the more I thought about it the more it bothered me. Though at first I was kind of shocked, on second thought I'm glad that it was only long-listed for the Tiptree Award, because its focus on gender while completely ignoring sexuality just doesn't seem a deep enough treatment to me. But there is so much joy in the book, and I love the religion of Tover Cove so much, so it still gets a spot on this list.
14. The Fox Woman, by Kij Johnson. This was an incredibly hard read for me. Partly it was hard because I was in an emotional slump that corresponded to a reading slump, but mostly it was hard because Johnson wrote her dysfunctional characters so very well. All three major characters spend the entire novel wanting things they cannot have, and wanting them in such an immediately recognizable and relatable way. It was a novel that ground my heart down, rather than outright breaking it like Deathless did, but both succeeded in wrecking all of my attempts at emotional balance. And strange though it is, I relish that.
15. The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente. Because two spots in the top 10 just wasn't enough. This is one of the books that inspired my "Why I Don't Like YA" post (linked to in the entry on The Changeling Sea) but while I didn't want to crush this book to my breast and pet it I did find it kind of perfect. If faux-Victorian YA (technically middle-grade, but I willfully and routinely conflate those two categories) portal fantasies were my thing, this would have been my favorite read of 2011, and while it doesn't (really can't, in something aimed at that age group) have the focus on the pleasures and pains of the flesh that resonates so much with me in Valente's adult fare, it still has a great deal of emotional depth and breadth, and that's what I look for in any novel.
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*When asked for my favorite author, if I'm not allowed to answer "there are too many!" I generally give the author whose body of work as a whole I rate highest -- Bujold has been my favorite author for years, because I've read everything she's written multiple times, love about half of her catalog to pieces, and wouldn't rate any of her books lower than 4-stars. But while I haven't reread any Valente yet, so far the only book by her that I have read that I've given lower than 5 stars to is Palimpsest, which got a downright embarrassingly low 4 1/2 stars. ;)
**Also, I am highly amused (because the alternative is screaming frustration) that when I recommended Embassytown to my dad and he hated it he kept insisting that Miéville must be a woman.