What I've read this year
SF (79)
Cultural Breaks (Aldiss coll)
Saliva Tree (Aldiss coll)
Foundation's Edge (Asimov)
Darkness That Comes Before (Bakker)
Algebraist (Banks)
Moving Mars (Bear)
No Enemy But Time (Bishop)
Numbers Don't Lie (Bisson)
Cities in Flight (Blish)*
Keepers of the Peace (Brooke)
Hallowed Hunt (Bujold)
Erewhon (Butler)
ThiGMOO (Byrne)
Heartfire (Card)
Imperial Earth (Clarke)*
Reach For Tomorrow (Clarke)
Babel-17 (Delany)
Best of the Best (ed. Dozois)
Dangerous Visions (ed. Ellison)*
Wind from Bukhara (Engh)
Chick is in the Mail (ed Friesner)
Sandman: The Dream Hunters (Gaiman)
Smoke and Mirrors (Gaiman coll)
Emerald Magic (ed. Greeley)
Stamping Butterflies (Grimwood)
Science Fiction - the Best of 2004 (ed Haber and Strahan)
Travelling Toward Epsilon (ed Jakubowski)
His Majesty's Starship (Jeapes)
Wind's Twelve Quarters (Le Guin)*
Wanderer (Leiber)
Doctor Who: Genocide (Leonard)
Magic for Beginners (Link)
Emerald Eye (ed Ludlow & Gourdriaan)
Ten Years To Oblivion (Macartney [ie Flackes])
King of Morning, Queen of Day (McDonald)
Assassin's Edge (McKenna)
Light Ages (MacLeod)
Feast for Crows (Martin)
Counting Heads (Marusek)
England Swings SF (ed. Merrill)
Iron Council (Miéville)
Cloud Atlas (Mitchell)
Ethos Effect (Modesitt)
Dancers at the End of Time (Moorcock)
Altered Carbon (Morgan)
Broken Angels (Morgan)
Third Policeman (O'Brien)*
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell)*
Mirror For Observers (Pangborn)
[Doctor Who] The Dying Days (Parkin)
[Doctor Who] Lungbarrow (Platt)
Going Postal (Pratchett)
Hogfather (Pratchett)
Lords and Ladies (Pratchett)
Forty Signs of Rain (Robinson)
[Doctor Who] The Well-Mannered War (Roberts)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Rowling)
Sevenacide (Shuster)*
Tomorrow's Worlds (ed. Silverberg)
World Inside (Silverberg)*
City (Simak)
Olympos (Simmons)
Triplanetary (Smith)
Accelerando (Stross)
Clan Corporate (Stross)
Family Trade (Stross)
Hidden Family (Stross)
Iron Sunrise (Stross)
Man Who Fell to Earth (Tevis)
Snow Queen (Vinge)
Prize in the Game (Walton)
Banner of Souls (Williams)
Book of the New Sun (Wolfe)
Tough Guide to Fantasy Land (Wynne Jones)
We (Zamyatin)
Creatures of Light and Darkness (Zelazny)*
Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (Zelazny coll)*
Manna from Heaven (Zelazny coll)
Nebula Award Stories #3 (ed Zelazny)
Comics (8)
David Boring (Clowes)
Ice Haven (Clowes)
Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron (Clowes)
Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Deitch)
Strangers In Paradise vol 2 (Moore)
Safe Area Goražde (Sacco)
Bone (Smith)
Nu We Toch Hier Zijn (Stok)
Other fiction (10)
Days of the Consuls (Andric)
Da Vinci Code (Brown)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Doxiadis)
Skinny Dip (Hiassen)
Trial (Kafka)
Balkan Trilogy (Manning)
Black Tor (Manville Fenn)
A Personal Matter (Oe)
Knight in the Panther/Tiger Skin (Rustaveli/Rust'hveli)
Non-fiction (34 + 6)
Getting Things Done (Allen/self-help)
Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway (Barry/satire)
Emergency Sex (Cain, Postlethwait and Thomson/peace-keeping)
Peace Without Politics? (ed. Chandler/Bosnia)
7 Habits of Highly Successful People (Covey/self-help)
Star Factory (Carson/Northern Ireland)
Jewel-Hinged Jaw (Delany/about sf)
Macedonia (Evans/Macedonia)
Never Eat Alone (Ferrazzi/self-help)
Theft of a Nation (Gallagher/Romania)
Last Journey of William Huskisson (Garfield/biography, British history)
Tolkien and the Great War (Garth/Tolkien)
Georgian Feast (Goldstein/cooking, Georgia)
Knowledge, Power and International Coordination (ed. Haas/international relations)
Cyprus - the Search for a Solution (Hannay/Cyprus)
Investing in Prevention (HMG/peace studies)
Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (Hibbert/Italian history)
A Very British Genre (Kincaid/about sf)
Up Through An Empty House of Stars (Langford/about sf)
'with all faults' (Low/autobiography)
Best of Xero (Lupoff/about sf)
Aldiss Unbound (Mathews/Aldiss)
Better To Have Loved (Merrill & Pohl-Weary/about sf, biography)
Blowing my Cover (Moran/spying, Macedonia)
Collision Course (Norris/Kosovo)
Orientalist (Reiss/biography, European history)
Alphabet (Sacks/alphabet)
Island at the Center of the World (Shorto/New York)
Banovina (Stancic & Lazovic/Vojvodina)
12 Caesars (Suetonius/biography, Roman history)
The Rules of Management (Templar/self-help)
With Stars In My Eyes (Weston/about sf, autobiography)
Pilate (Wroe/religion)
Truth About The Armed Conflict In Slovenia (Yugoslav People's Army/Slovenia)
and
Around Washington, D.C./New York City/Boston with Kids (McKay/Bailin/Oppenheimer)
Journey Around New York, Washington, Boston from A to Z (Zschock)
* = reread
Copying ninebelow's statistics:
Short story collections and anthologies: 15 - 19% of my sf reading, 11% of my total reading
Non-fiction: 40 - 29%
SFnal - 79 fiction, plus 8 non-fiction (and Bone; not so sure about Clowes) = 64% of my total reading.
By women (counting books edited by women or where at least one named author of several is a woman): 28 = 20%
I am struck that apart from the non-fiction tally, these figures are very close to ninebelow's.
Best books of the year in each category:
Non-fiction: 4th: Donka Stancic and Miško Lazovic's little book on the architecture of the main government building of their home region: The Banovina. A lovely little case study of politics and architecture.
Non-fiction: 3rd: The collection of essays on Knowledge, Power and International Coordination edited by Peter M. Haas; very insightful into how experts can affect the global policy process.
Non-fiction: 2nd: Dave Langford's collection of literary essays, Up Through An Empty House of Stars.
Non-fiction: 1st: Russell Shorto's history of New Amsterdam, The Island at the Center of the World - an absolutely fascinating look at a completely forgotten historical period.
Non-sf fiction: Ivo Andric's novel, The Days of the Consuls - a brilliant account of encounters between cultures, with I think a subtly hidden subtext about the author's own context.
Comics: Joe Sacco's account of war-time Bosnia, Safe Area Goražde
SF: With great difficulty I have pruned the list down to thirteen best books, excluding rereads, here listed in no particular ranked order:
Moving Mars (Bear)
ThiGMOO (Byrne)
The Best of the Best (ed. Dozois)
Magic for Beginners (Link)
King of Morning, Queen of Day (McDonald)
A Feast for Crows (Martin)
Counting Heads (Marusek)
England Swings SF (ed. Merrill)
Hogfather (Pratchett)
The Clan Corporate (Stross)
The Prize in the Game (Walton)
The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land (Wynne Jones)
We (Zamyatin)
I'm surprised to see that I don't appear to have picked up Dozois' or Hartwell's Best of 2004 collections. They did come out, didn't they? And I just missed them somehow.
Cultural Breaks (Aldiss coll)
Saliva Tree (Aldiss coll)
Foundation's Edge (Asimov)
Darkness That Comes Before (Bakker)
Algebraist (Banks)
Moving Mars (Bear)
No Enemy But Time (Bishop)
Numbers Don't Lie (Bisson)
Cities in Flight (Blish)*
Keepers of the Peace (Brooke)
Hallowed Hunt (Bujold)
Erewhon (Butler)
ThiGMOO (Byrne)
Heartfire (Card)
Imperial Earth (Clarke)*
Reach For Tomorrow (Clarke)
Babel-17 (Delany)
Best of the Best (ed. Dozois)
Dangerous Visions (ed. Ellison)*
Wind from Bukhara (Engh)
Chick is in the Mail (ed Friesner)
Sandman: The Dream Hunters (Gaiman)
Smoke and Mirrors (Gaiman coll)
Emerald Magic (ed. Greeley)
Stamping Butterflies (Grimwood)
Science Fiction - the Best of 2004 (ed Haber and Strahan)
Travelling Toward Epsilon (ed Jakubowski)
His Majesty's Starship (Jeapes)
Wind's Twelve Quarters (Le Guin)*
Wanderer (Leiber)
Doctor Who: Genocide (Leonard)
Magic for Beginners (Link)
Emerald Eye (ed Ludlow & Gourdriaan)
Ten Years To Oblivion (Macartney [ie Flackes])
King of Morning, Queen of Day (McDonald)
Assassin's Edge (McKenna)
Light Ages (MacLeod)
Feast for Crows (Martin)
Counting Heads (Marusek)
England Swings SF (ed. Merrill)
Iron Council (Miéville)
Cloud Atlas (Mitchell)
Ethos Effect (Modesitt)
Dancers at the End of Time (Moorcock)
Altered Carbon (Morgan)
Broken Angels (Morgan)
Third Policeman (O'Brien)*
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell)*
Mirror For Observers (Pangborn)
[Doctor Who] The Dying Days (Parkin)
[Doctor Who] Lungbarrow (Platt)
Going Postal (Pratchett)
Hogfather (Pratchett)
Lords and Ladies (Pratchett)
Forty Signs of Rain (Robinson)
[Doctor Who] The Well-Mannered War (Roberts)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Rowling)
Sevenacide (Shuster)*
Tomorrow's Worlds (ed. Silverberg)
World Inside (Silverberg)*
City (Simak)
Olympos (Simmons)
Triplanetary (Smith)
Accelerando (Stross)
Clan Corporate (Stross)
Family Trade (Stross)
Hidden Family (Stross)
Iron Sunrise (Stross)
Man Who Fell to Earth (Tevis)
Snow Queen (Vinge)
Prize in the Game (Walton)
Banner of Souls (Williams)
Book of the New Sun (Wolfe)
Tough Guide to Fantasy Land (Wynne Jones)
We (Zamyatin)
Creatures of Light and Darkness (Zelazny)*
Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth (Zelazny coll)*
Manna from Heaven (Zelazny coll)
Nebula Award Stories #3 (ed Zelazny)
Comics (8)
David Boring (Clowes)
Ice Haven (Clowes)
Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron (Clowes)
Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Deitch)
Strangers In Paradise vol 2 (Moore)
Safe Area Goražde (Sacco)
Bone (Smith)
Nu We Toch Hier Zijn (Stok)
Other fiction (10)
Days of the Consuls (Andric)
Da Vinci Code (Brown)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture (Doxiadis)
Skinny Dip (Hiassen)
Trial (Kafka)
Balkan Trilogy (Manning)
Black Tor (Manville Fenn)
A Personal Matter (Oe)
Knight in the Panther/Tiger Skin (Rustaveli/Rust'hveli)
Non-fiction (34 + 6)
Getting Things Done (Allen/self-help)
Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway (Barry/satire)
Emergency Sex (Cain, Postlethwait and Thomson/peace-keeping)
Peace Without Politics? (ed. Chandler/Bosnia)
7 Habits of Highly Successful People (Covey/self-help)
Star Factory (Carson/Northern Ireland)
Jewel-Hinged Jaw (Delany/about sf)
Macedonia (Evans/Macedonia)
Never Eat Alone (Ferrazzi/self-help)
Theft of a Nation (Gallagher/Romania)
Last Journey of William Huskisson (Garfield/biography, British history)
Tolkien and the Great War (Garth/Tolkien)
Georgian Feast (Goldstein/cooking, Georgia)
Knowledge, Power and International Coordination (ed. Haas/international relations)
Cyprus - the Search for a Solution (Hannay/Cyprus)
Investing in Prevention (HMG/peace studies)
Rise and Fall of the House of Medici (Hibbert/Italian history)
A Very British Genre (Kincaid/about sf)
Up Through An Empty House of Stars (Langford/about sf)
'with all faults' (Low/autobiography)
Best of Xero (Lupoff/about sf)
Aldiss Unbound (Mathews/Aldiss)
Better To Have Loved (Merrill & Pohl-Weary/about sf, biography)
Blowing my Cover (Moran/spying, Macedonia)
Collision Course (Norris/Kosovo)
Orientalist (Reiss/biography, European history)
Alphabet (Sacks/alphabet)
Island at the Center of the World (Shorto/New York)
Banovina (Stancic & Lazovic/Vojvodina)
12 Caesars (Suetonius/biography, Roman history)
The Rules of Management (Templar/self-help)
With Stars In My Eyes (Weston/about sf, autobiography)
Pilate (Wroe/religion)
Truth About The Armed Conflict In Slovenia (Yugoslav People's Army/Slovenia)
and
Around Washington, D.C./New York City/Boston with Kids (McKay/Bailin/Oppenheimer)
Journey Around New York, Washington, Boston from A to Z (Zschock)
* = reread
Copying ninebelow's statistics:
Short story collections and anthologies: 15 - 19% of my sf reading, 11% of my total reading
Non-fiction: 40 - 29%
SFnal - 79 fiction, plus 8 non-fiction (and Bone; not so sure about Clowes) = 64% of my total reading.
By women (counting books edited by women or where at least one named author of several is a woman): 28 = 20%
I am struck that apart from the non-fiction tally, these figures are very close to ninebelow's.
Best books of the year in each category:
Non-fiction: 4th: Donka Stancic and Miško Lazovic's little book on the architecture of the main government building of their home region: The Banovina. A lovely little case study of politics and architecture.
Non-fiction: 3rd: The collection of essays on Knowledge, Power and International Coordination edited by Peter M. Haas; very insightful into how experts can affect the global policy process.
Non-fiction: 2nd: Dave Langford's collection of literary essays, Up Through An Empty House of Stars.
Non-fiction: 1st: Russell Shorto's history of New Amsterdam, The Island at the Center of the World - an absolutely fascinating look at a completely forgotten historical period.
Non-sf fiction: Ivo Andric's novel, The Days of the Consuls - a brilliant account of encounters between cultures, with I think a subtly hidden subtext about the author's own context.
Comics: Joe Sacco's account of war-time Bosnia, Safe Area Goražde
SF: With great difficulty I have pruned the list down to thirteen best books, excluding rereads, here listed in no particular ranked order:
Moving Mars (Bear)
ThiGMOO (Byrne)
The Best of the Best (ed. Dozois)
Magic for Beginners (Link)
King of Morning, Queen of Day (McDonald)
A Feast for Crows (Martin)
Counting Heads (Marusek)
England Swings SF (ed. Merrill)
Hogfather (Pratchett)
The Clan Corporate (Stross)
The Prize in the Game (Walton)
The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land (Wynne Jones)
We (Zamyatin)
I'm surprised to see that I don't appear to have picked up Dozois' or Hartwell's Best of 2004 collections. They did come out, didn't they? And I just missed them somehow.