Year End Book List

Well I was going to talk about the absolute best twelve books that I read this year, anticipating having to narrow it down as I do every year. Then I started looking through my list, and um, maybe the challenge will be finding twelve?

Jeez. I refuse to believe that there weren’t 12 perfect-blow-me-out-of-the-water books that I could have read this past year, so I will accept that I apparently read a lot of perfectly pleasant, perfectly average novels that aren’t really worth recommending.

So here is my amended end-of-year list numbering 9 extremely good books.

The book I expected to be a favorite read and was: Martha Wells’s System Collapse. New Murderbot! Though one of the things I loved most about this book was that it gave me an excuse to reread Network Effect which is still so far my favorite book in this series.

The amazing book I can’t believe I read this year because it seems like it was forever ago: Saint Death’s Daughter by CSE Cooney. This fantasy was exactly my cup of tea—wordy and weird and creative. I even have a note beside my documentation of it that this book suggests it’s going to be a great year for reading. Um. Sorry past me, you were wrong.

The new-to-me favorite author I discovered this year: Margaret Rogerson. Vespertine, Sorcery of Thorns, Mystery of Thorn Manor, and An Enchantment of Ravens. Vespertine is a fantasy novel about a would-be-nun who acquires a revenant, and ends up on the run, and also becoming a major figurehead in the war going on. It’s dark and delicious. Sorcery of Thorns is about a librarian who is learning to care for dangerous, living grimoires. After she is accused of freeing a dangerous grimoire that kills their leader, she is sent away. She distrusts sorcerers but gets involved with one, and together they figure out who is actually to blame for the grimoire’s release. The follow up, Mystery of Thorn Manor, was utterly unexpected and delightful, being a slice of domesticity between Elizabeth, the librarian, and Nathaniel, the sorcerer.

Favorite nonfiction read of the year goes to Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days, which despite a twee sort of title, was remarkably honest and interesting. A close runner up was the autobiographic memoir Starstuck by Sarafina El-Badry Nance about her struggles struggles to become an astrophysicist.

My favorite short story collection was No One Will Come Back for Us & Other Stories by Premee Mohamed. I really enjoy her writing. It’s often bleak, but it’s always very rooted in humanity—the good, the bad, the inevitable.

The book that surprised me with how much I loved it. Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You. I expected a fairly standard mystery novel where the intrepid heroine uncovers the truth about a past murder. I got something more meditative, more realistic, and very much a reflection of society.

My two favorite “so weird you have to read them” books are Edgar Cantero’s This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us and Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us is about a noir-style PI who is two siblings in one. Over the top in style and in story. Great fun. We Ride Upon Sticks combines 1980’s girl’s field hockey and witchcraft, plus the unusual use of a narrator that is obviously one of the team, but never any particular one. It’s an interesting take on an omniscient narrator, and I loved it.

And here’s hoping for a better upcoming year where I will have to choose from a vast quantity of absolutely excellent books.

2016 Writers to love

Every year, I read a lot of books, with two goals in mind. 1) To find entertaining books (naturally) , and 2) to find a new (to me or otherwise) author. 2016 gave me three new authors to follow.

Gaie Sebold, who wrote the charming Babylon Steel (one of my favorite books of the year) as well as Dangerous Gifts, Shanghai Sparrow, & Sparrow Falling. Her writing is energetic; her characters are awesome and appealing; and her worlds feel flush with life.

Shanghai Sparrow (An Evvie Duchen Adventure Book 1) by [Sebold, Gaie]

JL Bryan, whose Jenny Pox claimed my weirdest book of the year title. But I started with JL Bryan for the Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series, which started off slowly and has become one of my most “oooh, a new one, grab it!” series.

And this year, I made a concerted effort to read more short stories, aided by the sheer number of good, online spec fic magazines. One of the first stories I read this year was Sam J Miller’s “Angel, Monster, Man” published in Nightmare Magazine I wasn’t sold 100% on this story, but I loved so much of it, that it left a big impression. One that only grew more favorable after I read “When Your Child Strays from God” (Clarkesworld), and “Things with Beards” (also Clarkesworld). Sam J Miller’s gone from completely new to me, to a writer that I’m excited to see.

Anyone else have new, or new to them writers they fell in love with this year?

If a Baker’s Dozen is 13, is a Writer’s Top Ten really 11? It is this year.

My favorite books read in 2016. Not in any particular order.

radiance

Radiance by Catherynne Valente

Reading Valente is always more experience than story. This is a silver-screen look at a past that never was—if the early Hollywood years encompassed an SF landscape of planetary travel. There’s an enormous amount of stuff going on here spread over multiple layers of story-telling and it takes some work to pick out which threads actually lead to a cohesive solution to the central mystery (though arguably not the central point of the book): what became of Severin, a Hollywood darling? How did she vanish and where did she vanish to? And will it change anything?

Valente’s writing style rewards rereading, not least because she sets up mysteries, then writes a lot of scenes that basically suggest that the answers are unimportant even as she gives you a handful of options, none of which feel super conclusive. This book, especially, flirts with made-up stories, in the thread of a movie being written about Severin that wanders through different genres and tweaks events to suit each need. In other hands, this might be a godawful mess, but here, it ends up being a book that lingers with you. And whether or not each segment of the book ends up part of a cohesive whole, they’re beautifully written vignettes on their own. I was a little dubious about this book when I first finished it, but it’s grown on me.

Experimental Film by Gemma Files

People talk about art being an “unflinching” look at the world around us, and holy god, this book refuses to flinch. The main character—a film analyst and writer, mother to an autistic child, daughter to a difficult mother—embarks on a brutal self-dissection of herself while hunting down a piece of film that may or may not have something horrific lurking in it. It’s part a mystery about what happened to a long-lost film-maker; it’s part dissection of the film scene in Canada; and its part homage to horror movies as a whole. The main character is rarely likable, but she is fascinating. The ending’s not quite as strong as the rest of the book—a sad irony of so many fantasy books; the better you ground it in reality, the less powerful the magic can feel—but it’s still way up on my list of books for 2016. Plus, Gemma Files’ writing on a micro level—line by line—is often glorious. Where Valente makes elaborations and fancy little flirts with words, Files’ writing tends toward deceptively sparse but it builds inexorably.

Continue reading “If a Baker’s Dozen is 13, is a Writer’s Top Ten really 11? It is this year.” →