Tuesday, January 1, 2019

2018 notable reads & re-reads

Because this is apparently A Thing I Do, some quick thoughts on my reads this year. I feel certain I'm missing a few, but so be it. A good year, with some good re-reads (both solo and for clubs) and some really good new/new-to-me selections.

  • Octavia Butler's Dawn: A fun re-read with club. The thing about Butler that always get me is how unsettling/unsettled her stories are. She pushes at power dynamics without cleanly laying out right & wrong for the reader to passively receive.
  • Johanna Sinisalo's The Core Of The Sun: This was an unexpected blast. Handmaid's Tale-esque but with better writing (I'll say it). Takes a seemingly-ridiculous premise (outlawing pepper along with a general governmental purity-obsession) and totally sells it, imbuing it with dark, surreal humor alongside biting social critique.
  • Christopher Priest's The Islanders: Almost literally nothing but world-building, which I am here for, though a lot of others might not be. There are some little stories here, but it's not primarily narrative. I enjoyed how much ambiguity is built into what's essentially an incomplete and eclectic traveler's guide. A little disappointed by how much a few of the mini-narratives seemed like encapsulations of other Priest stories.
  • Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time: Never did get around to seeing the film, but was fun to revisit anyway. Coming back to it, very struck by how short & "first in a series" this is, and also by how the Christian elements are at once forceful and unclear.
  • Ursula Le Guin's Changing Planes: What a fun collection! Had never read this before. I really enjoyed the mix of Le Guin's usual anthropological creations with more levity and humor than I usually see in her writings.
  • China Mieville's The City and the City: Just one of the best novels of our generation, I'm never sad to see it on a book-club list.
  • Brooke Bolander's The Only Harmless Great Thing: The buzz around this novelette was extreme, and well-deserved. Potent re-imagining and blending of the Radium Girls with the execution of the elephant Topsy, a time-and-reality-bending tale of grief and solidarity.
  • Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: Wanted to re-read this in the wake of all these moon & other in-solar-system SF works lately. Reading Heinlein as an *actual* adult, as opposed to a fairly sheltered teenager, is a weird experience. The craft and ideas are all still there, but the sexism, racism, and crypto-fascism are so glaring it almost physically hurts. This book is every red-faced libertarian who has never taken a single objection seriously.
  • Margaret Killjoy's The Lamb will Slaughter the Lion and The Barrow Will Take What It May: These are so freaking good, and I want more. Episodic counter-culture demon-hunting what-have-you. Takes seriously and centers non-comformist characters in really good rompy Scooby-Gang adventures.
  • John Darnielle's Universal Harvester: Dug. Less creepy than eerie, slow-moving, ambiguous, strangely gentle, fleshed out with great character sketches.
  • Terry Pratchett's Going Postal: Hadn't picked up any Discworld in a long time. Fun to re-read with club. So many wonderful sentences here, and I like the "Moist" timeline the most in Discworld (more direct commentary on social/political/technological); it also feels a bit slapdash and unstructured in ways I hadn't recalled.
  • Kiese Laymon's Long Division: I really regret reading this one as  an ebook, as I think more readily flipping back and forth would have made this work better for me. A time-travel story in rural Mississippi with believably young teen narrators and some incredibly tangled, ambitious play with framing and meta-textuality.
  • George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo: Somewhat surprisingly, I found myself adoring this. Told entirely in script format (dialog and "stage directions"), from the ghosts in the graveyard where Abraham Lincoln inters his son. A strange and affecting musing on life & death and our fixations.
  • Saladin Ahmed's Throne of the Crescent Moon: Still fun, albeit a bit light. I keep hoping Ahmed comes back to novels at some point, but it seems his comic career is getting better by the minute.
  • Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts: Another much-buzzed-about book this year. YA about a generation-ship with stark race/class hierarchies, also with a neuro-atypical protagonist and lots of sex/gender exploration. Kind of grim, and I did not like the ending, but quite good.
  • Catherynne M. Valente's Space Opera: I'd been psyched about this book since I'd heard the pitch a while back, which is basically "Eurovision in Space"—so it was a real bummer to find that book is not, in fact, for me. Quite unpleasant, in fact—it landed neither its extremely Doug Adams style nor its Bowie/Mercury protagonist. An outline of this book looks like something I would love, but the execution didn't work at all for me.
  • N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky: Holy cow, what a feat. The Fifth Season was such an accomplishment—as a story, in character, in rage, in worldbuilding, in stylistic daring (three braided timelines with one of them told completely in second person?!)—and to follow it with two more that only build on those strengths is kind of breathtaking. And that she pulls some happiness into the ending, without flinching from the brutal realities—just incredible.
  • Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky: These were great fun! Took me a second to get into their tone and pace, which is snappier than my usual: very short chapters, with a kind of rigorously point-to-point plotting. Really well-done, drawing on real history in a pleasurably deep way while charting its own alternate path. The strength of the writing, in both the main character and the world, allows Kowal's treatment of all kinds of issues to flow pretty naturally.
  • Stories by Karen Tidbeck: Was introduced to Tidbeck through Think Galactic's discussion of "Sing" and "Listen" (free to read online) and then immediately started snapping up others of her work, including Jagganath. This is a major talent, putting me in mind of Kelly Link and Ursula Le Guin in equal measure, albeit with a very distinctive voice—socially rich and imaginative worlds, coupled with a kind of unexpectedly affecting surrealism and symbolism. Highly recommended.
  • Brian Camp's City of Lost Fortunes: I try not to (negatively) evaluate books in terms of things they're printed after, but I was completely unable to form an impression of this book beyond "American Gods but in New Orleans". Underwhelmed.
  • Ann Washburn's Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play: Survivors of some kind of nuclear apocalypse attempt to re-create a Simpsons episode ("Cape Feare"). And it's a play! The last act, which is a totally in-frame play-within-a-play, showing the way this production has mutated to incorporate other bits of pop culture while grappling with death and societal collapse, is pretty masterful. Definitely recommended (if you have at least some Simpsons familiarity, anyway), and something I'd love to see staged sometime.
  • C.J. Cherryh's Downbelow Station: Re-read this behemoth for Another Dimension, Bucket O'Blood's SF discussion group—to say I'm a Cherryh fan is an understatement, but Downbelow, despite its status as her most largely recognized work, is not one I often return to. Interesting to read (and to some extend defend) this with other critical readers; while it does "stand on its own", I think it might not be self-rich enough (is that a word?) without knowing how it's a nexus for her larger body of work. Cherryh excels at the large-scale, long-timeframe in terms of setting, but I think her writing really shines when its up-close, focused and psychological—something that is dramatically watered down, in other words, in a monster like Downbelow. Also, the Downbelow natives get harder to read everytime; even aside from the poor naming choice of "Downers", they come across as painfully cheerful/mystic savages. Some of her other Pell-orbiting works, I think, are more successful at showing what I think she was trying to do with the Downers, a kind of radical openness and pacifism; it doesn't land very well here. All that said, still a good read. And man, Cherryh is brutal in this one.
  • Robert Charles Wilson's Darwinia: Another fun re-read and discussion. One thing that massively impresses me with this novel is its completely unnecessary scope: many other writers could have taken just one or two of the ideas here and made a successful novel; Wilson takes an already-elaborate premise (large tracts of the world, including most of Europe, somehow swapped out with some alternate Earth) and uses that as just a cover story for a much deeper, wilder SF tale. It's not so strong on character as some of his other works, and honestly I would have liked lots more of both a.) cool monsters and b.) the science-vs-denier conflict hinted at in the title, but even so this a great read, solid pick in the "SF of ideas" type.
  • Iain M. Banks' The Player of Games: Ugh, Banks is so good. Discussion at Think Galactic, and a great talk by Joshua Pearson at the SFRA conference, really got me thinking around how this novel is about challenging an re-writing toxic masculinity, long before that term was popular. What's fascinating to me is that I really think Banks pulls that off, even though he rather fails to do much with the science-fictional sex & gender issues he tosses around.
  • Fonda Lee's Jade City: What a blast! Generational crime-family drama with magic-infused martial arts bits, in a Pacific-island-inspired secondary world. Felt the most interesting for how messily real it is—the narrative takes some really unexpected turns, and you're left really unsure that it's a cleanly defined "good vs. evil" conflict.
  • Indra Das's The Devourers: Still greatly impressed with this. Lush, beautiful writing that shows off a few distinct modes and voices. Tackles werewolf/vampire tropes in unexpected ways, really digging into the problem of conflating sexual and literal hunger. Really sells the settings (modern & 17th century Kolkata). Not sure how well it succeeds with its exploration of sex and gender issues, but nonetheless a remarkable novel.
  • Mary Anne Mohanraj's The Stars Change: Underwhelmed, sadly. I liked a lot of the characters, and the erotica bits were strengths, but the plot didn't work for me.
  • Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Was a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Spare, surreal Russian stories. Enjoyable.
  • Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning: I really dug this. Light, fast-paced, in the urban fantasy mode (though more rural in setting). I really liked the combination of mythology (Native American) with a climate-disaster future. Plotting had some holes, but I enjoyed it, looking forward to sequels.
  • Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country: Great fun. Fix-up-like (each chapter could mostly stand on its own, slightly different stylistically), using pulp sf/horror tropes & race politics in 1950's Chicago. Highly recommended.
  • Kevin Brockmeier's A Brief History of the Dead: I wound up a bit meh on this, and I'm not entirely sure why. Juxtaposes two storylinesa very magical-realist-inspired city in the afterlife, and the Antarctic journey of one of the last surviving humans. Pretty well written, just didn't strike a chord for me.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Moon: KSR's always a treat for me. This one felt weirdly fast for him (it actually kind of cliffhangers); it also pulls a bit on his Antarctica and New York 2140. I think the weirdest thing for me here is the attempt to "do something with" China as a concept; which is just too big and too real a culture for me to buy. The flow-chart for whether or not you should read this consists solely of the question "are you a KSR fan?"
  • Robert Jackson Bennett's Foundryside: Very fun, brilliantly paced and plotted. Cyberpunk attitude in an urban fantasy setting, recommended if you like things like Gladstone's Craft sequence. It felt very video-game like to me, in a good wayit sets up the characters' abilities, limits, and then increases the challenges while leveling them up and tossing new equipment their way. Still tackling social issues, perhaps not quite so clearly as the City trilogy (which I would probably point you to first). Still, this was one of the more solidly entertaining things I read this year, even if it does have one of the more egregious fake swears I've ever seen.
  • Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding: Sort of a multi-biography of Campbell, Heinlein, Asimov, and Hubbard, using the four of them to weave together an image of "Golden Age" SF. Immensely readable and insightful. Without feeling at all mean-spirited, does a stunningly good job of getting across how terrible all four were as people. Feels particularly appropriate right now as that SF's descendants both have such cultural prominence, and grapple with issues of bigotry. Highly recommended. 
  • Seth J. Dickinson's The Monster Baru Cormorant: Loved it. Not nearly as tight or gut-punchy as Traitor, but still fantastic. More of the fantastic elements than I was expecting, actually, after the kind of rigorously materialistic Traitor. I really love the glimpses we get of Oriati culture as a possible alternative to Falcrest's imperialism; less wild about the overall pacing of the book, which feels kind of breathless. Baru feels more than a little untethered here, literally blown about the world. Still, loved this book, eagerly awaiting the next.
  • Peter Watts' The Freeze-Frame Revolution: Good, short novel, set in the same kind of ship-culture as his short story "Island". Cryo-hibernating, only-occasionally-awake human crew plot against a possibly-flawed, possibly non-omniscient AI, with generous amounts of Watts' body-horror and gleeful nihilism slathered on. Recommended if you're into that kind of thing. Also has some bonus secret message coding throughout.
  • William Gibson's work: Did a full re-read for a paper I'm working on (presented a draft at the SFRA in Milwaukee over the summer). Neuromancer, as the kids might say, still slaps; Pattern Recognition, imho, remains his absolute best, and one I gladly suggest even to non-SF readers. I hadn't read the Bridge trilogy in ages and found it by far the most solid across all 3 booksAll Tomorrow's Parties is just freaking great, and, in some alternate timeline, would have spawned just as many imitators as Neuromancer. It's more deeply punk, less testosterone-driven. I'm still impressed with The Peripheral and curious to see where Agency takes us.
  • Object-Oriented Ontology: read swathes of OOO for that Gibson bit, after falling head-over-heels for Timothy Morton's stuff. Humankind is one I'll be returning to; delightful and kind of affirming to see threads in philosophy matching up so closely with SF trends. Also recommend Harman's very readable overview, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything.
  • Helen MacDonald's H is for Hawk: Wow I'm glad I picked this up. Jake Casella 2018 award for "most audible exclamations while reading". Poignant, fierce, cerebral, full of phrases that had me screaming on the train. Memoir that blends grieving, falconry, and a little mini-biography of T.H. White.
  • Elizabeth McKenzie's The Portable Veblen: Rom-com, teensy bit surreal, deftly written. Could have done with more Thorstein.
  • Jeff VanderMeer's The Strange Bird: Companion novel to Borne, less...wacky? More dreamlike. Full of biotech, kind of wistful. Recommended.
  • Ian McDonald's Luna: Wolf Moon: Sequel to New Moon (Luna not Twilight). Well written, but I found myself disappointed by it. It's just kind of joyless, lots of bad things happening and not much else. Demystifying the "werewolves" doesn't do it any favors. World-building and tech are great, cultural sketching is more balanced than the first (McDonald sometimes strikes me, perhaps uncharitably, as a bit "look at how well I've researched this other culture"). My third-biggest gripe with this is some deeply confusing stuff on the timeline level of the plot. Second-biggest is that a major, even controversial point at the end of New Moon is that the Corta leadership doesn't use terrorist tactics with high collateral damage; which moral high ground is abandoned on practically the first page of Wolf Moon. Biggest gripe is just its ruthlessness as a story. I get it, unregulated gangster-capitalism is bad; failed & force-driven societies are bad. McDonald is clearly painting an indictment of corporate amorality, slamming rosy libertarian space-fantasies, and drawing on real-world regimes and atrocities to do so. It's just not much fun to read, especially when it feels like he's going out of his way to throw naked kids out of airlocks on the moon.
  • Ursula Le Guin's The Birthday of the World: Such a good collection!
  • Yoon Ha Lee's Revenant Gun: Brilliant. Satisfyingly lands the promise of Ninefox Gambit, the first in the trilogy, after the good-but-kind-of-detour-y Raven Stratagem. Still lots of great weirdness, has a surprisingly gentle, solidarity-and-incremental-change-focused ending, does good things with developing both core and peripheral characters.
  • Mary Beard's SPQR: This was alright I guess? I'd been wanting something of an overview of the Roman Empire, which is maybe too much to ask of one book...this is well-written, but at a weird level of knowledge assumption. Not a good introduction to Roman history (assumes a fairly deep pre-knowledge of the entire Empire), but also not a deep dive into one particular partit kind of dips around. My biggest takeaway is the composite and sometime-tenuous epistemology of this kind of history: Beard is great at showing how, why, and with what certainty we think things happened.
  • Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series: Was prompted to re-read The Thief (had read it years ago for a club and was underwhelmed). Definitely more impressed this time aroundworldbuilding issues and un-framed unreliable narration still bug mebut Turner's polished prose stood out more to me. Sequels are quite good, do a lot of good character and plot development. Looking forward to the next, reportedly final entry this year.
  • China Mieville's The Scar: Turning into a yearly re-read for me. The most balanced of the Bas-Lag novels, maybe, just loads of good stuff.
  • Neal Stephenson's Anathem: Was in the mood for a big enormous crunchy heady SF novel, so came back to this for I think the third time or so. Argh I love it so much. Everything I love about Stephenson, while the setting seems to restrain some of his tendencies in useful ways. Scientific, philosophical, full of delight and action and Socratic dialog.
  • Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312: What else to follow up Anathem with? Remains my most re-read KSR. Genuine and quasi-plausible utopia grappling with the flaws of the world; inventive and joyful; stylistically a bit experimental. I've heard a lot of critiques of the main character, but I love Swanif I had to pick a weak point in KSR's writing here, it might be the way that he doesn't do enough to draw our attention to Swan's grief, personality changes, and actual history (e.g. she has scientific and artistic chops such that she's treated as a personage of some international significance, though she doesn't seem to think of herself that way). Swan and Wahram remain one of my favorite couples in fiction.
  • J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion: It's become a bit of a cliché, but it's true: I get something a little different out of every Tolkien re-read. This time around, reading it in the dumpster fire of 2018, what jumped out at me the most is the way that most of the elves are...not that good? Like, there are clearly delineated "good/evil" lines here, but setting that convention aside, the greed, pride, and heedlessness of the Noldor are the major sources of strife here. Can't help thinking of how WWI-era politics might have been an influence. In this present era of rising fascism, I was also really struck in the face by Fëanor's use of racist demagoguery to move the Noldor to self-exile and violence. The one-two punch of over-inflated self-pride followed by drummed-up fear of the other, to move a populace to endorse policies that are both immoral and don't even benefit them, only to have the leaders who used that rhetoric betray them at the first moment it's convenientoy. I did not expect to be so clearly thinking of Trump and Brexit in the light of the Burning of the Ships at Losgar.
  • William Goldman's The Princess Bride: Had never read this! What a fool I was! I was pleasantly surprised to discover how true to the spirit the movie is; the extra levels of meta-silliness in the book are delightful.
  • Maria Dahvana Headley's The Mere Wife: Beowulf retelling in suburbia. Dream-like, nightmare-like. Lyrical, haunting, brilliant.
  • Amelia Brunskill's The Window: YA murder-mystery, high-schooler looking into the death of her twin sister. Well-written; I think I was most impressed with how the protagonist has a believably-limited level of knowledge and understanding, so the thread of the mystery itself is constantly crossed by false leads and tangential complexities.
  • Ling Ma's Severance: Wow this is good. Have been describing it (mostly in my head 'cos I'm shy, okay?) as Station Eleven but With Teeth. Apocalypse survival tale that is also a biting social critique. Darkly funny. Great (if brief) sketches of New York, Chinese immigrant culture, ends in Chicago. Is doing some deep if not entirely-clear musing on habit, repetitive life, nostalgia. Sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter, this is good writing.
  • Nick Harkaway's Gnomon: Argh so good! Would have loved it if this could have been accomplished in about 200 fewer pages, but I'm not sure it could have been. Nested, recursive, meta-textual. A gentle 1984 crossed with Inception as written by David Mitchell except good (I said it). In a near-future UK, a total surveillance society, genuinely plebiscite, managed by a near-AI system, where they have the technology to read minds, a police investigator looks into the memories of a woman who died in custody, only to find four impossible memories in her head. This book was a freaking delight, a real treat.
  • Iain M. Banks' Hydrogen Sonata: Finally getting around to working my way through the rest of the Culture novels. This one is super-good! I think my favorite so far. Lots of great insight into what the Minds are up to, without focusing on them exclusively. Ends in a very Banks-y bit of action followed by slight nihilism: thumbs up. Also, the Antagonistic Undecagonstring (the 11+ stringed instrument for playing the titular composition) is an unusually effective running gag.
  • Han Kang's The Vegetarian: Finally read this for Weird & Wonderful. Three linked novellas, tracking the way a woman's sudden turn to vegetarianism affects those around her. Much darker than I expected; it seemed for a minute like it was going in a more fantastic or magical-realist direction, but doesn't. Put much in mind of Bartleby the Scrivener. Ultimately a lot more about mental illness, and the way that rigid social systems like patriarchy are threatened by even non-confrontational dissent, than it is about vegetarianism.

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