‘Tis the season for retrospectives. Since I don’t read or watch that much stuff the year it comes out, my annual lists are always about what I consumed during the previous year, regardless of when it was made. Last year I wrote about John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. This year I have a little more to say. I’ll write my Best Books post later (Le Guin, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Gene Wolfe, this time around); right now I want to talk about the other books.
In 2022, I tried to catch up on some popular contemporary fantasy, and I was sorely disappointed. I hope I simply ran into Sturgeon’s Law—ninety percent of everything is crap–but I suspect I was also dipping into some pretty craptastic wells. Recent trends are… not promising. I took a number of recommendations from the r/fantasy subreddit. It’s Reddit, so a lot of the users either are or act like fourteen-year-olds, but I wanted to see what the youths were up to. It turns out they’re up to two things: loving Brandon Sanderson, and reading self-published anime clones.
Sanderson is fine. I like the writing podcast he spent many years contributing to. His books are, whatever, not to my taste, but I get it. Characters a bit shallow, plots a bit paint-by-numbers, narration a bit overlong on exposition, everything rather unsexy (befitting his devout Mormonism), but he builds great worlds, and is loved in particular for his intricate magic systems. He is one of the best-selling fantasy authors of the modern era. He’s also insanely prolific–during the pandemic he woke up one morning and found he’d accidentally written four extra novels. Good for him! But his success has led publishers to release a lot of high-concept mimicry–it’s like Brandon Sanderson but xyz–which, unsurprisingly, is not to my taste.
I was especially disappointed with Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’d seen its (excellent) cover on shelves for a few years and finally decided to read it. I was sort of excited. I adore Bennett’s City of Stairs, which I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for a good diplomatic spy thriller. But–nope. This book was not for me. The huge Brandon Sanderson blurb on the jacket should have been hint enough. Intricate magic system? Check. Decent action? Check. Bloodless romance… check… twisty-yet-predictable plot… you guessed it. Check.
On to the next trend: self-published anime clones. Let me begin by saying that I am not trying to crap on self-published authors, who have written some excellent books and who we have a number of among our readership. No, this is about a narrow slice of contemporary fantasy, largely written by people who got their start with fanfiction. And it’s an interesting phenomenon. There are two major subgenres here, isekai and LitRPG, which are not entirely new ideas, though in this context they share an important attribute: they are not, at a fundamental level, inspired by books, but rather by anime and video games. Add in the tendency for these authors to not use developmental editors, and you get some unusual (or all-too-typical) stories. One fun thing about them is the palpable, insane enthusiasm level of the authors–they love writing these things, and it shows. That’s great! A lot of trad-pub authors don’t manage this. But they can also get swept away by their own, ah, brilliance. Less great. Ultimately, though, what I take issue with is the lack of… I hesitate to say literary merit, barf… let’s just talk about the specific subgenres.
Isekai. Portal fantasy. Not a new idea. A person is displaced from their reality–usually our own–and ends up in a fantasy or science-fiction land. But these particular books are inspired by anime, usually episodic anime, and often originally written as web serials. This works well enough with an episodic structure, if you’re into that, but collected into a ‘novel’, it… does not. Especially when authors don’t try to fix the pacing and arc issues when it’s time to bundle it up for Kindle Direct. The novel is a form, with conventions and expectations, and these often just don’t engage with that.
Don’t get me wrong, I like a good serial. I’ve been reading Pale this year, a dark urban fantasy story inspired by “magical girl” shōjo anime (e.g. Sailor Moon; Puella Magi Madoka Magica). I’ll pick it up before bed sometimes. But it’s long, and it’s a serial, and it can be a grind, just a constant, episodic ratchet. I wish it felt like a series of novels, but it doesn’t. It feels like a series of cliffhangers. Still, I want to see how it ends.
LitRPG shares many of these flaws. These are stories like Ready Player One and Sword Art Online–a character is in a video game, engages with video game dynamics, gains power in video game ways, does video game stuff. Needless to say there is a lot of Japanese material inspiring these works. Video games usually take the form of episodic loops, so it’s no surprise to find that structure here. There’s a power progression, at least, which shares a lot with traditional hero’s journey stories, but these are mostly still serials with a fanfiction vibe. They also often feel like adolescent male power fantasies, which is hardly new in fantasy, but at a certain point, to quote Stephen King, everything starts to taste like beans.
So yeah. That’s what the kids are up to, I guess. I think I’ll go back to being an old fart who reads classics that have withstood the test of time, and leave the anime and video game stories for when I watch anime and play video games.
They say to end blog posts with a prompt, so: what disappointed you last year? Haha.
Nancy
I like Murderbot. Otherwise I’ve been re-reading old favorites.
Falling Diphthong
I lately have been more inclined to give up on books if the plot is not bustling along. My interest just fades, and after too many years feeling obligated to finish anything I’d started, I give it a couple of chapters to pull me back in and then drop it. Often I admire what the writer is doing with their storytelling, but emotionally I just am not invested.
Recommendations for contemporary fantasy:
How Long ‘Til Black Future Month, collection of short stories by N.K. Jemisin. A really nice introduction to her work if you’re considering taking on her excellent (but long) Broken Earth series.
The Scholomance by Naomi Novik, trilogy starting with A Deadly Education. What if you were in a magical high school where things kept jumping out to try and eat you, and that was actually horribly stressful and the only reason anyone would do it is your odds of being eaten by a monster are even greater outside? It works as straight fantasy adventure, but also as an examination of privilege. And after reading book 3, I immediately turned around and reread the whole thing.
Major Major Major Major
@Nancy: great series!
re: rereading, I’ve been thinking about doing The Goblin Emperor… then maybe the side sequels which I haven’t read…
Tom Levenson
The book I read this year that was a) not a reread of a comforting favorite (necessary for me in tough times) b) was fiction, and c) really stuck with me was Susanna Clark’s Piranesi. Hypnotic, compelling, strange from beginning to end.
I’m waiting on the third volume in William Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy. His work has been with me since Neuromancer, and I think that Pattern Recognition may in fact be the (a) great American novel.
Tom Levenson
As for SF/fantasy–I’m following the work of Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jean Anders pretty closely. I read Anders’ young adult novel Victories Greater Than Death this year with a lot of pleasure, and found both her adult novels, All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night very tasty. Newitz managed to make a fine tale out of intellectual property piracy in Autonomous, and I have some catching up to do on her more recent work.
(They’re both friends of mine, so you can discount for that if you like, but do check them out.)
Major Major Major Major
@Tom Levenson: I was pretty disappointed by Agency 😕 but also looking forward to Jackpot
My friend gave Piranesi a glowing recommendation the other day. Been meaning to look it up…
MattF
@Falling Diphthong: I read Novick’s Scholomance trilogy— it was very good, but I liked her two earlier novels (Uprooted and Spinning Silver) more. All three tales have rather similar plots, so maybe I’ve gotten weary of magical teen girls finding their guy. Reread Jemison’s ‘Broken Earth’ trilogy, still great. Now awaiting the first installment of the end of the Craft sequence from Max Gladstone.
ETA: And, of course, anything Murderbot.
Starfish
I had a hard time reading this past year. Everything was a slog, and towards the end I just gave up and read some really easy Fantasy.
I started out with the first two books of Fonda Lee’s Green Bones Saga including Jade War. These were good. I think Dorothy Windsor recommended them. I read Iron Widow which was a bit strange, and a lot of people said that the heroine diverged deeply from the historical Wu Zetian that she was based on. I read a couple of books in Naomi Novik’s Scholomance triology. I read the second book in Rebecca Roanhorse’s Between the Earth and Sky series. At the end of the first book she talked about how she studied up on “how not to write blind characters badly.” If you compare it to Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, you see how she is much better at her characters not being able to see things.
Tom Levenson
@Major Major Major Major: Agency didn’t have the power of The Peripheral–it had too much of Gibson’s attention to brands and identity shaping. But I am curious as to where he plans to go with the AI/time travel nexus.
Middle books in trilogies–his and others–often seem a let down. (The Two Towers being a magnificent exception.) Spook Country was less engaging than either Pattern Recognition or Zero History (and PR was clearly the standout there.) Felt the same about the Bridge trilogy–I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough on Idoru. Etc.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’m reading Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, which, for me, is just okay. The plot depends heavily on the magic, and that’s just not something that interests me a lot. I want the book to be about the characters with the plot functioning as an excuse for them to show their stuff. Ninth House is also rather dark.
It’s always interesting to see how big a role personal taste plays in reacting to a book. Ninth House is award winning, so my tepid response is not typical.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Starfish: Fonda Lee’s Jade series is exactly the kind of books I like. There’s a fantasy element in the power of jade, but the story reaches far beyond that.
Immanentize
Just a Q: did Momsense win the big lottery? Someone in Maine did!
Major Major Major Major
@Tom Levenson: I couldn’t even finish Zero History. My big issue with Agency was that it was explicitly rewritten on account of Orange Man Bad (according to a talk of his I saw), which resulted in an even less satisfying ending than normal.
Starfish
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I like that too. I really don’t need paragraphs and paragraphs about how the magic works.
Starfish
@Immanentize: Think of how many books you could buy if you won the big lottery.
MattF
@Tom Levenson: Agree about Piranesi. Very different from her earlier novels. Liked The Goblin Emperor, didn’t know that ‘Katherine Addison’ is a pen name— I had wondered whatever happened to Sarah Monette…
sab
Reading this thread in a hick city, I have to say that I love e-books. I used to read or hear about a book, hopefully make a note of the author and title, try not to lose said note, take note to local bookstore in hopes they had said book, order book if they didn’t, and be told two or three months later that the warehouse they worked with didn’t carry that particular book so sorry. Later I learned to note title, author, publisher and write publisher, but still it was always a crapshoot.
Now I just click the purchase tab on my Nook and hope the book isn’t exclusive to Amazon.
Sometimes glitches like Tom Levenson is Thomas to my Nook, but I can almost always find a book.
Kristine
Saving Maureen Johnson’s latest, Nine Liars, to serve as a reward when I dispatch some of the to do list. It’s the latest in a series featuring Stevie Bell, a teen who studies cold cases and solves one at her exclusive prep school. I guess they’re YA. Don’t care. I love mysteries and these are like nothing I would write so they’re like vacation.
NotMax
Nitpick?
Do you mean self-published manga, not self-published anime?
Entertaining classic style SF book recently encountered was The Darwin Elevator by Jason Hough, from 2013. First book of the Dire Earth trilogy. Downloaded the second, The Exodus Towers; from the library to the Kindle and am oh so slowly getting through it (inherent interest lags in comparison to the first, IMHO). Perhaps the final novel, The Plague Forge will redeem the unevenness.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax:
No, I mean self-published novels that are piles of popular anime tropes. Very well-selling!
I enjoyed the first Darwin book well enough but my suspicion that he had no outline ended up bearing fruit unfortunately.
GSV Sleeper Service
Nona The Ninth was fucking amazing. I tend to describe Gideon The Ninth and Harrow The Ninth as “lesbian necromancers in space”, and the third book in the series isn’t exactly NOT that, but it’s also a lot MORE than that. Highly recommend.
sab
@Immanentize: If you still want a home for CDs I will pay postage/ shipping for quite a few and send some of them back when you change your mind.
I’ve done the total move bit a few times and the purging isn’t fun at all.
Also too, I just got a CD player and need music.
Watergirl has my e-mail.
Kristine
@GSV Sleeper Service: I may try it. I enjoyed Gideon, but couldn’t get into Harrow. Maybe I was in the wrong headspace at the time, though I did wonder if she would spend the entire book throwing up because it’s a long book. I need to give it another shot.
bmoak
I’ve learned to really dislike the genres of Isekai and LitRPG because of how dominant they’ve become in anime and manga. Looking on lists of upcoming releases, you’ll see a bunch of both of these crowding up the schedule.
I have very little interest in stories based on life in a a video-game world. Isekai are hardly a new concept. The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court are all Isekai. I even have animation cels from old 80s anime that are Isekai. It’s just that the idea is so overused and often lead to lazy world building and characterization
OzarkHillbilly
I just want to say, “A Perfect Spy” is the book that made me fall in love with LeCarre’. In later years I saw echos of it in my sons lives and realized LeCarre’ had lived what my sons were going thru. It was not a comfortable revelation.
GSV Sleeper Service
@Kristine: I would say that each sequel begins begins by making you question if you actually read the previous one, but the payoffs where worth it to me.
bmoak
@Falling Diphthong:
I just finished reading Jemisin’s eagerly-awaited The World We Make, the sequel to her excellent (and literal) urban fantasy The City We Became. She was going to write it as part of a trilogy, but decided she could wrap up the series in one book. I appreciated her decision not to pad a series out, but I would like to see these characters again.
dnfree
@Falling Diphthong: Did you read Novik’s Temeraire series? The Napoleonic wars, but with dragons? The character development of the DRAGONS is spectacular, and again as the books progress in the series, more complexity in the role and status of sentient dragons in different societies.
Jim Bales
@Nancy:
Let me second the Murderbot stories — They are not too long and so much fun!
best
Major Major Major Major
@bmoak: they’re everywhere! And as I wrote it’s not just anime, it’s like everything. I get the appeal as escapism but sheesh.
Jim Bales
My big find this year is the 2 novels of Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus and The Starless Sea
they are beautifully written worlds with characters you care about that simply sucked me in
The only thing better than reading them, I have found, is listening to their audiobooks, which has been a great help for my mu commute :-)
The only thing better than reading them, I have found, is listening to their audiobooks, which has been a great help for my new commute :-)
Best,
Jim
Dorothy A. Winsor
@MattF: One of the things I really respect about Novik is that she doesn’t keep telling the same story. She did those Majesty’s Dragon books about dragons in the Napoleonic wars, which is different from what she’s doing now. You’d think moving on to new stories would be easy, but it’s not.
Ken
Or elections.
A Guy in Denver
My favorites this year are Nettle and Bone (T Kingfisher) and Spear (Nicola Griffith). Books for adults that are not Sanderson clones
CaseyL
My problem is I’ve all but lost the ability to bury myself in a book: anything with a long, drawn-out plot is no longer enjoyable – in fiction, I should note. Happily, I don’t seem to have that problem with non-fiction; maybe because I read a lot of books on science topics, which are episodic in nature.
So my reads these days have to either be so engagingly written I’m carried along by the sheer quality of the prose, or the plot moves swiftly enough that I don’t find myself skipping pages.
(I might note that Martha Wells’ Murderbot tales are right up my alley, on both counts,and I am eagerly awaiting the latest entry!)
Along those lines, one series I’ve enjoyed in the past year are neo-classic murder mysteries. They’re modern/new books, but set in London (and environs) in the 1920s-30s. They’re well-written, move jauntily along, and are a lot of fun: Sara Rosett’s High Society Lady Detective series. An entertaining look at what it was like to live in Depression-era London, on the fringes of the monied social set (which seems to spend a lot of time killing one another).
Professor Bigfoot
2034: A Novel of the Next World War, Elliot Ackerman and James G. Stavridis
If I’d bought it as a paper and ink book, I would have thrown it across the room. Every novel requires some “suspension of disbelief,” but… the idea that the United States Navy would sortie two carrier battle groups when they don’t know why they can’t control their own freaking aircraft and satellites… and this is secondary to the idea that the Chinese hack would permit them complete control of an F-35 remotely. Gah.
I paid full price for this bullshit.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
I really enjoyed Piranesi. It was simultaneously completely different from Clarke’s previous work and recognizably by the same author, which is a difficult pair to pull off. The only thing that was remotely disappointing about it is I expected it to be even bigger and more sprawling than it was. The climax came as a bit of a surprise to me; I was expecting it to be working up to the end of the second act rather than the end of the story. I guess this is an advantage to reading a physical book instead of an ebook; it’s much easier to tell by the number of pages left how close you are to the end.
sab
@OzarkHillbilly: I love LeCarre. I really liked his last book Silverview, a sort of very indirect tribute to spies’ children. So indirect that his editing son didn’t see that aspect.
raven
@CaseyL: Same here but I thought it might be the gabenpentin!
MattF
And another book I read last year is Peter Watts’ Blindsight. Excellent, hard SF + fantasy. A very different take on ‘first contact’. Gave me a lot to think about.
Major Major Major Major
@Jim Bales: she’s great! I wrote up “starless” here a couple years ago.
sab
@CaseyL: I am the opposite. If I cannot bury myself for days reading and obsess for weeks after then why bother reading.
Expletive Deleted
Adding my vote for Piranesi. Arkady Martine’s two book Teixcalasn series is excellent. The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez was an out-of-nowhere revelation, excited to see there is suddenly a new book by him. For a wonderful recent portal fantasy check out The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alyx E. Harrow. Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British sf author who seems to finally be getting more attention and deserves it.
I try not to dwell on disappointments too much, but the Tamsyn Muir necromancers while enjoyable seemed to be constructed purely out of vibes by the end of the second book. I had a good enough time but don’t feel the need to read a third, ymmv.
Roger Moore
@bmoak:
Also Alice in Wonderland and the Princess of Mars books. I’ve actually heard this genre described as “traditional fantasy”. The high fantasy style of Tolkien was actually a huge break; it was just so successful we’re used to seeing fantasy where the characters come from within the fantasy world rather than visiting it from our world.
GSV Sleeper Service
@MattF:
r/printSF loves Blindsight – I started it after reading a his Rifters trilogy, but wasn’t really hooked. Bleak is a pretty good summary for all of his stuff…
Major Major Major Major
@Expletive Deleted: love that Martine series! Especially the first one. Reread it last(?) year to get caught up for the sequel and liked it just as much.
Sequel was fine but I’d have been perfectly satisfied with a stand-alone.
Percysowner
I just finished the final book in the Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik.. It’s the story of a very dark magic school, if that’s your thing, and has great characters and an engrossing plot. The first book is A Deadly Education. She also did 2 fairy tale retellings. Spinning Silver is my favorite, a twist on Rumpelstiltskin with a Jewish, money lender as the main protagonist.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Major Major Major Major: A Memory Called Empire is at the top of my TBR pile. I have to finish the Bardugo book and prep for leading a book club discussion about The Thursday Murder Club, but then I’ll pick up the Martine book.
Emma from Miami
My new find is Nghi Vo’s The Empress of Salt and Fortune. It’s China but… it’s not. It’s the story of a well planned takeover of an arrogant Empire, but… it’s not. I read it all in one sitting. There are two more to follow. I hope they are as fascinating.
I re-read Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy novels. I found them as interesting as I did 30? years ago. Superb world building but it doesn’t interfere with the flow. Even the “magic science” exposition is tightly kept to the service of the story.Also, Sherlock Holmes pastiches. They grade from “it’s got to be self-published, no house would handle this dreck” to ” now that’s an interesting read.” But after a long day dealing with all the crazyness in my life. I just flat out need something that is as close to fanfiction as it gets.
piratedan
Will give a shout out to
Wesley Chu’s The Lives of Tao series.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric’s Labors
Timothy O’Malley’s Blitz the 3rd in the Chequey series
MattF
@Emma from Miami: You might like The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison. It’s Holmes-pastiche with angels, werewolves, vampires, etc. I found it very entertaining.
MagdaInBlack
@CaseyL: I’ve been much the same way for several years. I rarely read fiction, and when I do I notice its most often a non-american born female author, except for William Gibson, which I can always read. (and reread)
I’m currently reading a James Baldwin biography by David Leeming.
sab
May I just say that my husband gave me a boxed set of Harry Potter about ten years ago that I had never read, and I read this summer. I didn’t like it at all. Thought about it a lot and realized that I was reading it as a 60+ grandmother and not as an angry child.
My reaction was ” All of these children sneak around and lie, every time they open their mouths!”
I never did that at home with my parents, but I did that every chance my one year in boarding school.
Point of view matters a lot.
Dallas Taylor
Hi all, longtime lurker (and fantasy writer) here. I’m not usually much of a commenter but this hit my sweet spot in a couple ways, not least of which I finished A Perfect Spy this morning. Man, what a great book, capital-L literature but also, once it gets going, a real page-turner, even if the plot does not so much twist as spiral to its foregone conclusion like an airplane that’s lost an engine.
As for contemporary fantasy, ditto Nicola Griffith’s Spear, and let me heartily recommend literally everything else she’s written, particularly Hild, which is historical fiction and, if you can find them, her Aud Torvingen series, which are Nordic thrillers. Her wife, Kelley Eskridge, is also a fantastic writer.
Ditto also Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which is, to me, a near-perfect book. And Murderbot, which is just fun as all hell.
NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy is heavy heavy heavy, and also, to my mind, one of the greatest literary accomplishments by anyone anywhere. I read them as they came out, then again all at once about a year ago, and man oh man does she just nail it all the way through, especially the second-person POV that runs through and provides continuity for the whole trilogy. Just… wow.
Now, to stuff I haven’t seen mentioned, but heartily recommend. First, Daniel Abraham (who is half of James SA Corey, along with Ty Franck, who together wrote The Expanse). He has two long series, the Long Price Quartet, in which poets capture laws of nature into commandable beings and which spans the whole lives of its primary characters, and The Dagger and The Coin, which is more straight-ahead epic fantasy. The latter is a five-book series in a world with twelve races created by long-dead dragons, and follows the course of a war of imperial conquest/pogrom launched with the aid of a cult of infected priests with a really interesting special power and involves a surprisingly large role played by a brilliant young banker. I’ve read them all twice, and it’s just fking great all the way through. He has a new one, Age of Ash, that I enjoyed, that looks to be a Rashomon-style telling and retelling of a particular series of events in a city ruled/owned by a malevolent magical being, this one largely from the perspective of a pair of street kids who, well, I won’t ruin it for anyone.
I’d also suggest Lois McMaster Bujold’s fantasy work, particularly the World of the Five Gods books. The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt are all page-turning masterworks, and the Penric and Desdemona novellas are just fun as all get-out.
Other recent highlights include CL Clark’s The Unbroken, Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings, and Tade Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy (though they are probably more science fiction than fantasy).
Starfish
@sab: Okay, Naomi Novik’s books do that but better, and the annoying children get eaten by the monsters that live in the school sometimes.
sab
@MagdaInBlack: I love James Baldwin, but I can only re-read his books about once every five years.
Another Country is about gay black man and his sister, but I have never read a more sympathetic character than the frustrated white wife of a successful man. I loved her when I was 17.
Baldwin could see everyone.
mrmoshpotato
That there wasn’t an unexpected third day of Festivus. Oh, wait… :)
Wyatt Salamanca
Speaking of books, this article has some interesting statistics. Do these numbers mesh with anyone’s actual tally of books read to date?
How Many Books Will You Read Before You Die?
https://lithub.com/how-many-books-will-you-read-before-you-die
sab
@Starfish: Seriously? And you gave me no spoiler alert? I haven’t read a Novik book yet. Just bought one.
Jerry
I’ve finally finished Wolfe’s entire solar cycle novels and boy, did it end great with the Book of the Short Sun. I just love his ability to play with identity. Like, who is really writing this this and who is this person? One thing I’ll say about Book of the Long Sun: there’s just a single sentence towards the end of the series that made say out very loud, “WHAT THE HELL THIS IS INCREDIBLE ONLY WOLFE COULD PULL THIS SHIT!!” Lol. Just a single sentence.
One piece of advice when it comes to reading Gene Wolfe: read the books then listen to the Alzabo Soup podcast. Those guys do a tremendous job in helping you make sense of what you have read and may inspire you to re-read the books.
I also just finished Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time and am getting close to finishing book two of that series, Children of Ruin. Great books, highly original. Book three is coming out in the next few weeks and can’t wait for it.
Mel
An old favorite: A Boy’s Life, by Robert R. McCammon.
It won the 1992 World Fantasy Award. It’s a little magic realism, a little fantasy, a little nod to small town eeriness a la Bradbury, a little horror, but also a poignant coming of age story about a child trying to confront and trying to understand the harsh realities of the world for so many people outside the realm of his previously safe and sheltered childhood. I really enjoyed it 30 years ago, read it with my students many years over, and am getting ready to read it again this year after a decade and a half away from it. Hopefully it will still hold up.
sab
@Mel: Read that and loved that. Noted: I was a girl not a boy.
sab
Cleaning out my bookshelves. I am going to trot all my Ursula LeGuin to my grand-daughters and hope they read them and don’t dump the books.
Emma from Miami
@MattF: Read it several times. One of the best purely inventive ones. And by golly it makes sense.
mrmoshpotato
@Immanentize:
Haha. No, she didn’t. I asked earlier.
PaulB
I second (or third or fourth) the recommendation for Bujold’s Penric series. They’re just fun, particularly the interaction between Penric and Desdemona.
In 2022, I found that reading that was generally lighter was more to my taste than in previous years. I have to think whoever here first recommended the Murderbot series, as I ended up reading them twice in 2022. Although, I’m still waiting for the last one to be added to Kindle Unlimited, which is where I read the rest of them.
I also read John Bierce’s Mage Errant series twice, although the latest one in the series had a bit too much filler for my taste. Some great characters and some inventive use of magic, particularly in the battle scenes.
I also liked Honor Raconteur’s “Case Files of Henri Davenforth” series. What if a trained FBI agent was transported to a quasi-late-Victorian era world where magic worked? How would she adapt, particularly in a world where women were more accustomed to being cared for and protected than being masters of their own fate? Yet, adapt she does, as a police detective, no less, as she solves crimes in partnership with the station’s magical examiner. Jamie and Henri make a great team and the books are great light reading.
Steve
I’ve become very reluctant to read any sci-fi written by men. There’s some fine stuff by men, of course, but there’s just vastly more that’s shallow and predictable and little more than male wish-fulfillment.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I did just read Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which I thought was fantastic. She echoes Dickens’s fury over systemic poverty, especially the effects on children
kalakal
I started last year reading my Christmas presents which were some Alistair Reynolds books – the 5th book in the Revelation Space series – Inhibitor Phase
and the first 2 books in the Revenger series – Revenger and Shadow Captain and thoroughly enjoyed all 3.
Inhibitor Phase is great hard sf in and if you like the previous books in the series you’ll love it. The Revenger series is Reynold’s letting his hair down a bit, steampunk pirates in Spaaaace and a lot of fun.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time was very good.
I saw someone recommend Peter Watts’ Blindsight read that a few years ago, it’s excellent, there’s a sequel Echopraxia I must get around to reading. I’d really recommend his Rifters series.
reread Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga – Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained – good stuff, just bursting with ideas
Miss Bianca
@Tom Levenson: Susanna Clark has written something new?
Miss Bianca
@Jim Bales: I’ve read the first two Murderbots and really liked them, I have to grab the others now!
RSA
Harry Connolly released two new novels in his Twenty Palaces series in 2022, The Iron Gate and The Flood Circle. It’s an urban fantasy series, having been compared with the Dresden Files, but I think the novels are more tightly written with more coherent world building. Each entry is a hard-boiled detective novel, with the bad guys being supernatural monsters and the greedy or misled or power-hungry humans who want to bring them to Earth. I don’t know how the new novels would be as a starting point, but Child of Fire, the first book in the series, is well worth tracking down. Harry is on my Patreon list; I really like his work.
NotMax
Mormon slash fiction* makes dishwater look heady.
//
*Pretty safe bet there is some. No linkies, please.
Heidi Mom
I loved LotR and GoT, but beyond those I haven’t delved into fantasy. I haven’t watched The Witcher (despite having Netflix), but after reading that the books that gave rise to the series, by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, were heavily influenced by Slavic folklore, I decided to dip a cautious toe into those waters just to see what they were like. Surprise, I read the first one, a collection of short stories called The Last Wish, and liked it. Faulkner’s famous phrase, that the essence of fiction is the human heart in conflict with itself, applies here.
Kristine
@MattF: Loved Blindsight. Make sure to read the follow-up, Echopraxia.
kalakal
Just recalled a fantasy series I enjoyed
Peter Newman’s Vagrant trilogy. The Vagrant, The Malice, and The Seven
Well written and rather unusual in that the central character is mute.
Reread The Brothers Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, a brilliant idea and the basis for Tarkovsky’s film Stalker and the videogame series S.T.A.L.K.E.R
MagdaInBlack
@sab: I did not discover Baldwin until my mid-thirties, when I took an “African American Literature” class as a “non-traditional” student finally finishing my undergrad. Authors like him were not on my radar growing up in the cornfields of northern Illinois.
Barbara
@sab: Agreed on Silverview. I liked it also because, on his way out, LeCarre gave us two characters with a hopeful future. p;
Benw
Go Chargers!
Mel
@sab: Me, too. I was an outdoorsy, small town farm girl, so some of the moments from that book were like a sense memory pulled right out of childhood summers.
Major Major Major Major
@NotMax: that’s sorta what Twilight is, right?
Miss Bianca
So, M4, you asked, “what disappointed you this year” and I am sorry to have to say it was…LeCarre.
After so many years of listening to people throwing bouquets around about how great his stuff is, I finally decided I had to try one. Since I simply could not figure out where to actually start – publication order? – Smiley story line order? – I finally said, “Fuck it, I’ll start with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy“.
And man…what a wet, dreary mess. Sadly, not only did I find the story turgid and confusing, I really didn’t give a tinker’s dam about any of the characters. I forced myself to finish it because, you know, it’s supposed to be GREAT! STUFF! but man…when it finally ended I just said: “Is that it?” And then: “Thank God *that’s* over.”
Yeah, I know. Philistine to the max, that would be me.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Other than it (and the plethora of sequels) existing, don’t know squat about it. Happy as the proverbial clam to remain unilluminated.
NotMax
Kind’a sort’a disappointed with 1899. Had as it turns out unreasonably high hopes for it. Desperately needed fine tuning. Netflix already pulled the plug on another season.
Pretty to look at, though. And impressive SFX.
Feathers
I kept track of all the books I read and films/TV I watched in the notes app last year. Made it to 82 books. I joined the SheDunnit podcast book group, so lots of golden age mysteries. Hence the high count.
Disappointment? Tried a lot of mystery authors new to me and although Freeman Wills Croft was a fave to many, he left me cold. Raymond Chandler called him “the best of the plodding detail men.” I have decided to leave the detail writers alone. I keep hearing people say they like fair play mysteries, but I think that’s because they only read the best of it. Too often it devolves into mind numbing descriptions of rooms and entire chapters of people checking train tables against each other. Even Sayers falls into this trap.
No real fantasy reading, but in contemporary mysteries, thoroughly enjoyed the three Vera Kelly books by Rosalie Knecht. Set in early 60s. Teen kicked out of house when mother discovers she’s a lesbian. Moves to New York, recruited by CIA, becomes a PI in later books. Also high marks to The Book of the Most Precious Substance by Sara Gran. It’s an erotic thriller about a rare book dealer hired to find a copy of book of occult sex rituals from the 16th(?) century, which may or may not exist.
Best of the new to me older books, A Pin to See the Peepshow, a 1930s true crime heart tugger about the 1920s Thompson-Bywater murder case.
This thread has convinced me I should read A Perfect Spy, and the Murderbot books.
kalakal
For anyone who likes Le Carre his contemporary Len Deighton is worth a look, I loved his early Harry Palmer books which led to several Michael Caine films – The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin – but his best stuff is the Bernard Samson series Game, Set, Match… Faith, Hope, Charity.
MisterDancer
As someone who loves a good Women-centered PI story (ask me how excited I was when the Jessica Jones series was announced! Ask me how frustrated I am by the Veronica Mars fandom, and how I really just wanted her to be that Female Noir detective we met, long ago…!), this is a buy for me, thank you!
I’m also intrigued by …Most Precious Substance, but we’ll see :)
But between my work and my research, I’m not much for fiction, these days If I read, it is, believe it or not, fan fiction! Esp, crossover fanfic of TV/Books/Movies I adore, and where we get to see sides of characters I already like.
I’ll give one example, because I know people are already looking at me funny, and are next gonna think I’m some Fifty Shades apologist or something (yuk!) Yet I adore this fic “The Old Gods Called, They’d Like Their Kingdom Back“. It’s a Women-centric re-working of the controversial endgame show I viscerally disliked (and did not watch) from jump, Game of Thrones (“Hi, actual [former] medieval re-enactor/layperson research here, and Martin? Your vision of the past is…off-kilter, even when you add dragons and magic. Nice guy! Met him once, but…”), crossing over with a couple characters from Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, of all things.
It’s the sort of thing that great fiction, no matter it’s source, does — it showcases a reality that it’s quite ours, but feels visceral and real enough. It’s clearly written by someone who has done and is showing their work (multiple sewing circles, with explanations about why it’s important to do all that sewing and embroidery ! And without the “I’ve done this research and am inflicting it upon you, plot and pacing be dammed” that, say, early Outlander triggered in me…)
And of course, it gives you characters and motivations you actually want to root out and know more of. It makes sense of the arc of a character from the latter show that had always frustrated me, and it made me give a damn about a bunch of characters in GoT that I…didn’t, before.
Great work.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Miss Bianca: don’t start there, start with the spy who came in from the cold. That was his breakout book.
LeftCoastYankee
Dang, I’m always late to these threads.
Someone I haven’t seen mentioned who I enjoyed this year is R.F. Kuang. She has a fantasy trilogy “The Poppy War books”, which is set in an alternate China with a condensed history. It is engrossing and unflinching.
She also has a standalone book “Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence…” set in a magical version of Victorian England, where translation of language generates magical potential, and how this feeds the Empire. Again, unflinching and engrossing.
I also enjoyed Melissa Caruso’s books. She has 2 trilogies set in the same world, with “realistic” insights into the dynamics of managing magic and power.
I tend to like books where the magic is a metaphorical device to explore other more interesting themes. Although “bad magic logic” is kind of a turnoff.
Major Major Major Major
@Miss Bianca: definitely not the sort of thing that’s going to be everybody’s cup of tea!
J R in WV
@Miss Bianca: I’m not fond of his [ LeCarre ] stuff either. One or two were OK, none of them were great. Murderbot is great, tho.
ETA: Thanks everyone for all the book reviews and recommendations. I love ebooks, quit buying hard copies, read my tablet all the time.
Tehanu
@Major Major Major Major: The Goblin Emperor is a great book. The sequels are good and I enjoyed them, but not on the same level; they’re murder mysteries, essentially, although the author has expanded the worldbuilding. My own big discovery this year is Frances Hardinge, especially A Face Like Glass.
@Dallas Taylor: Are you me? I think you and I have basically the same tastes!
@Miss Bianca: The miniseries of Tinker, Tailor with Alec Guinness is well worth watching, even if you didn’t like the book. The movie had some good acting but just wasn’t the same. Take with a grain of salt, I’m a lifelong LeCarre fan.
And speaking of fanfic, there’s a website called, um, something like Our Own Archive where somebody wrote a connected series of Vorkosigan stories centered on Ivan’s cousin Byerly that are absolutely wonderful — almost as good as Bujold’s own stuff!
ETA: here’s the link, it’s Archive of Our Own: https://archiveofourown.org/media
MisterDancer
Archive of Our Own. It’s where the fanfic I pointed to is hosted. :)
Here’s the stories on there tagger with Byerly Vorrutyer: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Byerly%20Vorrutyer/works
(The site is a masterpiece of organization and managing data. I wish major corporate social media sites payed as much attention to how to organize and present information — and how to get contributors to self-support such — as Archive of Our Own did.)
Jim Bales
@Major Major Major Major: Agreed! And the Audiobook version of each is fabulous
I suppose the quality would not be the same if she wrote a little more quickly….
Jim
karen marie
How times have changed. Donald E. Westlake wrote under numerous psuedonyms because his publishers complained he was writing too many books too quickly.
If you have Audible, they have a bunch of great Westlake novels in their free section. Great stories well read and you don’t even have to use a credit!
GregMulka
Glad I’m not the only one who bounced hard off the Foundryside books after the Divine Cities books.
RF Kuang’s Babel is, from a craft of writing standpoint, her best work yet. I can’t stand Dark Academia. I really tried because I think she’s an excellent author but the whole sub-genre could disappear and I wouldn’t notice or care.
LarryB
Hey! The kids are alright. In LitRPG, I highly recommend Project Daily Grind, by A. Osadchuk. There’s also some cool stuff coming out of Australia. The Stork Tower series by Tony Corden is thoroughly entertaining and thought provoking. For sheer fun, get He Who Fights Monsters, by shirtaloon (for realz!) in audio book form. The narrator nails it.
VFX Lurker
I’d like to add to the recommendations for N.K. Jemisin in this thread. Amazing writer; amazing stories.
I’d also like to join the love for Susanna Clarke and R.F. Kuang.
I still have to catch up with the latest from all three writers, but I love their stuff.
Nancy
@Major Major Major Major:
OK, something new to look for. Thanks.
Nancy
@Tom Levenson:
I’m right there with you about William Gibson and eagerly awaiting. I’m like that with Neal Stephenson, too, thus the re-reading of old favorites.
Nancy
@MisterDancer: My daughter-in-law posts on Archive of Our Own as SareLiz.
@Tehanu: I think she’s great, but I may not be totally unbiased.
Nancy
@Jim Bales: Fun and absorbing.
BretH
Super late to this but absolutely loved The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi. Wicked good writing.
jerryn
@bmoak: I was sort of disappointed that The World We Make is the last in the series, but I understand why she made that decision. I do hope to see those characters again, too.
Groucho48
For those who have Kindle Unlimited, there’s a fair number of decent fantasies available. Lindsay Buroker is a prolific author. Lots of fantasy, some S-F. Her books mostly have a smart woman whose wisecracking is always getting her into trouble but whose clever schemes let her squeak through. The main secondary character is almost always a very quiet, very deadly assassin or powerful mage or whatever. Light, fun reading. The books have an overarching plot but usually are a series of her saying things that get her in trouble and then coming up with solutions which are so…um…unpredictable that he might even lift an eyebrow. For fantasy, I’d recommend starting with the Emperor’s Edge series. For S-F, the Star Kingdom series.