Since just after Christmas 2014 I’ve been keeping a reading diary: nothing fancy, just title, author, and date I finished reading each book.

Christmas 2015 I made it fancy. The records are now kept in json, and I’m putting together a tiny python toolkit for mangling them in various ways. Useful? Probably not. Fun? Yep!

So here is a mostly-complete list of what I read in 2015, in roughly chronological order but with occasional reshuffling for thematic consistency. I’ve marked with a ☛ any that I think are particularly worth checking out (if you happen to share my taste and interests, anyway).

  • Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos series. I’ve written about this.
  • ☛ Hild, Nicola Griffith. Historical fiction about the early life of a seventh-century saint. Wonderfully immersive.
  • An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield. You know, @Cmdr_Hadfield, who sang “Space Oddity” on the ISS. A combination autobiography and advice manual.
  • Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity, Thomas Metzinger. Philosophy of mind; very thought-provoking, but also classically alienating academic writing: prissy, boring at the sentence level, and very very long.
  • Household Tales, The brothers Grimm. The edition with the foreword by Russell Hoban, which is nuts.
  • Series A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, by David Zindell. I thought I had started but not finished this series repeatedly over the years; turns out I had finished it but forgotten most of the plot. Turgid.
  • ☛ The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton. 2013 Man Booker winner. Set in the goldfields of Hokatika; beautiful prose, and a clever and intricate formal structure.
  • Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross. SF focusing on the economics of interstellar travel. Stross is a favourite relaxation read of mine.
  • The River Singers, Tom Moorhouse. YA about water voles (what Ratty from Wind in the Willows was). Author is a friend.
  • Echopraxia, Peter Watts. SF about the imminent obsolescence of humanity.
  • The Dalkey Archive, Flann O’Brien. Irish absurdism. Not as good as The Third Policeman, despite giving De Selby a speaking part.
  • Going Postal, Terry Pratchett. Dipping my toes back into Pratchett’s world to mark his passing.
  • ☛ The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman. Weird Wild West done very very well.
  • In Viriconium, M. John Harrison. This might be my favourite of his so far: a weird, moody, grotesque piece. More than a hint of Gormenghast, but much more compact and focused. And shorter.
  • Maze, J. M. McDermott. Came highly recommended; did not quite succeed for me. I see the ambition, but the execution seems slightly off somehow. I wish I could pin down how, though: not being able to leaves me with the nagging feeling that maybe it’s not the book’s fault, maybe it’s me.
  • Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon. A joy as always (and as always, a bit of a struggle in the last third or so).
  • The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein. I’ve seen this one referenced as the kind of thing the Sad Puppies hate, and also as a clever fantasy/sf hybrid, with the genre balance shifting as the series progresses. I enjoyed it, but not enough to grab the rest of the series just yet.
  • Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees. A fairy story, of the Strange & Norrell flavour of fairies (indeed, I was probably pointed to it as an influence on Strange & Norrell). Maintains a surprising level of tension, and generally refuses to live up to all sorts of expectations. I keep wanting to use the word “odd” about this one.
  • From the Hugo voters pack:
    • Sex Criminals, Vol. 1: One Weird Trick, Fraction & Zdarsky. A comic; fun enough, but did not send me looking for more.
    • The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu. I can’t help wondering if this one would still have won the Hugo if it weren’t for the puppies piddling on everything. The SF setup seemed straight out of a bygone era.
    • The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison. Not much of this one stuck with me. I think I recall feeling my belief suspenders slipping at just how effectively the protagonist overcomes the prejudice against him.
    • The Dark Between the Stars, Kevin J. Anderson. Gave up on this one, simply awful.
  • ☛ Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr (who was actually Alice Sheldon). A short story collection: these are so good, and so awfully depressing.
  • The Girl in the Road, Monica Byrne. Lots of people were talking about it, so I read it. I felt stupid for not anticipating the various twists earlier.
  • Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian. The first time I read this series I devoured them compulsively, reading late into the night. Turns out these don’t work nearly as well for me warmed over. This probably means I’ll never finish the series.
  • The trilogy called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn (by Tad Williams), whose books (against all logic) are not called Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. YA fantasy, a bog-standard coming-of-age tale, with a twist that surprised and delighted me when I was 16 but is somewhat easier to see coming on a second reading at age 34.
  • To the Is-Land, Janet Frame. Autobiography of a famous New Zealand writer. She has an incredible eye for vivid, surprising detail. The following two volumes are in my bookshelf.
  • Charles Stross’s Laundry series is a funny beast: spy stuff meets Cthulhu mythos with a side-dose of computer-geek. The series started campy and fun (which is how I usually like my Cthulhu mythos), but it seems like somewhere along the line Stross started taking the implications seriously: the setting is getting darker with each book, and the characters are getting more rounded and realistic (with all the warts that implies).
  • Vellum: The Book of All Hours, Hal Duncan. Several kinds of complex formal structure combine to make this pure nerd-snipery for me. I re-read it before starting some structural analyses, then semi-re-re-read it by accident while doing the analyses.
  • Shipwrecked on the Top of the World, David Roberts. This was a lot of fun: a simple story of polar survival, but wrapped around in the author’s research project to verify it.
  • Straggletaggle, J. M. McDermott. Again McDermott didn’t quite manage to click for me. This one was recommended to me for taking steampunk to its logical, horrible, extreme. It does that, indeed.
  • The Tao of Pooh, Benjamin Hoff. Did not convince me: the philosophy it espouses is so clearly set up to be able to dismiss any potential challenge or disagreement without examining its merits. I did get a laugh from seeing the author’s musical prejudices wrapped up in Taoist jargon though.
  • Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy: Annihilation; Authority; Acceptance, Jeff VanderMeer. Best VanderMeer I’ve read so far. Previous work of his (City of Saints and Madmen and various short pieces) has reified its themes too clumsily for my taste (fungus! and, in Ambergris, giant squid!). While Area X still puts its themes explicitly into its setting, they are less easy to sum up (and thus dismiss) in a noun phrase.
  • ☛ The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt. Extraordinary.
  • The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, ed. Gardner Dozois. I think I bought this for the Ted Chiang (The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate) which is, indeed, wonderful.
  • Skylark of Valeron, E.E. “Doc” Smith. I re-read Doc Smith periodically, to remind myself not to be a snob. They’re terrible, but terribly fun: the trick is to enjoy them for what they are and not feel guilty for the enjoyment.
  • The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N. K. Jemisin. Another “lots of people talk about this, I should read it” pick, marked down at the American Book Centre in Amsterdam. I see why people talk about it: it tackles head-on a bunch of themes that should make an awful lot of fantasy writers rather uncomfortable. Suffers a bit from the standard problem of writing about gods: it’s hard to keep a balance between humanising them too much on the one hand, and drowning them in justified but ineffective superlatives on the other. There are a few moments near the end where I felt the age and power of the god-characters, but many more where I was told to feel them but didn’t.
  • The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1), Charles Stross. Dipping my toes back into another of Stross’s series, to see if I enjoy it more a second time around. Conclusion: nope, not for me.
  • S (Ship of Theseus), Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams. Magnificent concept, beautiful object, fails as fiction. This is a gorgeous thing: a hardcover book purportedly published in 1949, with handwritten notes in the margins telling a second story and various objects (postcards, maps, a cipher wheel) tucked between the pages. I think what failed for me is how transparently the handwritten notes exist for the story: in theory these are two people writing to each other, but they are too clearly Doug Dorst writing to the reader.
  • Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway. Light, fun. Uses the word “stricture” in an interesting way, and manages to make the noise of a passing train sexy.
  • Anathem, Neal Stephenson. Nerdery. Tricks the same bits of my mind that philosophy tricks, that are really supposed to focus on intellectual rigour. This is a super-stimulus problem, a bit like how we like sugar much much much more than is good for us now that we can get it whenever we want to. Anyway, the upshot is that I enjoyed this for its ideas, and managed to ignore the plotting and characterisation.
  • Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, Simon Sinek. Describes a perfect workplace, from the perspective of an employee. I don’t think it makes a compelling case for the benefits to management, but it’s inspiring nonetheless.
  • The Effective Executive, Peter F Drucker. There’s a lot of good advice in this book (don’t be put off by the title: “executive” as he uses it basically just means “person who makes decisions in their work”). I was massively distracted, though, by its dated language: the executive is always “he”, and often “a man”; I was honestly surprised by how uncomfortable this felt to me.
  • ☛ The Ancillary trilogy, by Ann Leckie. The third instalment was published in October, and I devoured it then re-read the first two immediately. This is space opera at its best: exciting plots on a grand scale, and at the same time some seriously interesting variations on the question of personal identity. (My favourite SF lives up to the “literature of ideas” notion.) I love the Presger Translator characters.
  • Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, Robert C “Uncle Bob” Martin. I got something from this, but it is very clearly located (I almost wrote “stuck”) in the object-oriented paradigm: if you’re not working there, some of the advice needs to be rotated through a few dimensions to make sense.
  • The Forever War, Joe Haldeman. I suppose this deserves its classic status, but I can’t say I was terribly thrilled. Perhaps its because its message seems at the same time blindingly obvious (it was written in response to the Vietnam war) and only marginally relevant to today’s Western world.
  • ☛ The Annals of the Parrigues, Emily Short. A guidebook to an imaginary place featuring substantial amounts of generated text; as you would expect from Emily Short there’s also a story woven in. After the guidebook she writes about the techniques she used for the generated text, which is fascinating.
  • ☛ The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Andrew Hunt & David Thomas. Now this is more like it! I wish I had read this one a few years back: in the meantime I’ve accumulated much of the same advice, but piecemeal and much more slowly. I recommend this one to any early-career programmer. It’s slightly dated in parts (the advice on version control apparently predates git) but basically solid.
  • Rationality: From AI to Zombies, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Gave up at 41%. He has interesting things to say, but recycling blog posts means he says each of them 17 times. When you start watching the progress bar and longing for 50%, it’s time to cut and run.
  • Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace. I’m a fan of Small Beer Press, who published this one. Increasingly these days I’m uncomfortable with fictional portrayals of abuse, when it seems to be used casually. (I’m not sure what’s changed in my sensibilities; perhaps having children has an effect.) The brutality of the protagonist’s situation as the novel opens triggered this discomfort, and I never quite shook it off.
  • How to Lie with Statistics, Darrell Huff. A quick and simple guide to scepticism about reported statistics. A bit dry, but it’s very short.
  • ☛ The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman. The publication date (before the PC revolution really took hold, and long before the iPhone) make for some amusing predictions (both hits and misses). The major themes are as relevant as they always were, though.