Just like for 2015, in 2016 I kept a record of the books I read. (At least, most of them: I started the list in late March. It’s pretty comprehensive from then on, though, because I threw together an iOS app which let me enter the details on my phone: this is frictionless enough that I think I missed very few.) The raw data is on github, in the unlikely event anyone else can think of anything to do with it. The list, with notes, is 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).

Some random stats:

  • 62 books started, 56 finished (some I didn’t finish are not included below);
  • 22 books authored by women, 36 by men (plus 3 multi-author collections);

  • 20 books I think the Sad/Rabid Puppies would object to (incidentally, these are skewed towards the female authors).

  • An A–Z of the Fantastic City, Hal Duncan. This was a chapbook from Small Beer Press. Somehow I didn’t read it when it first arrived: now I rediscovered it, and (unsurprisingly for Hal Duncan) it’s rather more than the title would suggest. (18/03-19/03)
  • The Mandolin: a history, Graham McDonald. I backed this one as a Kickstarter project. The text is a rather odd mix of kinds of information (histories of companies and brand-names, technical titbits about construction techniques, information about contemporary luthiers, and a short run-through of various related European instruments), but the main attraction for me is the huge number of photographs. I fell in love with plenty of instruments, including the Regal Octophone – luckily none of them are easy to come by. (19/03-06/12)
  • ☛ The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson. Excellent fantasy. You can read the first chapter at Tor.com. (12/04-15/04)
  • Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry, ed. Peter Forbes. This is about the fifth time I’ve tried reading this from the beginning to the end. Didn’t manage this time either. (15/04-)
  • Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente . Reread. This is still as beautiful and unsettling as it was first time around. (17/04-24/05)
  • Tim Powers. It’s no secret that Tim Powers has a schtick. That’s fine: I like his schtick. (I read somewhere, but can no longer find, a pithy description of his schtick as ‘secret history’: in his novels he takes historical events and imagines new, uncanny motivations for them. I dearly wish he would take on the rivalry between Richard Owen and Gideon Mantell: they feuded over early dinosaur fossils, and after Mantell’s death Owen had a portion of his spine pickled and displayed at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. It practically writes itself.)
    • The Bible Repairman and other stories. Short works: fewer historical figures, more carefully-realised settings. (30/04-01/05)
    • The Stress of Her Regard. Living stones. Hey, there are more of those in this list… (01/05-03/05)
    • ☛ Declare. A re-read prompted by the ‘weird spy stuff’ kick of the first two Fractured Europe books (see below). (03/09-08/09)
  • Robert Silverberg: a series of collections of his short work, chronologically arranged. If I were a devoted Silverberg fan this might have been more satisfying, especially given the anecdotes introducing each story.
    • To Be Continued. As it’s the first in the series, it collects stories from the very beginning of his career: perhaps not surprisingly, nothing really excited me. (04/05-08/05)
    • Trips. A later collection in the same series, but still not particularly excited: in fact, I didn’t finish this one. (22/05-)
  • ☛ The Winged Histories, Sofia Samatar. Magnificent. (08/05-22/05)
  • The Liminal series, Ayiza Jama-Everett. Good, solid entertainment, and everything the Puppies get so worked-up about, but they have slightly more YA vibe than most of my reading.
  • Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand. Part of a Humble Bundle offering books from Small Beer Press. As a long-term Small Beer fan I already owned about half of the books on offer, but this one was new to me. I got seriously wrong-footed by not knowing what genre to expect: I kept expecting something non-naturalistic to appear, and it kept not appearing. (29/05-29/05)
  • Kalpa Imperial, Angélica Gorodischer. An abortive re-read. This is lovely, but it strikes a very particular tone, and if you’re not in the mood for that tone, forget it. (29/05-)
  • A Darker Shade of Magic, Victoria Schwab. I don’t remember much about this. (15/06-15/06)
  • ☛ Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee. This was fun (although rather more grimdark than I like). The death toll (measured, quite literally, in millions) and prevalence of torture makes a bizarre contrast with the playful inventiveness of the setting: I enjoyed the setting a lot more than the grimdarkery. (16/06-21/06)
  • Tyrannia and Other Renditions, Alan DeNiro. These are terribly depressing, and I think meant to be so. (21/06-30/07)
  • The Nightmare Stacks, Charles Stross. I like a lot of Stross’s work, and I’ve enjoyed this series (The Laundry Files) thus far, but this one was a disappointment. He introduces the Forecasting Operations Department: precognitives whose main purpose seems to be to fig-leaf the absurd contortions required to arrange one of the weirder set-pieces in the book (involving plate armour and a kettenkrad). The problem with a get-out-of-plot-hole-free card like this is that you may feel tempted to overuse it, and I think he does. (I admit it’s pretty funny to see Alex boggling at the computational complexity implications of a Forecasting Ops Dept that can actually do their job, but even that rather draws attention to the essential problem.) There’s also something rubbing me the wrong way which might have to do with how far into the series this installment comes. It feels like by now Stross is recycling and remixing elements from the series lore, while earlier books added to it: sure the elves are new, but essentially all their terrifying armament is technology we’ve seen before, in very much recognisable form. It felt a bit stale to me, compared to elements like the vampires of The Rhesus Chart or the tongue-eating parasites of The Apocalypse Codex (both of which also, arguably, remixed existing lore elements rather than introducing new ones). (23/06-27/06)
  • LCRW 34, eds Kelly Link & Gavin Grant. (27/07-28/07)
  • North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Balingrud. These are some of the nastiest people you will meet in a work of fiction. (30/07-02/08)
  • N. K. Jemisin
    • ☛ The Fifth Season. Spectacular, a well-deserved Hugo winner. (02/08-05/08)
    • The Obelisk Gate. Much less impressive than The Fifth Season, mainly because of classic second-book syndrome: the first of the trilogy got to reveal all the juicy secrets about the setting, while much of what this one is doing is setting up the plotlines that will land in the final volume. (21/08-24/08)
  • Fire Logic, Laurie J. Marks. Another Small Beer addition. I have at least one other from this series, but it’s never really grabbed me. (07/08-08/08)
  • Peter Watts (thematic grouping)
    • ☛ Blindsight, Peter Watts. Excellent (if very pessimistic) SF about the immanent obsolescence of humanity. After the novel come the notes, which show some of the real research he used for inspiration: some fascinating stuff in there too. Free online. (08/08-09/08)
    • Permanence, Karl Schroeder. In the notes to Blindsight Watts writes: ‘Parts of Blindsight can be thought of as a rejoinder to arguments presented in Karl’s novel Permanence; I disagree with his reasoning at almost every step, and am still trying to figure out how we arrived at the same general endpoint.’ But while Blindsight lodged in my memory both as fiction and as speculation, Permanence didn’t really stick as either. (10/08-12/08)
    • Echopraxia, Peter Watts. Less philosophically interesting than Blindsight, but just as fun (and with just as bleak a view of humanity’s inevitable obsolescence). (15/11-19/11)
  • The Fractured Europe sequence, Dave Hutchinson
    • ☛ Europe in Autumn. Fun spy stuff in a near-future Europe, and just as you start getting comfortable with that, it gets weird. (26/08-28/08)
    • Europe at Midnight. Still fun. (28/08-29/08)
    • Europe in Winter. I enjoyed this less than the first two; I also note that it introduces yet another layer of behind-the-scenes manipulation, setting up the continuation of the series. (20/11-22/11)
  • The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts. This confirms an earlier impression, that I’m not the right audience for what Roberts wants to do. Both his reference-heavy approach in general, and the philosophising in this particular novel, just read to me as shallow. (29/08-02/09)
  • Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge. I have to admit I first picked this up because her partner wrote Hild, one of my stand-out reads of last year. Lots of my reading features characters that are exceptional in some particular field: a particularly talented wizard, a super-spy, and the like. This one is unusual, for me, in that the field in question is management. Yes, organising-people-into-productive-collectives type management. Even odder: this is not the only protagonist in my year’s reading with an MBA super-skill. (08/09-09/09)
  • The Moment Under the Moment, Russell Hoban. I love some of Hoban’s work (Riddley Walker in particular, and also How Tom Beat Captain Najork and his Hired Sportsmen from my childhood), but this collection amplifies some of his quirks that rub me up the wrong way. (11/09-16/10)
  • ☛ Underworld, Don DeLillo. Extraordinary, but almost too rich: it took me two months to finish. I particularly enjoyed the dialogue, full of unfinished sentences and non sequiturs. (18/09-26/11)
  • The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson. Angsty. Also very enjoyable, if you can stand the angst. This is the second read of 2016 to feature a super-skilled protagonist with a decidedly non-standard super-skill: this one, clearly genre-marked for fantasy with swords and horses (and colonialism: it’s smart, self-aware fantasy, which might explain some of the angst) features a super-accountant. (19/09-21/09)
  • The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins. Ugh. That’s the last time I follow Amazon’s people-who-read-also-read recommendations. (In this case it came from Baru Cormorant: I imagine the linking factor is grimdark.) This reminds me of a fabulous essay about Ender’s Game (a book which I devoured and re-read repeatedly in high school), which points out how Card manipulates the setting to provoke a particular moral judgement. In Mount Char we see God (not ‘a god’ as someone like Gaiman might write, but the bearded patriarch you imagine if you got your Bible study at second hand) abusing children, and we’re told in the denouement that despite all His power, the abuse was the only solution He could find to the problem of … arranging a successor when He took retirement. As in the case of Ender’s Game, once you consciously appreciate how the author must have chosen to make this true in their subcreation, you start squinting sideways at said author and edging as subtly and quietly as you possibly can towards the door. (29/09-30/09)
  • Ammonite, Nicola Griffith. Excellent first novel, showing a lot of the awareness of and appreciation for different ways of being human that made Hild such a joy. (01/10-03/10)
  • ☛ Bone Swans: Stories, C. S. E. Cooney. Very good stories, in the weird/eerie corner. (04/10-08/10)
  • ☛ Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Janssen. Manu is finally old enough to enjoy these (and indeed, to demand repeat readings of the chapter with the Mameluke). A delight as always. (19/10-29/10)
  • Sorceror to the Crown, Zen Cho. A generally light and pleasant read. (21/10-22/10)
  • The Fires Beneath the Sea, Lydia Millet. Another Small Beer random acquisition; more YA than my usual fare. (22/10-23/10)
  • Travel Light, Naomi Mitchison. Seems like a light fairytale, but underneath the surface it has teeth. Beautiful. (26/10-27/10)
  • ☛ What miscellaneous abnormality is that? A field guide with numerous illustrations, Shaun Tan. This booklet comes with the DVD of The Lost Thing, and is an absolute delight. (26/10-27/10)
  • Seed to Harvest, Octavia E. Butler. What an incredibly bleak view of humanity’s future prospects! One interesting feature of this series is that after starting with a McGuffin and building a coherent world around it, she introduces a second (completely unrelated) McGuffin in the second book, then lets them fight it out in the far future. (27/10-29/10)
  • ☛ The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster. Started reading this with Manu, but stopped pretty quickly: he needs a couple more years yet. (29/10-)
  • Sarah Caudwell
    • Thus was Adonis Murdered. Cosy mystery. The donnish tone had me laughing out loud over the first couple of pages (which was unfortunate, as I was reading in bed and almost woke my wife). (31/10-02/11)
    • The Shortest Way to Hades. More of the same. Enough so that I decided not to go looking for yet more of the same after this one. (02/11-03/11)
  • Water Logic, Laurie J Marks. (05/11-07/11)
  • Dune, Frank Herbert. Comfort re-read, of one of the classics from my early discovery of science fiction. (07/11-11/11)
  • Kraken: An Anatomy, China Miéville. This re-read confirms my original impression: messy and rushed, with lots of interesting elements that don’t really cohere. (Annoyingly, I again got fooled by the misplaced line of dialogue: this time because when I encountered it I remembered there was something with that line, and guessed it was probably plot-significant.) (11/11-13/11)
  • Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin’s voice is a delight, even if I’m extremely unlikely to put her advice to use myself. (22/11-25/11)
  • An Alphabet of Embers, ed. Rose Lemberg. I picked this one up without much investigation, after noting (a) that it was very cheap and (b) that several writers I’ve enjoyed had contributed. What I hadn’t realised is how short the individual pieces are: it turns out this means they don’t, in general, do much for me. (28/11-)
  • ☛ A Green and Ancient Light, Frederic S Durbin. A stand-out read for the year, discovered via a tweet (thanks @BBolander). I am amazed to see that it was published this year: it has a humble sincerity that I associate with a bygone era (in this respect it reminds me a lot of The Wind in the Willows). I’m looking forward to when Manu is old enough to share it with him. (02/12-04/12)
  • Alas Vegas, James Wallis. I have a mildly deviant hobby: I like to read the rulebooks for role-playing games, and then not play them. (It’s probably harmless.) The mechanics of this one are quite interesting: there is a quite tightly-controlled storyline, coupled with flashback scenes that are largely player-driven and very loosely controlled. Reading the playbook, though, of course the tightly-controlled storyline takes the front seat, and I didn’t find it nearly as interesting as the author would like me to. (04/12-08/12)
  • Natural History, Justina Robson. I saw an approving tweet by Charles Stross about the world-building in this SF novel, and was most surprised to discover that I already owned it. It failed to make much of an impression on second reading either, so I suspect I’ll be just as surprised when I rediscover it in another two or three years. (11/12-13/12)
  • The Lean Startup, Eric Ries. Speed-read over a weekend in Amsterdam (as it belonged to my hosts there). There’s a lot to learn here, but one element raises my hackles: as a programmer I value craft very highly, but I suspect it has very little relevance in the setting he’s describing. (He says exactly the opposite at one point, but I think the argument there is rather weak.) Besides this, however, particularly the observations about metrics (useful versus vanity) struck a chord with me. (17/12-20/12)
  • Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler. Wow, she pulls absolutely no punches doesn’t she? Bleak, bleak, bleak vision of the collapse of American society. It was extremely startling to find ‘Make America Great Again’ as the slogan of a religious demagogue in the excerpt from the sequel (written twenty years or so ago). (20/12-21/12)
  • LCRW #35, eds Gavin Grant & Kelly Link. (24/12-25/12)
  • Midnight Riot, Ben Aaronovitch. A fun enough read, but it’s so clearly establishing a franchise that I tried not to get too involved. Also I spotted the puppetry angle long before the protagonist did. (26/12-28/12)
  • ☛ The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi. Rereading these because they are really very clever indeed. (29/12-03/01)