This is the third year running I’ve kept track of my reading. Earlier editions: 2016, 2015. Like last year, I used a little custom-built iOS app which is very low-friction, so I probably caught just about everything. If you can think of anything to do with this data, it’s on github. This year the data is less rich than last year, though, because LibraryThing’s REST API no longer returns responses when queried by title. That’s also why the entries below are not linked: I don’t have any automated way to get those URLs any more, and I’m far too lazy to do them all by hand. I added little manicles to any I think deserve special attention.

  • ☛ Starting the year I re-read Hannu Rajaniemi’s Quantum Thief trilogy. This is classic SF-as-literature-of-ideas, with the ideas in the transhumanist singularitarian corner of the genre, wrapped up in a technicolour space opera. Good rollicking fun; I also like it because he leaves a lot of the setting unexplained at first, so you get the pleasure of puzzling it out as you go.
    • The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi. (29/12-03/01)
    • The Fractal Prince, Hannu Rajaniemi. (03/01-07/01)
    • The Causal Angel, Hannu Rajaniemi. (12/01-17/01)
  • Invisible Planets: Collected Fiction, Hannu Rajaniemi. These show a lot of the same themes as the Quantum Thief trilogy, but they didn’t work as well for me; I think I missed the multiple clever ideas mixing and interfering, which the short format makes much less common. (08/01-11/01)
  • Snake Agent, Liz Williams. I think I read this one deliberately looking to take up a new series. It didn’t grab me. (17/01-22/01)
  • The Fortress at the End of Time, Joe M McDermott. Best McDermott I’ve read so far (or I should say, the McD which best connected with my taste: he’s one of those authors I suspect I underrate because he happens not to push my particular buttons). (23/01-24/01)
  • Slow River, Nicola Griffith. Since reading Hild I’ve become a committed Griffith fan, and started reading her back catalogue. This one is very ambitious, but I think she was overreaching herself at this point in her career. I do enjoy the way she defaults to using women for all the minor characters: it’s interesting to notice how unusual that is. (29/01-29/01)
  • Roger Zelazny. I read several recommendations in row, so I found something I could pick up cheap. These two, at least, seem quite dated to me.
    • Isle of the Dead, Roger Zelazny. (29/01-30/01)
    • Eye of Cat, Roger Zelazny. (30/01-31/01)
  • The Stars are Legion, Kameron Hurley. Pulpy. Quite high squick factor, lots of body fluids. (07/02-10/02)
  • Yoon Ha Lee.
    • ☛ Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee. Brain-wrenching space opera. Fabulous setting, dubious plot. (12/02-14/02)
    • Raven Strategem, Yoon Ha Lee. Decent sequel to Ninefox Gambit, but it suffers from the classic sequel effect: most of what makes Ninefox so fabulous is that it introduces us to this utterly bizarre setting, but that’s a trick you can only pull once. (14/06-17/06)
    • Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee. Collected short fiction. Lots of these use essentially the same trick as Ninefox did, even when they don’t share the setting. Of course it loses quite some of its effect through repetition. (22/03-31/03)
  • ☛ The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin. Fabulous setting, deep and important themes, slightly let down by the nitty-gritty of telling a story about people, but richly deserving of at least one of its two Hugo wins. Excellent review at Asking the Wrong Questions.
    • The Fifth Season, NK Jemisin. (14/02-17/02)
    • The Obelisk Gate, NK Jemisin. (17/02-25/02)
    • The Stone Sky, NK Jemisin. (19/08-24/08)
  • ☛ The Rise of Ransom City, Felix Gilman. Wonderful for its systematic puncturing of so many fantasy tropes, its Weird West setting, and its style. (26/02-11/03)
  • Transition, Iain Banks. Turns out I had already read this once, but it took me at least halfway through to realise. (12/03-20/03)
  • ☛ The Solitudes, John Crowley. Magnificent, but between the rich style and the fact that I have it on paper and thus can’t read it while putting the kids to sleep, it took me an incredibly long time to finish it. (I’m still working on the sequel.) (31/03-18/11)
  • ☛ The Summer Book, Tove Jansson. Beautiful, gentle, strange. Everything that is wonderful about the Moomins, for grownups. (05/04-17/04)
  • Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey. Kindle editions regularly run discounted to just a couple of euros. This one is a reminder that I should still apply some filtering. It’s not even particularly bad, life’s just too short, y’know? (06/04-15/04)
  • Speculative Fiction 2012, eds Justin Landon & Jared Shurin. I think I did end up reading several novels on the strength of reviews in here, so that counts as a win. (23/04-24/04)
  • Speculative Fiction 2013, eds Ana Grilo & Thea James. Ditto. (24/04-01/05)
  • Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman. This pretty clearly marks my parting of ways with Gaiman. I will try to get Sandman before Manu hits high school though. (02/05-04/05)
  • Tender: Stories, Sofia Samatar. These are good, but I enjoyed her longer work more. (05/05-16/05)
  • Surface Detail, Iain M Banks. Standard Banks Culture SF. (17/05-28/05)
  • ☛ Mechanique, Genevieve Valentine. Rich and sad; takes one idea and pushes it to its bitter end. (28/05-06/06)
  • ☛ At the Mouth of the River of Bees, Kij Johnson. Some hits and some misses in this collection. One definite hit is The Man Who Bridged the Mist, which reoccurs below. There are enough hits to make it worth checking out. (10/06-12/06)
  • First Person Peculiar, Mike Resnick. I remember very little of this one. (12/06-17/06)
  • The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and other stories, John Kessel. Also of this. (19/06-24/06)
  • Babel-17, Samuel R Delaney. Terribly misguided, but also terribly fun. I wish he was still writing SF. (25/06-06/07)
  • The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross. Latest in the Laundry series. Better than the previous, but still not up to the earlier series standard (which I think peaked with Fuller and Apocalypse). The Forecasting Operations Department make another appearance, and again are used as a get-out-of-authorial-jail-free card: this time they train a gigantic spotlight on a plot point that otherwise would be invisible (because it’s utterly arbitrary) but which the reader has to notice in order to set up tension for the next in the series. I will keep reading these “to find out what happens” but my expectations get lower with each installment. (11/07-14/07)
  • The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells. Very average fantasy. Slight aura of game tie-in, with the antagonist race’s tech-tree-like special abilities: I don’t think it is a game tie-in, but that’s the sort of tropes it’s working with. (17/07-29/07)
  • The Salt Roads, Nalo Hopkinson. The bits directly about slavery are (of course) incredibly painful to read; the magical stuff knitting it together is rather thin. (30/07-03/08)
  • A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, Adam Rutherford. One of those books you might drop tidbits from if you want to sound smart. (03/08-19/08)
  • River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey. The hippos are good honest silly fun; the progressive agenda is rather a lot too explicit even for me. (29/08-30/08)
  • Kabu Kabu, Nnedi Okorafor. These are clearly drawing on a cultural background I’m unfamiliar with, which makes them sometimes intriguing and sometimes just difficult. I enjoyed most the windseeker stories that roughly hang together in a single continuity. (30/08-06/09)
  • Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence. These are ridiculously readable and have a decently clever setting, but it’s a fair bit more chaotic than I like, with tropes like vampires, gargoyles, scorpion-people, etc that feel out of joint with the much more thoughtful worldbuilding around the Craft itself and its history and politics. Closest comparison from my regular reading would be Steven Brust’s Dragaera series: Craft suffers in contrast because while it clearly wants to be about something significant, in the end it doesn’t quite manage to make it stick.
    • Last First Snow, Max Gladstone. (07/09-11/09)
    • Two Serpents Rise, Max Gladstone. (12/09-17/09)
    • Three Parts Dead, Max Gladstone. (17/09-18/09)
    • Four Roads Cross, Max Gladstone. (18/09-23/09)
    • Full Fathom Five, Max Gladstone. (24/09-24/09)
    • The Ruin of Angels, Max Gladstone. (24/09-02/10)
  • Provenance, Ann Leckie. A solid “something different” after her Ancillary trilogy. It’s nice to get away from Breq’s moral and tactical superiority, but Ingray is a bit absurdly hopeless, especially in (unfair) contrast to Breq. As with the Ancillary trilogy, my flat-out favourite moments came from her playing with the hermeneutic circle: the Presger Translators in the Ancillary trilogy, and the Geck Ambassador in Provenance (“Diplomat does not mean nice. Diplomat means tell the aliens to leave us alone.”). (03/10-08/10)
  • Vallista, Steven Brust. A new Dragaera novel is always a cause for celebration! I wasn’t so taken with the “local plot” of this one, but it drops several rather broad hints about where Brust is going with the entire ridiculous 20-book master plan. (17/10-19/10)
  • ☛ Winter Tide, Ruthanna Emrys. I found this one so fascinating I wrote about it. It’s a bit difficult to give a review-style “score”, because I don’t think it’s an especially good novel (it’s not bad, it’s just not great, as far as I can judge), but the subcreation jiu-jitsu is genuinely inspired. (21/10-24/10)
  • The House of Shattered Wings, Aliette de Bodard. Overwrought. (05/11-12/11)
  • Nebula Awards Showcase 2013, Ed. Catherine Asaro. Standout from this collection is The Man Who Bridged the Mist by Kij Johnson. (13/11-22/11)
  • Central Station, Lavie Tidhar. Interesting for its placement just far enough from SF’s white-Western-technical-bloke history but still close enough to belong clearly to that tradition. It didn’t hit the balance I would have preferred between epistemic and ontological uncertainty, both for the reader and for the implied author. There’s a good chance that’s more to do with my preferences than with any defects in the novel itself though. (26/11-03/12)
  • Riddle-Master, Patricia A. McKillip. This trilogy started very strong, and has lots to recommend it right to the end, but it gets extremely emo around halfway through then holds that note right to the end: I would have much preferred that the angst be leavened with the same gentle humour at play in the first of the trilogy. (03/12-09/12)
  • Slow Bullets, Alastair Reynolds. Confirms a previous suspicion, that Alastair Reynolds is very definitely not for me. (09/12-10/12)
  • Beyond the Rift, Peter Watts. This collection ends with an essay in which Watts claims, hilariously, to be an optimist. Less intellectually challenging than the work of his I most admire (Blindsight and Echopraxia). (12/12-14/12)
  • In Calabria, Peter S Beagle. Sweet, but I must admit I feel somewhat uncomfortable reading a May-and-December romance written by a December. (16/12-16/12)
  • The very best of Kate Elliott, Kate Elliott. I have very mixed feelings about these stories. On the one hand, they show a depth of cultural awareness that makes me suspect Elliott is trained as an anthropologist or something similar, and this richness of cultural background is something I wish for in lots of my other reading. On the other hand, in these stories it’s so prominent that it sometimes seems like that’s her starting point, or her only point, and the stories themselves (taken as stories) are frequently somewhat trope-heavy and weak. I wonder if I’d enjoy her longer work more, with more space to work out “literary” as opposed to “anthropological” themes. (16/12-20/12)

Looking back over these, my main conclusion is that I’m a massive snob. I want writing that is culturally sensitive and embodies progressive values, with plenty of novelty, it should be a page-turner, and please also written with a poet’s sensitivity for the English language. Not much to ask for, surely?

In all seriousness: this list of unreasonable demands means that I probably should give up on random dips into the Amazon bargain bin, and start building a reading backlog of work that has accumulated a solid critical opinion that it’s worth paying attention to. It also makes me value more the books I do deeply appreciate; perhaps 2018 will be my year of rereading.