Some Books I Loved

It's been a good year!  I read a ton this year, a lot of time on trains and in cafes.  Starting this blog has been a ton of fun, and I'm happy to move my annual tradition of listing some books I loved over to here So here we are.  Not a ranking, not even a comprehensive list of my favorite books.  I like reading, I like writing, I like writing about reading, and I love being able to share.  Just what it says at the top:  Some books I loved this year * * * "I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself" by Marisa Crane, 2023 This is a heavy one, this was a tough one.  This was a very good one.  This one felt too close to home, at times On a scifi level, this is about an all-too-imaginable future in which the technology exists to mark criminals with a second, or third or fourth, shadow.  These "Shadesters" are allowed to live their normal lives, but everyone they meet knows instantly that they are a convicted criminal.  And it does that scifi thing of ...

**In which our main character walks away from the power and the Taoist magic and the drama in order to live a simple life as a farmer.  Hilarity ensues** A quick glossary of terms, I'll wave down below when the actual review starts, if you already know them.  Basically, if the sentence, "the main character isekais into a xianxia cultivation world, but then decides to turn it into an iyashikei instead," makes sense to you, skip below.  If it doesn't, I mean, yeah, that's fair.  Thus, a quick glossary: Isekai (異世界) refers to subgenre in which the main character is transported to another world.  The term is Japanese, and it's a very popular genre in manga and anime (to the point that these days, a lot of people complain about oversaturation).  That said, it's not particularly rare in Western literature as well, although the term "portal fantasy" is more common--"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", "The Wizard of Oz", "The...

**This is why I read scifi.  A cutting social commentary, but wrapped in a fun tech setting with thriller-paced plotting** One of the core tenets of science fiction is to take some idea, technological or societal or whatever, and logically extend it.  The term "speculative fiction" has gained more traction lately, and I've always liked it--one, as a larger umbrella term to encompass scifi, fantasy, supernatural horror, etc.--but also because this concept of speculation is what I love to read A man once postulated, "imagine, for the sake of speculation, if it were possible to travel faster than light using one specific resource that is only found on one specific planet.  The guild that controlled that resource would become fantastically powerful.  What sort of things might they do to protect that power?" A woman once pondered, "imagine a society where the vast majority of people were genderless for most of the month, only adopting a defined gender for a week...

**Calling it the greatest cyberpunk writing ever is an understatement to the point of insult.  Calling it one of the best science fiction short story collections is still an understatement.  Simply put, a masterclass in short fiction writing for any  genre**  In the Introduction to the 2003 re-release of this collection, William Gibson wrote about the scifi he read when he was a child: Science fiction tends to behave like a species of history pointing in the opposite direction, up the timeline rather than back.  But you can't draw imaginary future histories without a map of the past that your readers will accept as their own. The less you think your map of the past imaginary (or contingent), the more conventionally you tend to stride forward into your imaginary future.  Many of the authors I read as a boy possessed remarkably solid maps of the past.  Carved, it seemed, from doughty oak.  Confident men, they knew exactly where we were coming from, ...