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, ...

 **A post-apocalypse in which the new world looks sadly all too much like the old one** This book is a modern classic, gritty and dark with William Gibson and Blade Runner vibes, a near-future vision of a world where human history changes but humanity can't defeat its demons.  Loved it from the vibe to the pointed messages that have only gotten more and more relevant in the six years since its publication Set in a floating city in the North Atlantic purpose-built following climate disaster, this story juggles multiple viewpoints across the city.  Each narrator lives in a different area of the city and belongs to a different social class (a child of privilege, a queer sex worker, a blue-collar washed-up fighter . . .) and the book tells the story of the city as a whole.  The obvious implication is that the city itself, this new society itself, is in fact the main character:  " This city contains so many cities, he thought . So many lives I’ll never get to live, s...

 **A book about that very particular part of a very particular type of person's life, the time in which the characters in the books you read are more important and more tangible than people in the 'real' world with whom you're forced to spend your time** I didn't know it was possible to fall in love with a book literally from the author's foreword "thanks and notes" section, and yet here we are: People tell you to write what you know, but I’ve found that writing what you know is much harder than making it up. It’s easier to research a historical period than your own life, and it’s much easier to deal with things that have a little less emotional weight and where you have a little more detachment. It’s terrible advice! So this is why you’ll find there’s no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red buses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies ar...

 **Asian-American, feminist, queer, but more than anything else just a badass dark fantasy about what you can do when they refuse to let you into your club.  You can make them let you in** If you're friends with me, you probably already know how much I love this author.  I will read any- and everything that Nghi Vo writes, and you can count on more of her books showing up on this blog in the future.  Every world she creates, she imbues with magic--not the hard-and-fast system of magic that a Sanderson writes, but a magic that permeates the entire story.  Her books rarely have people throwing fireballs or summoning eldritch horrors.  Instead, the magic of her stories flickers on the edge of sight and disappears when you turn your head; it's a hum, constant and quiet, that you quickly forget is there until you put the book down and realize its absence in this boring, mundane world.  She never loredumps the system of magic, because for her, magic isn't so...