Other than the links on the right side of the page, you really don’t see much about my books around here any longer. I haven’t released anything new in six years or so, maybe longer, and most of the time I’m pretty convinced that that particular door is gonna stay closed. Part of the problem is that writing fiction, for me, has always been like pulling teeth– I can knock out any sort of nonfiction prose at length and quickly, but I would spend hours staring at a blank screen and not writing anything, and eventually the pain and the self-torture had to stop. COVID didn’t help, obviously, but it would have happened anyway, I think.
Part of the problem is Skylights. Skylights is near-future science fiction, which is always rough, no matter what, but I was stupid enough to attach certain events in Skylights to actual dates, which put the book on a timer for when bits would become Objectively Wrong, and several of those years have passed by now. In addition, the prologue of the book is explicitly tied to the main character’s recollection of the Challenger explosion. That’s not automatically a problem, not yet, but it made Gabriel the oldest character in the book, and he’s going to keep getting older until his inclusion no longer makes sense.
I have been tossing around the idea (for years now, for the record) of doing a second edition of Skylights that basically gets rid of all of the dates and adjusts the prologue so that it doesn’t automatically age my main character into his late forties or early fifties for a while now. I’ve not done it because 1) it’s kind of pointless, especially since I’ve blown up the sequel more than once already, and 2) I feel like if I’m going to bother revising Skylights, it ought to be in the context of relaunching my writing “career,” such as it is, and I’m not at all prepared to do that.
And then I hit a throwaway detail in Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger book, and bam, everything fell together. I’ve got a way for the prologue to work now, based on something that actually happened, and I can slide Gabe’s birth forward enough that by the time the book is out of date again I won’t have to worry about it. I even came up with a better reason for him to be on the trip in the first place; I was never entirely satisfied with Zub’s reasoning for bringing him on, and I think I’ve got a better idea now.
I’m not sure why I’m telling y’all this, other than another example of my habit of working through my thoughts by writing about them. I mean, I could just quietly update the text on Amazon and not worry about it; I might have to adjust the cover by a fraction of an inch somewhere or something like that, but once the writing part is done, it’s not a lot of additional work. And there are times where I miss being able to call myself an author. The problem is that authors have ideas, and I don’t have any. It’s not like figuring out how to move Skylights onto a floating timeline helped me solve the plot snarls and ridiculousnesses that multiple drafts of Sunlight kept falling into.
I should probably at least put a document together and write out some notes about how it was going to work, though, so that I can get it back later if I need it.
Watch: once this post goes live, I’ll get another email, and this whole thing will turn out to have been real, only now I’ve pissed her off.
Suddenly it occurs to me that the fact that there has been a delay in this person replying to me is actually evidence for it being real. Surely, surely I’m not actually being ghosted by a scammer, right? These people are nothing if not persistent.
At any rate: last week I got an email from someone purporting to be an Editorial Director at a publishing group that shall remain nameless, as will the actual person. That person showered several paragraphs of praise upon The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 and then asked me what my future plans were for the series and whether I currently had representation. Which, obviously, I don’t, seeing as how I haven’t written a single word of fiction since Covid hit.
The praise felt a lot like AI. Which, y’know, suspicious, especially when coming from someone who was purportedly an editor.
I did some research. The publishers were legit and the person was a real person. I allowed myself to get excited for a moment, then noticed that the email address was clearly not from any kind of official work email. A personal email address? Maybe, but it added additional tingles to the Spider-sense. Plus there was no actual promise of anything in the email, or was there actually an ask, so if this was a scam, they had multiple steps planned for it.
I went to LinkedIn. The editor was there, too. I dug up the work email and sent a quick message: a more polite version of hi, is this real?
I got an immediate response saying that the person had retired in December and that the email address was going to be shut down in January. It is May; clearly this did not happen. LinkedIn made no mention of being retired and the website of the company still refers to this person as if they are currently employed.
Also, this provided a reason for the personal email, right? Maybe they’re retired, but not retired-retired, if that makes any sense.
So I did two things, wanting to see where this was going, especially if I could get some posts out of it: I responded politely and with some interest to the original email address, but I also sent a message to the person’s LinkedIn, with a brief explanation of the situation and basically saying Hey, I don’t quite trust this, would you mind letting me know if it’s real?
And now it’s several days later, and I haven’t heard from either of them. The editor doesn’t appear to be especially active on LinkedIn, and their messaging system is opaque at best, especially concerning messages from people you aren’t already connected with, so that’s not terribly surprising, but I was expecting a pretty quick response from the original email– either you’re real, so you’re looking forward to hearing from me, or you’re not, in which case you’re still interested in … whatever it was you had in mind in the first place. I’m still not completely clear on the angle, to be honest.
It also occurred to me that whoever sent the email very well might be monitoring the blog, so maybe an explanation is the post from the day it happened saying I thought I was being scammed? Maybe they just dropped it at that point, realizing it was futile.
Either way, this didn’t end up being nearly as entertaining as I wanted it to be, dammit.
Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?
I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.
In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.
(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)
No, no, not a review of Ron Chernow’s book that happens to be called “Mark Twain.” I’m reviewing Mark Twain. And reading Book Mark Twain has caused me to lose a surprising amount of respect for Person Mark Twain. He gets three stars out of five.
Y’all, this dude was weird.
The person Twain is pictured with up there is Dorothy Quick. She is eleven years old in that picture. She and Twain were not related, and they literally met on an ocean voyage in 1907 and Twain, a man in his seventies, just decided to treat her like she was his best friend. They exchanged letters until he died, and he occasionally arranged for her parents to bring her for visits at his home. Multi-day visits.
And she wasn’t the only one. At two different points in his life Twain started a club for girls between ten and sixteen years old, and both times he was the only male member. He called the second group of girls his “angelfish.” They had membership pins. Chernow is quick to point out that there was never any kind of contemporary accusation that Twain’s relationships with these girls were sexual or predatory, but it becomes clear after a while that he recognizes how Goddamn weird the whole thing is and genuinely isn’t sure what to do about it. There’s lots of talk about substitute granddaughters– only one of Twain’s four children survived past her twenties, and his only grandchild was born after he died– but do you really need enough substitute grandchildren to call it a club? And do you stop talking to your substitute grandchildren after they get to be too old for you? Because that happened too. Once his angelfish got into their late teens he lost interest in them. This is not a joke.
Don’t even ask me about Lewis Carroll. Chernow talks about him in a throwaway sentence at one point (literally something like “at least he wasn’t drawing naked pictures of his preadolescent girlfriends, like Carroll was”) and oh my god I hate to talk about falling down a rabbit hole when literally discussing Lewis Carroll, but … yeah.
Twain was terrible at business, prone to falling for outrageous scams, deeply in debt for most of his adult life despite his royalties and his wife being ultra-rich, and held onto a grudge like Kate Winslet on a floating door. There was something vaguely Trumpian about him, where all his friends and business associates were brilliant, salt-of-the-earth, wonderful people until the moment they were no longer useful or Twain felt the need to blame them for something and then they were the worst poltroons and scofflaws in the history of poltroonery and scofflawism.
Like, I’ve read dude’s books. The fact that he was a sarcastic, irascible motherfucker is one of the things I like about him. But I feel like Chernow would have been a lot happier had he just had a chapter called “Look, this guy was a prick,” and gotten everything off of his chest.
There’s nothing genuinely damning in there. I’m never reading anything by any number of authors ever again because of their assorted bastardries and nothing Chernow reveals about Twain rises to that level. Even the angelfish thing is more of a massive ongoing WTF than something that was immoral or should have been illegal. But the last time I came out of a biography or autobiography feeling like I had less respect for its subject than I did going in was Ralph Abernathy’s And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, which I read nine years ago. The only other example I can think of is Jefferson Davis’ memoirs, and I didn’t exactly have warm feelings about that guy going into those books. It doesn’t happen all that often.
Chernow’s book is still a five-star read. Twain still has a ton of five-star books out there for you to read. Twain himself? Three. At best.
Seven years ago, in 2018, this man’s debut novel jumped off a shelf at me at Barnes and Noble. It looked satisfyingly chunky and as a science fiction book that was obviously going to be Part One of a substantial series, it was something that was immediately Aligned with My Interests.
I opened it and flipped through it and looked at this author picture. And thought Jeez, that guy looks like a prick. I bet he’s a conservative.
And then I put the book down.
And, standing there in Barnes and Noble, I googled this man to see if I could find evidence of him being a prick. And, indeed, I couldn’t find any, and the closest I came was him claiming he “doesn’t talk about politics” on Twitter, which is something that only conservatives say.
And after a few minutes I started feeling bad about it! This is not how I usually work. My rule for politics in my reading has always been Don’t Want None Won’t Be None, and how it is supposed to work is you can believe whatever you want so long as you don’t go out of your way to make that information available to me, but as soon as you do I will judge you accordingly. And, to be completely clear, I’m perfectly fine with people applying that same line of reasoning to me. You can choose to not read a book– which, most of the time, costs you money— for literally any reason you want. Refuse to read a book with a blue cover. Spend a year reading only books with blue covers. I don’t care. There are way more books out there than anyone has time to read in an entire lifetime, with more coming out literally every day, so you use whatever filter you want. I don’t have anything to say about it.
Feeling guilty and kind of stupid, I bought his book. And brought it home, and read it, and really didn’t like it all that much. And it sat on the shelf for five or six years while four sequels came out, and sometime in the last couple of years I looked at it again and thought oh, what the hell, and for whatever reason the second time around I liked it a lot more, and the sequels quickly followed, along with the sixth book, on release day. The series wasn’t world-changing or anything, but it was solid and interesting, and it was also clear that barring some sort of car accident or something it was going to be finished soon.
So how do I feel about the fact that a 2018 interview has come to light recently where not only does he piss and moan about how every YA book nowadays is about a girl who “wants to be an assassin for some reason” and there aren’t any books for boys, and about his affection for Jordan Peterson?
I am, to be clear, almost certainly going to buy the last book of his series when it comes out, which should be this year or early next year. This isn’t JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman territory, where the books are forever consigned to the pit. He’s just a conservative Catholic, and frankly the fact that the interview lurked in the depths for years before exploding onto TikTok in the last couple of weeks for whatever reason means that he actually does seem to be following my DWNWBN rule. But I likely won’t bother with whatever he does next, and next time I’m gonna trust my gut when I take a look at an author and get a vibe. Because, again, there’s lots of books out there, and I don’t need a good reason not to buy one.
This is kind of awkwardly stapling two posts together (and there will be an addendum at the end featuring even more stapling) but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how weirdly gendered reading seems to be getting. I have never believed that there was any such thing as “girls’ books” or “boys’ books”– I’ve told the story here a few times before about my aunt catching me with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when I was ten or so, a book I picked up and read because it was there and I was bored, and her being vocally horrified, and me being completely baffled about what the problem was. But just because I don’t believe there’s any such thing as gendered books doesn’t mean that society doesn’t think so, and it feels like in the last couple of years reading has taken this weird slide into being Something Men Don’t Do, which is entirely fucking unacceptable. This is particularly clear in retail establishments that sell books but aren’t bookstores– go look at the books in Target sometime, for example, and I’ve seen pictures of Wal-Mart’s book selection and it seems to be the same thing. Target clearly doesn’t think men read.
(Do more women read than men? Sure. But that’s not the same thing as “men don’t read.”)
I think this is probably mostly BookTok’s fault, which is dominated by women, and whatever, I’m not attached enough to my own gender to be bothered if something is addressed to “my book girlies” and happens to overlap with my interests.
But did I kinda want to fight when I saw this? A little:
Anyway, one way or another, I’m not going anywhere. If that makes me a book girlie, I’ve been called worse.
You may remember a couple of weeks ago when my family attempted to go to a specific local Italian restaurant and, in a comedy of errors, managed to end up at the wrong restaurant, eating a meal there because we are cowards, and resulting in me not getting carrot cake, which was the entire reason I wanted to eat at that place in the first place.
Well. My birthday was yesterday, but my birthday dinner was tonight:
I could only finish half of that gorgeous sonofabitch. I don’t even want to know what my blood sugar is right now. I’m getting my A1C checked later this week in advance of a regular doctor visit next week, and I may just show the doctor a picture of this cake when she jumps down my throat about how I’m so diabetic I’m legally already dead.
A confession: I am, for no clear reason, less enthusiastic about writing this post than I usually am. I’ve done this every year that this blog has been in operation, and it’s a post that I look forward to all year long. For most of this year, that has been true! And right now I’m looking at a mostly-blank screen and God, I’m so tired.
The really weird thing: the quality of these books, and my enthusiasm for them, is as high as it usually is and frankly the differential between book #1 and book #11 is lower than it has ever been; most of these books could have been top three, at least, in any other year, and more than ever this is a “don’t pay too much attention to the specific rankings” type of year. I went to 11 this year because I couldn’t leave either of those two books off of the list, and as always there’s an Honorable Mention at the end.
Also, as always, that asterisk up there means “new to me,” a lot of these books did come out in 2023 but not all of them and coming out this year was not a criteria for making the list.
11. Shadows of the Short Days, by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson. You’re going to see a little bit of a theme with several of these books, which is spectacular worldbuilding and really cool magic set in places and/or times that I typically don’t see people using for fantasy books. In this case, Shadows of the Short Days is set in Iceland– Reykjavik, specifically– but not remotely an Iceland that matches the real world’s. The book sets you up nicely with a six-page glossary of terms that you cannot pronounce with letters you’ve never seen before, and it is not going to be nice to you with the vocabulary, but the end result– a dark urban fantasy with sorcerers and fascist governments and what looks like a bog-standard “brilliant wizard gets kicked out of school because he’s reckless” subplot that upends itself when the scholarly authorities turn out to have been one hundred percent correct— is just an absolute joy to read. This has a sequel sitting on my TBR shelf right now but I think it’s one of those sequels set in the same world but with unrelated characters; one way or another Shadows stands on its own very well. There are 11 books on this list because it came down to this book and the next one and I couldn’t leave either of them off.
10. The Witch and the Tsar, by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore. Here’s another mini-theme: books that are sort of historical fiction, or at least feel that way, but aren’t. Also, books where I have to double- and triple-check the spelling of the author’s name. In this case, the titular witch is Baba Yaga, and the tsar is Ivan the Terrible. This can’t be historical fiction, because Baba Yaga rather inconveniently isn’t real, but it does its damnedest to feel like it; there’s a lot of Madeline Miller’s DNA in here, if that comparison helps any. At any rate, the book is from Baba Yaga’s perspective, but there’s a lot of real or at least real-feeling Russian history in here, and Russia during the sixteenth century is something I’m happy to read about to begin with, and once you throw in magic and the slow waning of Russian pagan gods in favor of Christianity (and, oh, those pagan gods are real, and they’re pissed) it ends up becoming a really interesting story. It does sort of fill the same niche as Shadows of the Short Days, but again, I just couldn’t convince myself it was okay to leave either of them off of the list.
9. The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez. Did I mention pagan gods? Well, okay, maybe not pagan, because this is a second-world fantasy and Christianity isn’t a thing, but this is probably the weirdest book on the list, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. I didn’t mean pagan, I meant edible. Sorry about that.
What?
No, seriously, there are multiple places in this book where gods are eaten, and the book veers between first person, third person, and second person narrative, and apparently it’s all a play? Until it’s not? And the story is at least outwardly about a pair of warriors escorting the body of a goddess to her final burial place while alternately dodging and defeating her sons, who are known as the Three Terrors, only I’m pretty sure it’s about a few dozen things the than that. It’s inventive as hell and I loved it, and the interesting thing about it is you twist it a little bit and I’m talking about my least favorite book of the year, because this book makes a lot of choices that most of the time will kill my interest in reading something, but man, this was amazing.
8. Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, by Stephen Puleo. There’s always a couple of nonfiction pieces on the list, and this is the first of two and a half (you’ll see when I get there) and I think perhaps the most broadly interesting of the three, if not specifically the most interesting to me. I only learned that Boston had had a molasses flood this year, and ordered this book within about ten minutes of making that discovery, because how can you not want to know more about that? It can be very tricky to write a micro-history like this of a very specific event, because if you just write about the event the book is ten pages long, and it’s really important to pick starting and ending points that make sense and stay interesting to the reader. This book does an exceptional job of that, and ends up being a history not only of the flood itself but of capitalism and manufacturing in New England, as well as being a half-decent courtroom drama as well. It also managed to add a brand new way that I really don’t want to die to what was already a long list; there are probably less pleasant ways to die than drowning in a literal tidal wave of molasses, but I could do without the bit where once the flood is over it hardens and everyone has to be literally chipped out of the sea of frozen sugar left behind. No thank you. Read the book, though.
7. Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, by Robert M. Sapolsky. I said when I first wrote about this book that I really wanted someone else I knew to read it so that I would. have someone to discuss it with, and thus far, unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet, although I convinced one friend to pick it up and bought it for my brother as a Christmas present, so hopefully it’ll happen soon enough.
At any rate: Sapolsky is a neuroscientist, or maybe a neurobiologist, or maybe both; I have to admit I’m not a hundred percent clear on the distinction between the two, and he’s convinced there is no such thing as free will. Entertainingly, he’s not happy about this conclusion, and his hangdog insistence that everyone is going to hate him for the arguments he’s making echo through every page of this book, which wouldn’t be half as much fun to read were it not for Sapolsky’s sense of humor. Now, I am no kind of neuro-anything, and have no especially relevant expertise to this book, so all I can say is that I read the first half without ever going “Wait, what about …” at any point and without spotting anything that felt like an obvious hole in his reasoning, and he’s exceptionally talented at making complex scientific concepts feel understandable. The second half of the book, about the societal implications of free will’s nonexistence, are not as airtight but that’s why I want to talk to somebody about the book. Please go read it and get back to me?
6. The Warden, by Daniel M. Ford. I always feel the need whenever I talk about Dan’s books to mention that I know him in the sort of parasocial “he let me into his Discord and knows my real name but we’ve never met” way that the Internet allows, but it’s also fair to point out that this is the sixth of his books that I’ve read and the first time one of them has shown up on my end-of-year list.
One way or another, though, The Warden is delightful, one of only two books on this list I’d apply that word to, and it is strongest in its worldbuilding and its characters. Aelis de Lenti, the titular Warden, is an absolute slam dunk of a character and one of the best arrogant assholes I’ve encountered in print in a long time. A Warden is a sort of combination of a cop, a governor, and an ombudsman, and Aelis graduates fresh from her training and gets more or less banished to a little village in the middle of nowhere with a crumbling tower to live in and a very persistent goat as a roommate. The book has a very old-school D&D feel to it without feeling like an adaptation of someone’s campaign, and there are at least two more in the series coming. I will also say that if you’re going to read one book from this list, I actually want you to pick this one up, as Tor kinda fumbled the rollout of the book and I feel like it needs more attention. Another reviewer called it “the most underrated book of the year,” and I really feel like it deserves a look.
5. My Government Means to Kill Me, by Rasheed Newson. Another book from the “sorta historical fiction, I guess,” genre, Government has the words “a novel” right there on the cover in big letters and I still had to look into the author to confirm that he wasn’t old enough to have lived through the AIDS epidemic in New York in the 1980s. I get into more details in my initial write-up for the book, but this really feels like a personal memoir, and the inclusion of a number of actual historical figures as characters does nothing at all to diminish that feeling. The main character, Trey, moves to New York from Indiana and more or less immerses himself in gay bathhouse culture for the first half of the book, doing what he can to get by from day to day and filling his nights with anonymous sex, and then the epidemic hits and he begins working in an unlicensed AIDS hospice, caring for men who have fallen victim to the disease. It’s a hard book to read on a lot of levels, and there are trigger warnings galore for it, but it feels important in a way that a lot of other books I read this year didn’t, and Newson is an author I’m going to be keeping a close eye on in the future. Honestly, this book is perhaps the best example of “don’t let the rankings matter too much,” as it and basically everything that comes afterward could easily have been #1 on a different day. I’d particularly recommend it if you’re in your mid- to late forties or older and remember at least some of what was going on during that time.
4. Siren Queen, by Nghi Vo. Third of the “Historical fiction, but …” genre, this is the second year in a row that a book by Nghi Vo has made the top 10, and in a lot of ways Siren Queen feels like it could be a loose sequel to The Chosen and the Beautiful. It’s set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, during the transition between silent films and “talkies,” and the main character is a Chinese-American actress named Luli Wei, who is willing to do nearly anything in order to break into acting, and this is a book where selling your soul for fame and fortune is literal. Much like The Chosen and the Beautiful, Siren Queen puts you into a world absolutely pregnant with magic without going to any real lengths to explain any of it– at one point in Wei’s youth a ticket-teller lets her and her sister in to a movie without paying for tickets in exchange for an inch of her hair, and the book gives you nothing to help you figure out why that might be important– and, again, much like TC&TB, the big selling point of this book is Vo’s incredibly atmospheric and immersive writing. She can do a million of these books and I’ll read all of them. I loved it.
This is where it got really, really hard to rank the books, by the way, and if you want to just call all three of them #1, I won’t bet mad about it.
3. Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang. Speaking of selling your soul to the devil, R.F. Kuang has now written five books across three very different genres, all five of which were absolutely fucking spectacular, and she is somehow still only eight years old. Yellowface might be my least favorite of her books and it’s the third-best book I read this year! How the fuck is that even possible? I don’t know. She’s clearly a deity of some sort, and as soon as I finish this post I’m going to start working on getting the cult started.
At any rate, after writing a three-book fantasy reimagining of the war between China and Japan and a work of dark academia set at Oxford, Kuang has now written a brutal work of satire about the publishing industry, set in the modern world, with not a trace of magic or fantasy to be found, because that’s fair and one author should definitely be talented enough to be magnificently fucking good at all three of those things. It’s about a white woman who literally steals a manuscript from a dead friend and publishes it under her own name to immense acclaim and success, and even as someone who doesn’t really have a dog in this particular fight I was wincing at some of the events in this book. It’s so, so good, and Kuang is so, so good, and the notion that she’s still in her 20s and has decades of work still to come actually gives me a little bit of hope for the future.
2. Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree. Okay, I’ll be honest: on a technical level and even on a lot of non technical levels, Legends & Lattes isn’t necessarily as good as a lot of the other books on this list, particularly after the amount of praise I just directed toward Yellowface. But for a large chunk of the year I was thinking of this as the best book I’ve read all year, or at the very least my favorite book of the year, and the reason for that is how I felt while I was reading this. Remember a thousand words ago when I said that The Warden was one of two books I’d apply the word “delightful” to on this list? This is the other one. This book is delightful. It delights. And if you’re reading that and thinking “Didn’t he say that about TJ Klune at some point?” you’re right, and yes, I mean it as that high level of praise.
Legends & Lattes is about an orc named Viv who puts down her sword and opens up a coffee shop. She hires a succubus as her barista and some sort of nonverbal rat-thing bakes scones and cinnamon rolls for her. And I loved it. The sequel is on my shelf right now and I haven’t read it yet because it’s set before Viv opened the shop and I’m not sure I’m nearly as interested in her as an adventurer. I want more of the coffee shop. I will read about Viv and Tandri making delicious coffee and being quietly and happily in love for a hundred years, and I will love every second of it. I mean, stuff happens, there’s some conflict, it gets resolved, blah blah blah. This book’s strength is in evoking emotion, and it does so magnificently, and I loved it.
1. To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, by Moniquill Blackgoose. I really wasn’t sure, when I wrote my initial review of this book, if it was going to hold up against the initial high I was on after I read it. I used the phrase “book-drunk” in the review, and I’ll stand by that; this book is intoxicating in the best way and it is the best book I read this year. It also fits into a few of the sub-themes I had going on this list; it feels like historical fiction, as it’s set in Canada during the … 1700s, I’ll say? Colonial era? Only the English are the Ainglish, and while it doesn’t get into a ton of detail that I hope is coming later in the series, because I love nothing more than I love thorough worldbuilding, but it feels like the real world, only the Norsemen took over the world instead of the English, and also there are dragons. And dragon school. The main character is Anequs, a young First Nations girl who more-or-less accidentally bonds herself to a dragon egg early in the book, and then gets swept off to an Ainglish dragon school to legitimize her connection to her dragon in the eyes of the government.
Did you read Fourth Wing and Iron Flame? I did, and I liked them both. In a lot of ways To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is a very similar book to both of those, and if you read and liked them you absolutely need to read this book, as it’s better in nearly every imaginable way, from the characters (I compared Anequs to Rey Skywalker, and now that I’m thinking about it she has a lot of Aelis in her as well) to the nature of the school to the actual writing itself. Oh, and there’s chemistry. No, not between the main characters– actual chemistry, only magic-tinged, and at the end of the book the author manages to connect magic and chemistry and dancing in a way that is absolutely inventive as hell and when does the sequel come out again because I want it right now.
This was a great year for reading, and To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is the best book I read this year. Go buy it.
HONORABLE MENTION, in NO PARTICULAR ORDER: Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell, Hell Followed With Them by Andrew Joseph White, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, The Daughters of Izdihar by Hadeer Elsbai, In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, Into the Light by Mark Oshiro, the entire The Faithful and the Fallen series by John Gwynne, Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Dead Take The A Train by Cassandra Khaw and Richard Kadrey, and Black River Orchard by Chuck Wendig.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT AWARD: Hospital, by Han Song.
I am running out of days in which to write pithy retrospectives or overly detailed nerd epics about blog stats, and I’m starting to think that I’m going to spend all of New Year’s Eve writing and generate a dozen of them. I just put together my top 11 books of the year (I couldn’t fit it into 10, but 15 felt like pushing it this year) and I’ll probably write that tomorrow, but we’ll see how energetic I’m feeling.
But let’s talk about what I read this year anyway. I read more this year than any year since 2015, I think, which I believe was the year where I read 200 books just to prove I could, and I’m probably not done– I started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Blood of the Mantis today, and I can easily imagine a world where I read both that and the fourth book in his Shadows of the Apt series before the calendar year rolls over. So 140 books this year and it might end up being 141. Goodreads tells me that I’m at 52,188 pages for the year, with an average book being 372 pages long– and that’s in a year where I read all 25 volumes of Invincible, at about 160 pages each. I was about to type a sentence about how I wasn’t going to do the math to figure out what a difference the graphic novels made, but then I went and did it anyway. Without those, it’s 419 pages per book.
Which, uh, can you tell I focused on fantasy/sci-fi series fiction this year? Because holy shit. I am trying my damnedest to clear my TBR right now, and I’m seriously thinking about making a rule that I can’t buy anything other than sequels to series I’ve started until the damn shelf is either clear for the first time in several years or really close to it. I’ve got a few books on preorder that I’m not about to cancel but if I don’t make any discretionary purchases in 2024 until I’ve got it cleared … hell, that’s still probably three months, easy. Sigh.
I read 48 books this year by authors who were new to me, and read more than one book by fifteen different authors. The big winner there was Robert Kirkman, who wrote the Invincible series (25 books), but beyond him there was Adrian Tchaikovsky (10, possibly 11), John Gwynne (4), Neal Shusterman (3), Matthew Ward (3), Josiah Bancroft, Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, Cassandra Khaw, TJ Klune, Fonda Lee, Seanan McGuire, Suyi Davies Okungbowa, Christopher Ruocchio, Nghi Vo, and Rebecca Yarros, all with 2.
And my TBR has even more books from, like, half of those authors. Whee!
The total number of authors represented was 92, of which at least 37– 40%– are women or nonbinary and at least 27– 29%– were people of color. The 40% isn’t bad, although I’d like it to be higher, but the 29% is. At least 40 (43%) were white males. (Why “at least”? I can’t find a picture of every author, and I’m not going to spend a million years digging so there are a couple of assumptions in there. There are a couple of trans men in the mix as well, I think.) I’m not going to cross-reference that with the number of books because of the number of series I read; Tchaikovsky and Kirkman alone are going to skew the hell out of that and a clear majority of the books I read were by white men. I’m not going to make an explicit goal of it but I’d like to see the numbers higher next year for people who aren’t straight white men in general.
