You can now view all the books I read this year on my Bookshop page.
This week’s reading haul.
📚 Read: Harrow the Ninth by Tamyn Muir.
I think this book broke my brain. It’s everything I typically don’t like, and I’m still not positive I’m sure what I read, and yet I devoured it. Rather than my confusion leading to frustration, I found it propulsive. I wanted every layer of unreliable narration on top of half-overhead statements by characters on top of non-linearity shellacked onto me as I was reshaped by reading this the way Harrowhawk can reshape her own bone.
What the fuck was that?
Please get Alecto the Ninth into my hands immediately.
📚 Read: The Worst of All Possible Worlds by Alex White
📚 Read: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
📚 Very excited to have received Incredible Doom.
📚 Read: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
📚Read: Recursion by Blake Crouch
📚Just started reading Recursion by Blake Crouch last night. Hell of an opening chapter.
📚Read: Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The nature of hate is mysterious. It can gnaw at the heart for an eon, then depart when one expected it to remain as immobile as a mountain. But even mountains erode.
📚Read: The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
The will to be polite, to maintain civility and normalcy, is fearfully strong. I wonder sometimes how much evil is permitted to run unchecked simply because it would be rude to interrupt it.
📚Read: The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thomspon
📚 Read: Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett
📚 Read: The Mortal Word by Genevieve Cogman
📚 Read: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
📚Read: State Tectonics by Malka Older
📚Read: A Choir of Lies by Alexandra Rowland. Might be the best sequel I’ve ever read.
📚Read: A Memory Called Empire by Arkardy Martine — I really enjoyed this one, disappointed it’ll be another year before the sequel is released.
📚 Read: The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz.
I am positive this will be one of my favorite books I read in 2020.
📚Read: The Cruel Stars by John Birmingham.
📚Read: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. At the start of this book I thought, “What is going on and what is everyone talking about?” By the end of it, I was confident it would be one of my favorites of the year.
Semiosis was one of my favorite books from last year, so I’m not surprised I really enjoyed Interference. I think I’ve got a thing for first contact books and non-human narrators, considering how much I loved Children of Time and Children of Ruin.
Even though I read more books and pages than ever before this year, my habit wasn’t exactly consistent. I basically flatlined to end the year. Let’s hope for a similar quantity next year, but more evenly distributed. Reading is a habit that I want to nurture, not a binge activity.
Just finished “To Be Taught, if Fortunate” and my god is Becky Chambers a treasure.📚
A Big Ship at the End of the Universe was delightfully fun SF and F mixup and I immediately bought the sequel. 📚
Time travel stories have been getting better and better lately it seems. Permafrost was a good one, and it marks 📚 16 for the year.
All three books in the masterful Last Policeman Trilogy for just $5.97 is a steal. 📚
Spinning Silver was brilliant. At least as good as Uprooted. Wow. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 📚
A lot of people in my life are trying to diversify who they read. I know I’m doing poorly on reading people of color, but I felt subconsciously like I read quite a few books by women. So I decided to check the last three years of books I’ve read.
I exported my data from Goodreads as a CSV 1, hand coded the authors, and found, to my surprise, I was now reading mostly women.
I find it pretty challenging to be intentional about what I am reading. It is pretty easy for me to get out of the habit of reading if I pause for a few days– it almost always stretches to weeks if I stop reading for just three or four nights in a row. This almost always happens between books when I become paralyzed by choice and my “mood”. I am going to try and keep more authors of color “handy” though so that I can be more likely to unintentional change my balance there like I have with gender in the past couple of years.
- Annoyingly, I noticed that four of the books I read in the last three years did not export with a “Date Read” attribute even though it’s clearly set in the Goodreads interface. I mention that as a “buyer beware” if you want to do similar analysis on your own reading. I added those four back by hand. [return]
The more I think about it, the more I like the title Record of a Spaceborn Few.
I’m not sure any writer has just come onto the scene like Kool-Aid man blasting through a wall and knocked me over like Becky Chambers has. 📚
Currently reading: The Last Mortal Bond by Brian Staveley 📚
Part of me wants to walk to BookPeople right now. Then the other part of me remembers I can go to Powell’s next week. 🤔📚
I don’t want to wait until July for Record of a Spaceborn Few. 📚
I have only read two of the Nebula nominees for best novel, which means I can add 5 more books to my “want to read” shelf on Goodreads! 📚
Altered Carbon was good, but probably about 100-150 pages too long. 📚
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️, book 7 of the year 💪🏻
Missed my GoodReads challenge 2 years in a row. So I started this year by breaking one of my rules and doing a couple of rereads— The Subtle Knife & The Amber Spyglass. Hadn’t read either since they were published. Now I’m on my sixth book this year. 💪🏻📚