What I read in 2020

[dagibbs]

A few years back I set myself the goal of averaging a book a week read throughout the year, or 52 books over the year. I exceeded this for the last several years, but unfortunately fell well short this year. I blame Covid-times. One of the issues is that two of my usual reading times are on flights, especially trans-oceanic flights and evenings in hotel rooms -- both situations that have been drastically cut back this year. And, yes, I should have had more time to sit at home and read, but I found myself less inclined towards reading than normal -- it felt difficult. I think if more of my to-read pile had been light/easy reads, then I might have been more able to get through things, but even that isn't entirely clear -- and much of my buy-to-read has been towards somewhat more challenging reading, if nothing else, because I've been aiming for authors writing from a different socio-economic perspective than me.

This years numbers:

Total books read: 35 (2019: 69)
(S?WM): 4.5 (one co-author; also assumes that Chuck Tingle is not straight) (2019: 6)

Some favourites of the year: Gideon the Ninth, War Girls, Son of a Trickster, The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, Mirage, Queen of the Conquered, Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse


Tremontaine: The Complete Season One - Various authors. Meh+
Al-Kabar - Lee French. Well-intentioned, but decidely lacking in sophistication in story or writing. (Female author)
All Systems Red - Martha Wells. First Murderbot diaries story. Fine, but I'm not as taken with this as many others seem to be.
The Coconut Swindle - Matt Abraham. (2nd in series, but didn't hurt). Ok. Noir detective super-hero. Not ironic enough on some of the sexist noir tropes.
The Quantum Thief - Hannu Rajanieme (Finnish, apparently). Interesting and pretty good. (Buy more in e-book and cheap.)

The Falling Woman - Pat Murphy. Very good. Interesting in how the genre of the novel changes what is happening in the story.
Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir. Very enjoyable, buy the rest of the trilogy.
Contingency Plans for the Apocalypse - S. B. Divya. Short stories, published in India. All were good. Characters quite varied in gender, race, orientation.
The Cloud Roads - Martha Wells. Raksura book 1 -- good. Pick up rest of trilogy (ebook prefered).
Silenced - Nicole Givens Kurtz. (Cybil Lewis book 1.) An attempt at black, female, hard-boiled detective. Not a bad story, but SO needs an editor. (Maybe self-published, or micro-publisher?)
10

Velocity Weapon - Megan E. O'Keefe. Good, does some interesting things.
The Red Threads of Fortune - Jy Yang. Good, though not quite as good as The Black Tides of Heaven. Still worth buying more, though.
Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories - Vandana Singh. Some good stories, no bad stories. Some from a very different (to what I'm used to) perspective. Indian background/culture. Also story arc.
Kabu-Kabu - Nnedi Okorafor. This was read overlapping with the above (Singh), and was another collection of stories from a very different place. Mixed to good.
This is How You Lose the Time War -- Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone. Hm. Well-done, and I enjoyed it, yet also... not quite my thing.

A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine. Enjoyable political space opera, Aztec-inspired for a change of pace. Complete, though room for sequels. Would buy more.
Trail of Lightning - Rebecca Roanhorse. Enjoyable post-apocalyptic fantasy, Navajo-inspired. First of a trilogy - look for rest.
And Then There Were (N-1) - Sarah Pinsker. (Short story? Novella? Dunno. Web-published, uncannymagazine.) Fun multiple-worlds murder mystery.
The Beautiful Ones - Silvia Morena Garcia. Mostly a (faux-)historical romance, with some bits of magic. I think well-done for what it is, but not really my thing.
Finder - Suzanne Palmer. Felt like a classic SF story where the protagonist rambles along from adventure to hijinks, protected by plot immunity. But, with better female characters. Meh+
20

War Girls - Tochi Onyebuchi. Very good -- based on the Nigerian-Biafran/Nigerian civil war. The character and story is good, another not-a-pretty-war story, and characters die. The science/technology doesn't neccessarily hold-together, but is more what works for the story.
Pounded in the Butt by My Reluctance to Buy a Humble Bundle Featuring Stories with Gay Characters As Though That Has Some Kind of Bearing on My Own Sexuality or the Quality of the Product then Eventually Realizing It's Pretty Good and I'm Fine
- Chuck Tingle. Short, very meta, has one butt-pounding that is exactly what is on the label.
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday - Saad Z. Hoosain. Short, but really fun.
Son of a Trickster - Eden Robinson. Starts out not my thing (I like F&SF -- I don't tend to like unreliable narrator where it might be magic
or it just might be hallucinations/drugs/insanity, and that is never resolved to actual F&SF content), but develops well. Works as a standalone, but apparently first of trilogy.
Prime Meridian - Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Short, well-written, but not really my thing.
25

Mirage - Sonaiya Daud. Very good, first of a series? Pick up more.
Queen of the Conquered - Kacen Callender. Good, trilogy? Pick up rest. Somewhat brutal (realistic, I expect) depiction of blacks in slavery.
The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger - Stephen King. Meh. Strongly recommended by a friend and his wife -- but just meh.
The Affair of the Mysterious Letter - Alexis Hall. Initially fun gender-queer Sherlock Holmes pastiche, but it went on a bit too long.
Escaping Exodus - Nicky Drayden. Not my favourite by her, but not bad.

Hard Landing - Algis Budrys. Ok, a touch dated.
New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color - Nisi Shawl (ed.). Sometimes not to my taste, occasionally unsettling, but generally good to better. Worth reading.
Hive Mind1: Telepath - Janet Edwards. Good, clever-funny at times. Buy more.
Travel Light - Naomi Mitchison. Not a book of our time, but it has aged very well. A touching YA/child's tale.
Albatross - R. A. MacAvoy and Nancy L. Palmer. Reasonably good.
30

Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria - Carlos Hernandez. A short-story collection, and generally good. Very Cuban-American, at times felt like a window into that culture.
Magical Women - Sukanya Venkatraghavan (ed.). An anthology of short stories by women from India. Varying quality, but worth reading. I also did/do not have enough Hindu theology to catch all the references that the local audience would have had. (It was published by Hachette, India.)
Artificial Condition (Murderbot #2) - Martha Wells. Fine. Apparently this series really speaks to some -- not me. It is fine.
Gods of Jade and Shadow - Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Good. Mayan-inspired fantasy.
Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire. Not bad, but I didn't like it as much as the first Wayward Children book. Style change, maybe?