Yep, it’s that time of year again. 103 books finished (of which 20 were graphic novels); dates indicate when I finished reading; one asterisk means a re-read, two asterisks a second re-read, three asterisks a many-times-re-reading; a zero indicates a book left unfinished.

Graphic novels

Maggie the Mechanic	Jaime Hernandez	19 Jan	*
The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S.	Jaime Hernandez	20 Jan	*
Perla la Loca	Jaime Hernandez	23 Jan	*
Promethea Vol. 1	Moore et al.	26 Jan	**
Promethea Vol. 2	Moore et al.	26 Jan	**
Promethea Vol. 3	Moore et al.	26 Jan	**
Promethea Vol. 4	Moore et al.	27 Jan	**
Promethea Vol. 5	Moore et al.	27 Jan	**
Global Frequency	Warren Ellis et al.	8 May	*
Planetary Vol. 1	Warren Ellis et al.	9 May	*
Planetary Vol. 2	Warren Ellis et al.	9 May	*
The Authority Vol. 1	Warren Ellis et al.	16 May	*
Doktor Sleepless Vol. 1	Warren Ellis et al.	16 May	*
Doom Patrol Vol. 1	Grant Morrison et al	15 Jul
Doom Patrol Vol. 2	Grant Morrison et al	13 Aug
Monstress Vol. 7	Liu & Takeda	09 Oct
Ducks	Kate Beaton	14 Oct
Saga Vol. 10	Vaughn & Staples	18 Oct
The Wicked & the Divine Vol. 2	Gillen & McKelvie	25 Nov
The Wicked & the Divine Vol. 3	Gillen & McKelvie	? Dec

Fair few re-reads in here: a big comfort-read binge on Moore’s Promethea, a truly magical sequence (both figuratively and literally) which I love without shame, which helped me get through January’s ‘rona aftermath; all of the Jaime Hernandez Love & Rockets collections that I have, because there’s something about the way they mix the mundane and the bohemian and the speculative that I’m interested in trying to steal (and because they’re just great stories); a bunch of the pre- and post-Transmet Ellis stuff, because I’ve become quite fascinated with the thematic continuity through his career, and am trying to pick it apart to see how it works.

Both Monstress No.7 and Saga No.10 were long anticipated (and worth the wait). WicDiv No.2 and No.3 are pretty OK, though there’s something about them which is so very of-their-moment that makes them a strange reading experience, a sense of them coming from a different time whose strangeness is precisely due to its temporal closeness… a story that could only work in the late 2010s, and probably wouldn’t work in the early 2020s. The Doom Patrol collections were also pretty OK, though I dare say they might have meant more to me had I read them at their time of original publication; then again, maybe not, as I really wasn’t into comics/graphic novels at the time.

And Beaton’s Ducks is just, wow. For this dabbler in graphic novels, at least, a real revelation regarding what can be done with the medium, not least with regard to a juxtaposition of style and content.

Short Fiction

Collected Stories	Paul Bowles	15 Jan	*
Men Without Women	Hemingway	15 Jun
Jagganath	Karin Tidbeck	30 Jun
Warm Worlds and Otherwise	James Tiptree Jr	18 Aug
Tangleroot Palace	Marjorie Liu	10 Sep
Selected Stories	Fritz Leiber	25 Sep
Illuminations	Alan Moore	1 Nov
Tales from Earthsea	Ursula Le Guin	27 Dec	**
22 Ideas About The Future	Greenaway & Oram (eds.)	28 Nov

I wouldn’t say it’s always nice to return to Paul Bowles, because he was not a “nice” writer, but he was certainly a brilliant one; a real master of creepy and unsettling affect (and something of a misanthrope). The Earthsea pendant stories were part of a sustained Le Guin comfort-read binge through December (see below).

The Hemingway was one of those “I really should have read them” jobs; while I understand the importance of his style in the history of C20th short fiction, and understand it more viscerally now, I really don’t feel I want to read him again. Far from being the triumphal paeans to machismo they’re often described as, I found the men in these stories to be tragic archetypes, though I can imagine that they may not have been consciously written as such; the distance of history (and the influence of critique) may be shaping my reading a lot in this case.

Tidbeck’s Jagganath was a book-group read, and a very interesting collection to read with folk who don’t have much experience with genre styles and reading protocols. It is probably very reductive to say that Tidbeck’s fiction is “very Swedish”, but for this recent immigrant her stuff really has provided a fascinating lens on the place, albeit an ambivalent inside-outsider’s perspective. Her afterword about the experience of basically self-translating into English was also quite revelatory; the specificities and nuances of translation are much on my mind still, for reasons I presume to be obvious.

The Tiptree I wrote about before. The Liu was good—better than I expected, actually, given it was more on the fantasy/horror side of the genre landscape. She’s a very deft and understated writer in prose, which I wasn’t expecting after the full-bore maximalism of Monstress. The Leiber was hit and miss, though no more than one might expect from a writer of his era. Likewise the Moore, but for different reasons: there’s a sense of him sometimes reinventing generic wheels, but the results are nonetheless always quite original. The much-discussed Thunderman mosaic novel that forms about 1/3 of the book is definitely the highlight, a gloriously acid yet loving look at comics history.

The 22 Ideas collection was… really not good. At all. I am writing about this at greater length for another venue, so I will keep my powder dry, so to speak.

Long Fiction

Beowulf	Maria Dahvana Headley (tr.)	14 Mar
Notes from the Burning Age	Claire North	4 Jan
Piranesi	Susanna Clarke	16 Jan
Far From the Light of Heaven	Tade Thompson	25 Jan
Byzantium Endures	Michael Moorcock	2 Feb
Defekt	Nino Cipri	15 Feb
The Sparrow	Mary Doria Russell	13 Mar
A Man Lies Dreaming	Lavie Tidhar	28 Mar
Harlem Shuffle	Colson Whitehead	3 Apr
Riddley Walker	Russell Hoban	13 Apr	?
BUG	Giacomo Sartori	19 Apr
The Red Men	Matthew de Abaitua	25 May
Virtual Light	William Gibson	28 May	***
Idoru	William Gibson	29 May	***
All Tomorrow’s Parties	William Gibson	30 May	***
Pattern Recognition	William Gibson	2 Jun	***
Spook Country	William Gibson	6 Jun	***
Zero History	William Gibson	7 Jun	***
Neuromancer	William Gibson	8 Jun	***
Count Zero	William Gibson	11 Jun	***
Mona Lisa Overdrive	William Gibson	13 Jun
The Grass is Singing	Doris Lessing	17 Jun
Mythago Wood	Robert Holdstock	23 Jun
Lavondyss	Robert Holdstock	28 Jun
Too Like the Lightning	Ada Palmer	5 Jul
Sea of Tranquillity	Emily St John Mandel	8 Jul
Seven Surrenders	Ada Palmer	10 Jul
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms	N K Jemisin	15 Jul
The Will To Battle	Ada Palmer	4 Aug
Dreamland	Rosa Rankin-Gee	7 Aug
Emma Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	13 Aug	0
The Good Neighbours	Nina Allan	24 Aug
Perhaps The Stars	Ada Palmer	05 Sep
Generation Nemesis	Sean McMullan	12 Sep
The Stars My Destination	Alfred Bester	02 Oct
Synners	Pat Cadigan	11 Oct
Of One Blood	Pauline Hopkins	17 Oct
Cyber Mage	Saad Z Hossein	22 Oct
This Is Memorial Device	David Keenan	24 Oct
Growing Up Weightless	John M Ford	5 Nov
Revelation Space	Alastair Reynolds	20 Nov	*
The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again	M John Harrison	25 Nov	*
Cold Water	Dave Hutchinson	4 Dec
The Western Lands	William Burroughs	19 Dec
A Wizard of Earthsea	Ursula Le Guin	21 Dec	***
The Tombs of Atuan	Ursula Le Guin	22 Dec	***
The Farthest Shore	Ursula Le Guin	22 Dec	***
Tehanu	Ursula Le Guin	23 Dec	**
The Other Wind	Ursula Le Guin	24 Dec	**
Rizzio	Denise Mina	20 Mar
The Employees	Olga Ravn	25 Apr
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday	Saad Z Hossain	28 Nov
Corum	Michael Moorcock	21 Jun
Illusions	Richard Bach	29 Jul	***

Counting Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf as long fiction here, mostly because i don’t have a separate poetry category, and, well, because it is indeed long. I quite liked it, too, though I understand that it has irked many purists of many different stripes.

North’s … Burning Age is brilliant, the best solarpunk novel there is, despite (or perhaps precisely because) it doesn’t think of itself as a solarpunk novel. Clarke’s Piranesi was a neat little puzzle-box, and easily readable as a concretisation of Clarke’s health issues, though it is much more than that. The Thompson was a disappointment after having heard his work spoken of so highly by so many, but this (rather rote and hold-the-reader’s-hand) space-opera-mystery may not have been the best place for me to start. The first of Moorcock’s notorious Colonel Piat books is quite an experience after having mostly only read his pulp fantasy stuff (i.e. the Corum sequence, also listed here); a classic case of unreliable narrator, very maximalist, and (as I understand it) as much a biography of the C20th as of its protagonist. Also mashes a lot of political buttons which, at the present moment, would likely lead to major controversy… though they were banned in the US not long after publication, so maybe things haven’t changed so much as we sometimes think?

Cipri’s Defekt totally crystallised my conception of squeecore (and/or torwave) sf; very cute and wholesome, and really not my bag at all. How did I sleep on Doria Russell’s The Sparrow for so long? A real out-of-the-park first-contact story, thoughtful and affecting. Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming may have been the peak of Lavie’s pulp provocations: an alt-history Hitler as a London gumshoe, excessive and grotesque and at times laugh-out-loud funny, while also being a kind of genre approach to Holocaust literature. Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle was a great tale told with brilliant verve, and I enjoyed it as both a reader and a writer.

I thought I’d read Riddley Walker before, and maybe I did, but the thing read so fresh and revelatory that I don’t think I could have done… unless that’s just part of the magic. Sartori’s BUG is kind of torwave-adjacent, I suppose, but also quite singular in its style and concerns, and a much better read than Defekt. I remember all the fuss—positive and negative—around de Abaitua’s The Red Men when it came out, and while time seems to have diluted its stylistic and thematic innovation somewhat (i.e. I think his stuff may have been more impactful on sf in recent years than is generally appreciated), the story itself is still a real banger, fast-moving, acerbic, critical.

Swept through the early Gibson oeuvre again, because why not? Still a brilliant body of work. The Lessing is… um, very of its time and place? But an astonishing debut by a justifiably feted writer. The two Mythago books by Holdstock are also astonishing, but particularly Lavondyss—though you probably need to have read Mythago Wood to get the full value out of it.

What to say of Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota sequence? I feel I have a lot to say… though saying it right is going to require my re-reading them, which is a daunting prospect. It’s a strange thing, really, because while I wouldn’t say I liked this series, I nonetheless found it incredibly compelling (even as it was often infuriating at the same time).

St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquillity did not, for me, live up to the hype at all, though I might give Station Eleven a swing nonetheless. The Jemisin is fairly formulaic by comparison to the Broken Earth books, but you can see those grandmaster skills developing in this earlier work. Rankin Gee’s Dreamland is bleak and bitter and brilliant, and I will probably never read it again because I’m not sure my heart could handle it. Nina Allan’s Good Neighbours does that thing Nina Allan does so well, but in a package that easily slips through the walls of the generic ghetto in either direction.

Emma Bovary was another “I should have read this” job, and you can take away my literati card right now, because I gave up after maybe 100 pages. I can totally see how Flaubert’s narrative style was radical and unique, and I learned a lot from it, but—with apologies for sounding like the most bloggy of book critics—I just could not muster myself to give a shit about any of the characters at all, and the fun of the narrative voice could only carry me so far. Selah.

I was invited to blurb Sean McMullan’s Generation Nemesis (thanks, Cheryl!), and you can read my blurb on the Wizard’s Tower Press website.

Bester’s The Stars My Destination is another book that I was sure I’d read before, but which felt completely fresh nonetheless; of its time, certainly, but also timeless. Likewise Cadigan’s Synners, which is astonishingly good; if I ever end up teaching sf, the opening chapter of this book will be a primary text. The Hopkins is being reviewed elsewhere (and my review is long overdue, in fact), so dry powder here too. Hossein’s Cyber Mage and The Gurkha… were exactly as fun as I knew they would be, which is why I read them. Keenan’s … Memorial Device is strange and familiar and compelling—a genuine stay-up-all-night-to-finish-it novel—and suggests new directions for writing, both fiction and non. John Ford’s Growing Up Weightless explains exactly why his early death was so lamented: “the best Heinlein juvenile ever written”, as I think someone blurbed it, which is to say that it takes the form of the Heinlein juvenile and then levels up so hard on the content that it redefines the category entirely. Amazing writing, deft and rich and layered.

Al Reynolds’ Revelation Space was a fun reread, twenty or so years after the first; a real ripper of a debut. (I really must dig into his (hefty) backlist again, I have most of them already.) Mike Harrison’s Sunken Land should need no justification or praise, but (as with Climbers) I think I could read this book once a year and never tire of it. Hutch’s Cold Water is a welcome return to his Fractured Europe—which reads anew to me as someone who now dwells alongside the Baltic—and I should like to go through that sequence again as well. Burroughs’s Western Lands is late-style Burroughs, which of course has great continuity with early-style Burroughs; it’s also, in a very tragic (and strangely affecting) way, a book-length explanation of why its author can’t and won’t write another book. Denise Mina’s Rizzio is a kind of modern-voice retelling of a crucial moment in Scottish history, by someone who I believe is a very respected crime writer; this was recommended and lent to me by a writer friend of L____’s. Olga Ravn’s The Employees very much deserves to be talked about as much as (or more than) it is, though I felt less impressed by the execution of the concept than by the concept itself, perhaps? Interesting to see how plastic it is in the face of critique, though: I’ve seen a dozen different takes on it, none of them quite the same. (Ravn is also a practising artist in Denmark, so i think I might try to go see some of her stuff in the new year.)

Closed the year out with a big old Le Guin binge, returning to the undeniable magic of Earthsea in a time of need. Re-read Bach’s Illusions in the middle of summer for similar reasons; yes, I understand all the reasons that it and its author (and the notional self-help genre of which it is exemplary) are problematic, but you know what? That book helped me through a very shítty part of my twenties, and sometimes certain lessons need to be refreshed later in life. No regrets.

Non-fiction

Timefulness	Marcia Bjornerud	2 Jan
Reverse Colonization: science fiction, imperial fantasy and alt-victimhood	David M Higgins	2 Mar
Speculative Epistemologies	John Rieder	2 Apr
London Peculiar and Other Nonfiction	Michael Moorcock	27 May
Literature for a Changing Planet	Martin Puchner	24 Jan
Starve Better	Nick Mamatas	25 Jul	*
The Dawn of Everything	Graeber & Wengrow	30 Jul
In Emergency, Break Glass	Nate Anderson	19 Oct
The Universe of Things	Steven Shaviro	11 Nov
Humankind	Timothy Morton	14 Nov	0
The Five	Hallie Rubenhold	24 Nov
Beyond Good And Evil	Nietzsche	14 Dec	*
How to Philosophize With a Hammer and Sickle	Jonas Čeika	20 Dec
Gilles Deleuze [critical philosophical biography]	Frida Beckman	29 Dec
Conversations on Writing [interviews]	Ursula Le Guin / David Naimon	16 Dec
Scandinavians [part-memoir]	Robert Ferguson	9 Feb
Tenement Kid [autobiog]	Bobbie Gillespie	16 Dec
The Storyteller [autobiog]	Dave Grohl	25 Dec
The Kindness of Women [autobiog / novel hybrid]	J G Ballard	29 Sep
Devil in a Coma [memoir / testament]	Mark Lanegan	29 Jan

Timefulness is basically a geologist’s introduction to deep time, and thus to small-a anthropocenic issues, and I liked it a lot. Reverse Colonization provides a really fruitful way of thinking about the appropriation of sfnal narratives of colonisation and victimhood by the (alt-)right. Speculative Epistemologies (which I have reviewed in greater detail for the SFRA, though hell knows when that will be published) is largely a close reading of six outsider-episteme sf/f texts from the New Wave onward, with a thin wrapper of Rieder’s “mass-cultural genre” theory which he has expounded at greater length elsewhere. I am long overdue on finishing and filing a review of Literature for a Changing Planet, so suffice it to say for now that it’s a very light primer on ecocrit from a notable USian humanities scholar, as well as an argument for the relevance of the academic humanities made so weakly, and from such a position of unacknowledged privilege, that it rather makes one despair for the fate of the academic humanities.

Moorcock’s London Peculiar was diverting enough while I was reading it, but pretty much all I can remember is that he seems to have written a lot of obituaries, so either I wasn’t paying attention (very possible) or it wasn’t that interesting overall. Starve Better is perhaps the only how-to-write-better manual I’ve ever re-read, because Nick Mamatas does not sugar-coat anything, and has a knack of simplifying and demonstrating issues of technique in a way that works for me.

Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn is a leviathan of a book (albeit one opposed to Leviathan, har har har), and will probably require as well as merit a number of re-reads before I feel I can really speak to what it’s trying to say… but as I noted to someone a while ago, I would have happily read a book of half this size that dwelt only on the critique of the Hobbes/Rousseau dichotomy which is the topic of its opening section.

The Anderson turned out to be a rather weak reading of Nietzsche as self-help, which I felt didn’t really tell me much I hadn’t already parsed for myself; Čeika’s Hammer and Sickle, which attempts a reconciliation of Marx and Nietzsche, is a much more interesting and useful book. Ol’ Friedrich’s own Beyond Good and Evil is a much easier read in the Cambridge UP translation than the one I had before, but it’s still a challenge to wade through compared to the later books. Shaviro’s Universe of Things is pitched as a critique of the speculative realists, which it is, but it’s also a vehicle for Shaviro’s own reading of Whitehead, which would have made an interesting book in its own right (though would presumably have been harder to get published); more Shaviro (and maybe more Whitehead) are definitely indicated. Beckman’s short (and very Deleuzean) life of Deleuze was surprisingly accessible, and has really opened up her subject’s oeuvre to me in a way that companions to and readings of his work have failed to do so far.

As for Morton’s Humankind, I think I said to someone mid-read that “it feels like he’s right in the wrong way”, though it may just be me that’s right in the wrong way (or, less likely, wrong in the right way); one thing I can say for sure is that this book was almost unreadable in its incoherence, and while I really wanted to follow the arguments, I gave up a third of the way in because it was just all over the shop, and was making me quite irate. (I realise that me calling out a published philosopher of great repute for breathless and incoherent argumentation is like the obscure pot faxing the famous kettle, but hey, there it is. The phenomenon of “too big to edit” is definitely a thing—late Iain M Banks being a prime example, if a non-philosophical one—but this may simply have been a case of not knowing a suitable editorial Herakles to assign to this particular textual stable.)

Rubenhold’s The Five is an account of as much as is known and recorded of the lives of the five women heretofore only ever referred to as the victims of Jack the Ripper. Very informative, if a little flatly written in places, and Rubenhold’s anger at the dismissal of these women as “mere prostitutes” sometimes threatens to reverse her into an implicit moralising position on prostitution, though I think this is more a matter of writerly style (and its limitations, particularly in a book aimed at a broad and presumably theory-averse public) rather than a matter of her actually holding such a position. Overall, though, very good—particularly for anyone with an interest in the living conditions of the poor late-Victorian and early-Edwardian Britain (and, surprisingly, Sweden).

Ferguson’s Scandinavians is the closest thing I’ve yet found to an accessible potted history of the Nordic countries in English, but it’s also a sort of memoir of Ferguson’s acclimatisation to the region (to which he first moved in the 1960s), so it’s very partial in both senses of that term. Ferguson is a long-term resident of Norway, and as such his view of Sweden is coloured by the Norwegian view of Sweden; Sweden sees itself as the sensible, sober and mature Nordic nation, but the others tend to see it as the stuck-up and buttoned-up older brother. This is not without good reason, either—and of course there’s no such thing as an impartial history. Nonetheless, I’d like to read something that was a bit more overviewish and chronological, if only to gain a frame on which to hang my own slow efforts to understand my new home.

The interviews with Le Guin by Naimon were literally her last, though you wouldn’t know it unless he told you so in the introduction, as he does. In truth, there’s not much here in substantial terms that can’t be found in her previously published non-fiction, but even so, I don’t regret acquiring and reading this book, which is a handsome little volume.

Bobby Gillespie’s biography is very much of the rock biography genre, though with a great sense of voice, and some great anecdotes not only from the early days of acid house in the late Eighties, but also a glam-to-punk childhood and adolescence; if it is typical to read a rock biography and wonder how the narrator survived their heroic intake of substances and other debauch, then at least here you realise that after surviving a daredevil childhood in 1970s Glasgow, Gillespie’s body and mind alike probably took the chemicals in their stride.

Dave Grohl’s biography, by contrast, makes it obvious that having a good relationship with one’s mother is not only rare among rock stars, but perhaps the key to surviving that industry’s worst traps and temptations. The whole “nicest guy in rock” label seems merited, but it does mean that once you get past the Nirvana years, it’s mostly a succession of meetings with and befriendings of famous musicians and other notables, and sincere paeans to family life—which, to be clear, is nice to read in one sense, but rather lacks the spice and dirt of, say, Gillespie’s story. (That said, Dave still clearly likes a beer.) The thing gains a kind of tragic air from its having been written a few years ago, which means that the passionate declarations of brother-from-another-mother that Grohl makes to Taylor Hawkins make you feel a pain that the Grohl who filed the book could not have expected.

Lanegan’s Devil in a Coma was less a memoir than a bunch of memoiristic stuff written through the early stages of the pandemic; in combination with his more fulsome memoir Sing Backwards and Weep, it makes you realise it’s some sort of miracle he lasted as long as he did, perhaps powered only by a stubborn and ornery self-loathing turned outward into a sense of having something to prove to himself and everyone else. The yin to Grohl’s yang, one might very well say.

Last but not least, Ballard’s The Kindness of Women, a kindness that would seem on the basis of this very novelised autobiography to have consisted mostly in having sex with Ballard or mothering him, or indeed combining the two. (A writer of Ballard’s caliber must presumably have been aware of the extent to which the sex he describes here paints a very distinct psychological profile of him, but then again, perhaps not; we can be very blind to our own tells, I suppose.)

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Well, there we go then. My plan is not do this again next year; I will keep the list, for sure, but while there are advantages to quantifying aspects of one’s life (such as knowing that one spent more than 14,000SEK on books this year), such acts start to make the quantities seem like goals or targets. I don’t want this to be about how many books I’ve read; that’s a pretty shallow way to approach a life with books, even as it’s a way of knowing with confidence that you’re devoting a certain amount of your life to that end

Instead, it is my intention to write up short bits on what I read as i finish reading it, and to publish those here as I go along… but then again, that was the plan this year, too, and it was quickly derailed by disease and chaos and stress and all that good stuff. But hey, you gotta have goals, right? Just don’t call ’em resolutions.

Happy new year; see you on the other side.