Reading in 2022
Jan. 2nd, 2023 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8Books I read this year!
Continuing on my "silver refuses to pay a monthly subscription to continue access to Excel (even though she loves Excel)" journey, I have kept a log of what I read this year in my paper journal. I'm really bad about updating it though, so I know there are books missing, and can't remember...oh well. This only counts books I read cover to cover and for the first time.
I have way more 10/10 books in the beginning of the year than the end. I read a lot more nonfiction this year! I didn't do any reading challenges, I picked up a library summer reading one, but didn't end up doing it. Here are the highlights!
I read a bunch of non-fiction, like What Is a Bird (ed Tony Williams), a Natural History of the Sonoran Desert (published Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum) near the first half of the year. Both were great, Natural History of Sonoran was a series of short essays starting from the physics and the geology of the desert and progressing to the flora and fauna. I had picked it up because while the library has 30 books about eastern birds, it's very short on anywhere else, so I just grabbed anything that might be related. Wish I could read ahead of time for trips but I don't plan them far enough out and I'm often more interested once I come back.
I also read Field Guide to Advanced Birding by Kenn Kaufmann, which I rate 10/10, so good. I can't remember if I waxed eloquent on my love for this book in my journal or on soph's, but I'll reiterate it! It's a guide to birding, but instead of being a field guide of birds with descriptions and pictures of field marks, listing all the birds likely to be seen in the area, it talks about ways to think about and approach birding. This sounds horribly dry, but it's really written very engagingly. could actually tell what the greater coverts were. The front half of the book talks about pitfalls or patterns in the way we think about birding. There is a section about molt in different bird species (this can be very complicated) and feather structure, both things that I had previously skipped because they seemed really complicated and not useful in the field, but Kaufmann laid out convincing arguments about why, if you want to level up, you should know molt and how feathers are arrayed. There were illustrations as well as photographs, including eight images of the same house finch's wing going from fully tucked to fully open, and when I finally took the time to look, I could understand and see the greater coverts. There were illustrations and pictures of pointing out feather groups on different families of birds, which were super helpful - one idealized songbird has somewhat different feathers showing than a duck, usually. The second part of the book, more substantial, goes through by taxonomic grouping (starting with waterfowl and ending with passerines) the North American species that pose difficulties - for example, there are literally only 2 pages on owls, because as Kaufmann says, birders would love to have trouble differentiating owls because that would mean we seeowls, who are pretty distinctive anyway - but twenty or thirty pages on the notoriously difficult Empidonax flycatchers, who differentiate themselves among themselves by voice, and who therefore have extremely similar plumages.
And another digression into the front half of the book - I absolutely loved reading about how to approach birding. I obviously love birding and have struggled my fair share to ID many many birds. I started during the pandemic, so I didn't really get to bird with anybody to help me. I just looked and tried to compare what was on the Merlin app. Kaufmann talks a lot about how our mindset, experience, circumstances can shape what we see and conclude, from a birding perspective, and it's so interesting. There are field marks that are more reliable if difficult for beginners (shape) versus others that are very tricky to pin all your ID on (the colour can be hugely affected by the lighting conditions). He also writes that your mindset can really influence what you see, because after all, your brain has to interpret the signals your eyes send. If you are very excitedly driving somewhere to chase a rare bird, you'll be scanning for that exciting rare bird and trying to fit each bird into that mold. He writes that he believes that the person who sent in a sighting of a rare bird that was instead an ordinary bird, that the reporter genuinely believed he had seen all those field marks, wasn't lying to say he had seen it - just that he had been so intent on finding it, primed himself so much for that bird that he convinced himself he had seen it. Which is very understandable. When you're very excited - and some people are really into finding rarities and upping your life list - your wish can warp what you see. It's a reminder to be careful...and then there is the opposite too, that you can get so accustomed to assuming that with it's likely a herring gull, so you write off all the gulls as herring, and don't investigate the part where it doesn't look quite right and is a different gull.
It's overall just engagingly written. The sparrow section - all the sections - start with some introductory text about the family. Kaufmann talks about how a new birder's typical encounter with a sparrow is basically the following: the sparrow opens the encounter by hopping up to a prominent visible perch. New birder begins immediately to panic while trying to look at field marks. Does it have a crown? IDK can't see. OK its chest is sort of streaky. What colour is the wings, kind of just brown. Oh, and the sparrow hopped down and is now invisible, the only useful info you've gained is that it has a streaky breast, and you don't have any qualifiers for the streaks (thick? thin? splotchy?) Even the clean-breasted sparrows have juveniles that can be confusingly streaky, so from that encounter you've gotten no information at all. I love sparrows, but he's got it completely right and it was so funny to read about it and feel reassured that even Kaufmann, who's a legend, has felt this way. The whole book was like #relatable.
I really liked that Kaufmann also has the view that you should bird in a way that makes you happy - obviously within ethical boundaries, like please don't disturb wildlife to make yourself happy, but that if you don't feel like ID-ing down to the sex and age of a 4 year gull, don't. If you don't even feel like ID-ing a sparrow, don't. If you don't want to count, don't. It's not a competition.
Also - this is a 10/10 book, as I said, and I have so many thoughts - I thought his opinion on certain bird groups was really interesting. He mentions that there's no group in NA that separates birders from non-birders like warblers. That while a lot of birders, me included, spend a massive amount of time and effort, especially spring and fall, chasing warblers, that to non-birders, these birds don't even exist. I would hazard that for those who live in cities and don't care about outdoor activities, they haven't seen one, even though warblers infiltrate cities by the thousands as they migrate through. Sure, there are many birds that if you're not into birding, you'll never see, like the sea-going jaegers. But I completely agree with Kaufmann's assessment. Of course, birders are more interested in birds than non-birders, but I agree that for this family of birds the difference in level of interest is especially stark. He also observes that hummingbirds are extremely popular for people who aren't birders, that even those who don't own binoculars will buy feeders and enjoy watching them.
I really enjoyed Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction. I also read The Rise and Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte, which primarily is about the Cenozoic, and I really disliked it - I rated it 5/10. I am by no means a paleontologist, just someone who is interested in natural history. I don't mind if it's dry, I want to read something with a lot of detail and evidence. This one felt so speculative, and also filled with things I already knew, and I don't think I'm really that familiar with the Cenozoic - it's just so surface and common knowledge. I especially hated all the parts where Brusatte would go off on a fiction spasm and lay out a scene from his imagination, to make it more engaging. The only positive I can say is that Brusatte isn't prone to the really irritating view that posits evolution is a march of progress with humans at the top (or in this case sub mammals as the glorious peak). Creatures that have made it till now are all very successful; even species that went extinct previously were often extremely successful, just in many ways unlucky. After all, fossilization is extremely unlikely, with a lot of things that have to go right all at once to happen; a species with only a few members is unlikely to have the raw numbers to even get caught and observed by us in fossilization. But I digress. It was extremely popsci and I didn't want that.
In fiction in fantasy I read a bunch of good stuff:
The Wonderful Adventure of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf, which is a children's book about a horrible young boy who is rude to a tomte, is cursed and transformed into a tiny boy only a few inches high, and when he tries to stop his family's gander from taking off and following the wild geese, is pulled airborne with the flock and goes all around Sweden. It was written as an educational novel, visiting almost all the regions (I believe the few areas that weren't visited were filled in later) so that was interesting. Also, the edition I had had the most beautiful watercolour illustrations, the kind that really make children's picture books so pleasing and wonderful. So many cute birds! I loved the wild geese, there were clever crows, there were cranes and golden eagles and all kinds of enjoyable scrapes.
I read A Court of Thorn and Roses by Sarah J Maas as well as the second book A Court of Mist and Fury. It was pretty iddy, which I enjoyed, and which was enough to keep me going even when I was rolling my eyes at some points.rachelmanija reviewed it and listed some really great reasons it's iddy so I will link it here (her review on DW), and she was right and I'm so glad I picked it up. I'm just shocked that Rhys is the endgame pairing - I got extremely fond of him in the end of the first book, thought "no way he's endgame!"and was then shocked and surprised and happy about the second book.
I read The Copper Crown by Patricia Kennealy, which has legitimately been on this weird email draft tbr from 2009. It's the far future and Earth has interstellar flight, and they come upon a very advanced civilization, the Keltia, who escaped from Earth before the middle ages and have flowered into a major stellar empire. It's quite a different flavour of fantasy from the very YA feel of Maas, for instance - it feels almost like a dreamy bard's yarn about an ancient wonderful civilization, and it leans very heavily on Celtic themes. Personally, my threshold for this is quite high, and while there's definitely a feeling that Keltia is the best, it's not too bad, and I enjoyed it a lot. A lot of the politicking is very shallow and Aeron, the young queen, is just going to bull through, but it was enjoyable. I also read the next book, The Throne of Scone, which picks up after the cliffhanger, and that's more of a quest-style book. Again the characterization is almost more archetype and sometimes a little shallower than I would expect, with betrayals and forgiveness being almost formulaic instaed of human, but enjoyable.
Finally, on the last day of 2022, I read Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn. It's a world with low tech, but there are angels with wings who live among humans and who can fly into the air and sing and cause medicine and food (manna) to fall down on the ground when needed, to divert storms and make it stop raining. The land, Samaria, is led by the Archangel and every year there's a massive Mass sung in a huge plain, which the Archangel leads. Honestly I've enjoyed everything that Sharon Shinn has written, and I've read most of the other books in this series. What I really love about this one is that the Jovah that the angels sing to is not a god, but a spaceship in orbit; it's massive and self-sustaining and run by a giant computer. The oracles speak to the spaceship via what are computer consoles, though almost none of them know the truth about Jovah. I love this kind of meld of SF and F, and I like them separate too, but this trope "actually god is a spaceship that brought us here" is somehow so enjoyable to me. This book has one character that's an engineer and he gets teleported up to the spaceship because Jovah needs circuits replaced - Jovah can't hear the angels singing because of a mechanical issue, while down on the ground they believe that they have lost the favour of the god. There was some great and fun worldubilding about how the spaceship worked and stuff, but also some talk between the protagonist and the spaceship (as well as between protagonist and the engineer) about what to do with the knowledge, the fear that it would fracture Samaria, if it was good or even possible to hold back these ideas developing, as Samaria is starting to use hydroelectricity, that optical improvements one day will allow people to see Jovah, and it was more balanced than I thought it would be, so props.
For science fiction, I read a few good things also.
I read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and enjoyed it immensely. 2 parts - I enjoyed the can-do attitude and the "please let me do math/calculations so I can figure out WTF is going on" - I love these kinds of protagonists (this is why I still occasionally read Heinlein). Second, OMG Rocky. He practically immediately became my top 5 favourite alien characters ever. Again I love cheerful engineering types who just want to solve problems, and I love how gung-ho he was about everything, how although he wasn't really a physicist or a scientist he could fix things, and just the way the two of them worked together to try to save both their civilizations. Also I'm still weak to aliens speaking in musical notes. I thought I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel this year, but it's not listed...anyway, love that, love this. And there's so much less misogyny than in a Heinlein, that's all I waaanted. Rocky and Ryland BFFs forever!! Also one thing that was also intensely iddy was that Eva Stratt, the coordinator of the response to the Sun suddenly dimming (with catastrophic planetary effects), was able to force through so many projects and steamroller any stupid objection to save the planet. Now that is some real adult fantasy - forget porn, it's a lovely fantasy that if we had a crisis coming now that would be catastrophic in 30 years we could take real, solid, hard-hitting action right away without running into brick walls of indifference, "but what's in it for me", no funding, "actually climate change isn't real" denial, etc. Auuu but it was good to envision it for awhile.
Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro I enjoyed a lot. I'm currently dying to get my hands on the sequel. It's space opera with FTL (unique) where the Skagolian Empire, which is led by empaths, are trying to prevent themselves from being taken by the Traders, who are all sadists, and who particularly love kidnapping and using empaths. The protagonist leads a highly trained set of pilots who take on special tasks, but she's also a high ranking person in the empire - her half brother is the Emperor. The reason they use empaths is their ability to speak mind to mind even when travelling FTL, and there is a lot of interesting hard sf kind of explanation about this drive, which has a concept I haven't seen before. Warfare at this level has gotten so inhumanly fast and difficult that the only way that they can get an edge here is with this kind of mental meld and being able to flip in and out of FTL. It was never really iddy but I could absolutely see fandom taking that and running.
Other books I read that I also liked, in a mishmash of categories:
Agatha Christie always comes in strong, I read a bunch - Hickory Dickory Dock, A Pocketful of Rye, The Body in the Library, Murder in Mesopotamia, Elephants Can Remember, Lord Edgware Dies, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Murder in the Mews. I liked Hickory Dickory Dock and Pocketful of Rye best, plus Murder in Mesopotamia. They are just the right level of not emotionally demanding but still really enjoyable, and they tend to be extremely reliable for me.
I read SOMANY Laura Lee Guhrke romance novels this year. Like five almost in a row. Some of them, like the Marriage Bed, danced right on my line of what I consider iddy and what just made me mad - that one was weirdly compelling partly because of this. I love marriage of convenience Regencies and have read any number of them. Many of them are wildly ahistorical and I don't really care. (What makes me mad is men breaking promises and getting treated better about it and infidelity and also, if it gets serious, the appalling inability of women to get divorced when men could.) I am the worst at rating romance novels. I simply love them or I don't. In fact, sometimes romance novels are well constructed and I don't care because I don't care for the LI - this is why I'm not in the local romance book club...
The best book this year though was Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. It was just so good start to finish. I loved Theo (Theo you have so many issues buddy) and Boris. The Vegas portion was so empty somehow and also so good. It's hard to talk about. I kept reading and reading and cursing the fact I had work and couldn't finish up yet.
Finally books I especially disliked, with very short notes otherwise I could write several thousands of words.
Continuing on my "silver refuses to pay a monthly subscription to continue access to Excel (even though she loves Excel)" journey, I have kept a log of what I read this year in my paper journal. I'm really bad about updating it though, so I know there are books missing, and can't remember...oh well. This only counts books I read cover to cover and for the first time.
I have way more 10/10 books in the beginning of the year than the end. I read a lot more nonfiction this year! I didn't do any reading challenges, I picked up a library summer reading one, but didn't end up doing it. Here are the highlights!
I read a bunch of non-fiction, like What Is a Bird (ed Tony Williams), a Natural History of the Sonoran Desert (published Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum) near the first half of the year. Both were great, Natural History of Sonoran was a series of short essays starting from the physics and the geology of the desert and progressing to the flora and fauna. I had picked it up because while the library has 30 books about eastern birds, it's very short on anywhere else, so I just grabbed anything that might be related. Wish I could read ahead of time for trips but I don't plan them far enough out and I'm often more interested once I come back.
I also read Field Guide to Advanced Birding by Kenn Kaufmann, which I rate 10/10, so good. I can't remember if I waxed eloquent on my love for this book in my journal or on soph's, but I'll reiterate it! It's a guide to birding, but instead of being a field guide of birds with descriptions and pictures of field marks, listing all the birds likely to be seen in the area, it talks about ways to think about and approach birding. This sounds horribly dry, but it's really written very engagingly. could actually tell what the greater coverts were. The front half of the book talks about pitfalls or patterns in the way we think about birding. There is a section about molt in different bird species (this can be very complicated) and feather structure, both things that I had previously skipped because they seemed really complicated and not useful in the field, but Kaufmann laid out convincing arguments about why, if you want to level up, you should know molt and how feathers are arrayed. There were illustrations as well as photographs, including eight images of the same house finch's wing going from fully tucked to fully open, and when I finally took the time to look, I could understand and see the greater coverts. There were illustrations and pictures of pointing out feather groups on different families of birds, which were super helpful - one idealized songbird has somewhat different feathers showing than a duck, usually. The second part of the book, more substantial, goes through by taxonomic grouping (starting with waterfowl and ending with passerines) the North American species that pose difficulties - for example, there are literally only 2 pages on owls, because as Kaufmann says, birders would love to have trouble differentiating owls because that would mean we seeowls, who are pretty distinctive anyway - but twenty or thirty pages on the notoriously difficult Empidonax flycatchers, who differentiate themselves among themselves by voice, and who therefore have extremely similar plumages.
And another digression into the front half of the book - I absolutely loved reading about how to approach birding. I obviously love birding and have struggled my fair share to ID many many birds. I started during the pandemic, so I didn't really get to bird with anybody to help me. I just looked and tried to compare what was on the Merlin app. Kaufmann talks a lot about how our mindset, experience, circumstances can shape what we see and conclude, from a birding perspective, and it's so interesting. There are field marks that are more reliable if difficult for beginners (shape) versus others that are very tricky to pin all your ID on (the colour can be hugely affected by the lighting conditions). He also writes that your mindset can really influence what you see, because after all, your brain has to interpret the signals your eyes send. If you are very excitedly driving somewhere to chase a rare bird, you'll be scanning for that exciting rare bird and trying to fit each bird into that mold. He writes that he believes that the person who sent in a sighting of a rare bird that was instead an ordinary bird, that the reporter genuinely believed he had seen all those field marks, wasn't lying to say he had seen it - just that he had been so intent on finding it, primed himself so much for that bird that he convinced himself he had seen it. Which is very understandable. When you're very excited - and some people are really into finding rarities and upping your life list - your wish can warp what you see. It's a reminder to be careful...and then there is the opposite too, that you can get so accustomed to assuming that with it's likely a herring gull, so you write off all the gulls as herring, and don't investigate the part where it doesn't look quite right and is a different gull.
It's overall just engagingly written. The sparrow section - all the sections - start with some introductory text about the family. Kaufmann talks about how a new birder's typical encounter with a sparrow is basically the following: the sparrow opens the encounter by hopping up to a prominent visible perch. New birder begins immediately to panic while trying to look at field marks. Does it have a crown? IDK can't see. OK its chest is sort of streaky. What colour is the wings, kind of just brown. Oh, and the sparrow hopped down and is now invisible, the only useful info you've gained is that it has a streaky breast, and you don't have any qualifiers for the streaks (thick? thin? splotchy?) Even the clean-breasted sparrows have juveniles that can be confusingly streaky, so from that encounter you've gotten no information at all. I love sparrows, but he's got it completely right and it was so funny to read about it and feel reassured that even Kaufmann, who's a legend, has felt this way. The whole book was like #relatable.
I really liked that Kaufmann also has the view that you should bird in a way that makes you happy - obviously within ethical boundaries, like please don't disturb wildlife to make yourself happy, but that if you don't feel like ID-ing down to the sex and age of a 4 year gull, don't. If you don't even feel like ID-ing a sparrow, don't. If you don't want to count, don't. It's not a competition.
Also - this is a 10/10 book, as I said, and I have so many thoughts - I thought his opinion on certain bird groups was really interesting. He mentions that there's no group in NA that separates birders from non-birders like warblers. That while a lot of birders, me included, spend a massive amount of time and effort, especially spring and fall, chasing warblers, that to non-birders, these birds don't even exist. I would hazard that for those who live in cities and don't care about outdoor activities, they haven't seen one, even though warblers infiltrate cities by the thousands as they migrate through. Sure, there are many birds that if you're not into birding, you'll never see, like the sea-going jaegers. But I completely agree with Kaufmann's assessment. Of course, birders are more interested in birds than non-birders, but I agree that for this family of birds the difference in level of interest is especially stark. He also observes that hummingbirds are extremely popular for people who aren't birders, that even those who don't own binoculars will buy feeders and enjoy watching them.
I really enjoyed Carboniferous Giants and Mass Extinction. I also read The Rise and Reign of Mammals by Steve Brusatte, which primarily is about the Cenozoic, and I really disliked it - I rated it 5/10. I am by no means a paleontologist, just someone who is interested in natural history. I don't mind if it's dry, I want to read something with a lot of detail and evidence. This one felt so speculative, and also filled with things I already knew, and I don't think I'm really that familiar with the Cenozoic - it's just so surface and common knowledge. I especially hated all the parts where Brusatte would go off on a fiction spasm and lay out a scene from his imagination, to make it more engaging. The only positive I can say is that Brusatte isn't prone to the really irritating view that posits evolution is a march of progress with humans at the top (or in this case sub mammals as the glorious peak). Creatures that have made it till now are all very successful; even species that went extinct previously were often extremely successful, just in many ways unlucky. After all, fossilization is extremely unlikely, with a lot of things that have to go right all at once to happen; a species with only a few members is unlikely to have the raw numbers to even get caught and observed by us in fossilization. But I digress. It was extremely popsci and I didn't want that.
In fiction in fantasy I read a bunch of good stuff:
The Wonderful Adventure of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf, which is a children's book about a horrible young boy who is rude to a tomte, is cursed and transformed into a tiny boy only a few inches high, and when he tries to stop his family's gander from taking off and following the wild geese, is pulled airborne with the flock and goes all around Sweden. It was written as an educational novel, visiting almost all the regions (I believe the few areas that weren't visited were filled in later) so that was interesting. Also, the edition I had had the most beautiful watercolour illustrations, the kind that really make children's picture books so pleasing and wonderful. So many cute birds! I loved the wild geese, there were clever crows, there were cranes and golden eagles and all kinds of enjoyable scrapes.
I read A Court of Thorn and Roses by Sarah J Maas as well as the second book A Court of Mist and Fury. It was pretty iddy, which I enjoyed, and which was enough to keep me going even when I was rolling my eyes at some points.
rachelmanija reviewed it and listed some really great reasons it's iddy so I will link it here (her review on DW), and she was right and I'm so glad I picked it up. I'm just shocked that Rhys is the endgame pairing - I got extremely fond of him in the end of the first book, thought "no way he's endgame!"and was then shocked and surprised and happy about the second book. I read The Copper Crown by Patricia Kennealy, which has legitimately been on this weird email draft tbr from 2009. It's the far future and Earth has interstellar flight, and they come upon a very advanced civilization, the Keltia, who escaped from Earth before the middle ages and have flowered into a major stellar empire. It's quite a different flavour of fantasy from the very YA feel of Maas, for instance - it feels almost like a dreamy bard's yarn about an ancient wonderful civilization, and it leans very heavily on Celtic themes. Personally, my threshold for this is quite high, and while there's definitely a feeling that Keltia is the best, it's not too bad, and I enjoyed it a lot. A lot of the politicking is very shallow and Aeron, the young queen, is just going to bull through, but it was enjoyable. I also read the next book, The Throne of Scone, which picks up after the cliffhanger, and that's more of a quest-style book. Again the characterization is almost more archetype and sometimes a little shallower than I would expect, with betrayals and forgiveness being almost formulaic instaed of human, but enjoyable.
Finally, on the last day of 2022, I read Jovah's Angel, by Sharon Shinn. It's a world with low tech, but there are angels with wings who live among humans and who can fly into the air and sing and cause medicine and food (manna) to fall down on the ground when needed, to divert storms and make it stop raining. The land, Samaria, is led by the Archangel and every year there's a massive Mass sung in a huge plain, which the Archangel leads. Honestly I've enjoyed everything that Sharon Shinn has written, and I've read most of the other books in this series. What I really love about this one is that the Jovah that the angels sing to is not a god, but a spaceship in orbit; it's massive and self-sustaining and run by a giant computer. The oracles speak to the spaceship via what are computer consoles, though almost none of them know the truth about Jovah. I love this kind of meld of SF and F, and I like them separate too, but this trope "actually god is a spaceship that brought us here" is somehow so enjoyable to me. This book has one character that's an engineer and he gets teleported up to the spaceship because Jovah needs circuits replaced - Jovah can't hear the angels singing because of a mechanical issue, while down on the ground they believe that they have lost the favour of the god. There was some great and fun worldubilding about how the spaceship worked and stuff, but also some talk between the protagonist and the spaceship (as well as between protagonist and the engineer) about what to do with the knowledge, the fear that it would fracture Samaria, if it was good or even possible to hold back these ideas developing, as Samaria is starting to use hydroelectricity, that optical improvements one day will allow people to see Jovah, and it was more balanced than I thought it would be, so props.
For science fiction, I read a few good things also.
I read Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and enjoyed it immensely. 2 parts - I enjoyed the can-do attitude and the "please let me do math/calculations so I can figure out WTF is going on" - I love these kinds of protagonists (this is why I still occasionally read Heinlein). Second, OMG Rocky. He practically immediately became my top 5 favourite alien characters ever. Again I love cheerful engineering types who just want to solve problems, and I love how gung-ho he was about everything, how although he wasn't really a physicist or a scientist he could fix things, and just the way the two of them worked together to try to save both their civilizations. Also I'm still weak to aliens speaking in musical notes. I thought I read Have Space Suit, Will Travel this year, but it's not listed...anyway, love that, love this. And there's so much less misogyny than in a Heinlein, that's all I waaanted. Rocky and Ryland BFFs forever!! Also one thing that was also intensely iddy was that Eva Stratt, the coordinator of the response to the Sun suddenly dimming (with catastrophic planetary effects), was able to force through so many projects and steamroller any stupid objection to save the planet. Now that is some real adult fantasy - forget porn, it's a lovely fantasy that if we had a crisis coming now that would be catastrophic in 30 years we could take real, solid, hard-hitting action right away without running into brick walls of indifference, "but what's in it for me", no funding, "actually climate change isn't real" denial, etc. Auuu but it was good to envision it for awhile.
Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro I enjoyed a lot. I'm currently dying to get my hands on the sequel. It's space opera with FTL (unique) where the Skagolian Empire, which is led by empaths, are trying to prevent themselves from being taken by the Traders, who are all sadists, and who particularly love kidnapping and using empaths. The protagonist leads a highly trained set of pilots who take on special tasks, but she's also a high ranking person in the empire - her half brother is the Emperor. The reason they use empaths is their ability to speak mind to mind even when travelling FTL, and there is a lot of interesting hard sf kind of explanation about this drive, which has a concept I haven't seen before. Warfare at this level has gotten so inhumanly fast and difficult that the only way that they can get an edge here is with this kind of mental meld and being able to flip in and out of FTL. It was never really iddy but I could absolutely see fandom taking that and running.
Other books I read that I also liked, in a mishmash of categories:
Agatha Christie always comes in strong, I read a bunch - Hickory Dickory Dock, A Pocketful of Rye, The Body in the Library, Murder in Mesopotamia, Elephants Can Remember, Lord Edgware Dies, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Murder in the Mews. I liked Hickory Dickory Dock and Pocketful of Rye best, plus Murder in Mesopotamia. They are just the right level of not emotionally demanding but still really enjoyable, and they tend to be extremely reliable for me.
I read SOMANY Laura Lee Guhrke romance novels this year. Like five almost in a row. Some of them, like the Marriage Bed, danced right on my line of what I consider iddy and what just made me mad - that one was weirdly compelling partly because of this. I love marriage of convenience Regencies and have read any number of them. Many of them are wildly ahistorical and I don't really care. (What makes me mad is men breaking promises and getting treated better about it and infidelity and also, if it gets serious, the appalling inability of women to get divorced when men could.) I am the worst at rating romance novels. I simply love them or I don't. In fact, sometimes romance novels are well constructed and I don't care because I don't care for the LI - this is why I'm not in the local romance book club...
The best book this year though was Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. It was just so good start to finish. I loved Theo (Theo you have so many issues buddy) and Boris. The Vegas portion was so empty somehow and also so good. It's hard to talk about. I kept reading and reading and cursing the fact I had work and couldn't finish up yet.
Finally books I especially disliked, with very short notes otherwise I could write several thousands of words.
- Cinderella is Dead - Kalynn Bayron - selfpub and not good at writing mechanics to make it worthwhile. Also I hate fairytale retellings. Book club book. 2/10
- A College of Magics - Caroline Stevemer - unsatisfying, not very magic not very college, weird characterization. However I will forever associate it with eating poke outside U of Arizona in Tucson and underestimating how cold it would be.
- Entangled Life - Merlin Sheldrake - already talked about elsewhere but like accidentally running into a guy at a party who won't stop talking at you about his experiences being on shrooms and what you really wanted was to look at mushrooms themselves not hear about his trip on them. Data super nonspecific and cherrypicked, writing was frustratingly repetitively circular. 4/10
- Light from Uncommon Stars - Ryka Aoki - way too much happening, everyone else's characterization got shallowly treated, felt less like a celebration of Asian food than a weird litany, so many slurs. 4/10
- Once and Future Witches - Alix Harrow - just so shallowly disappointing, it's not quite Corporate Feminism or anything so bad, but not handled deftly or with enough emotional weight (instead of Stock Tragedy) to make the injustices feel engaging instead of just trite. Book club book. 5/10
- The Galaxy and the Ground Within - Becky Chambers - surface skim, all the characters are the same 21st century liberal well-educated similar outlook etc. It says "cozy" but it's actually just shallow. No conflict but nothing else to catch your attention or enjoyment either. 4/10
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Date: Jan. 5th, 2023 02:33 am (UTC)The Swainson's thrush has such a beautiful song and really unique!