In 2015 I read 132 books, on a par with recent years but lower than I
really like.
Still, one of them was A Distant Mirror which took a fair old
while to get through. It wasn't even my favourite non-fiction book of
the year: that was The Box, and I gather an updated edition is
expected in 2016.
I've been trying to read a significant number of potential Best Novel
Hugo nominees rather than wait until nominations are done. So far
Ancillary Mercy is still at the top of my list, though Dark Orbit
and Archivist Wasp (review coming soon) run it pretty close. Red
Equinox and Sorcerer to the Crown are Hugo-eligible, and pretty
good, but flawed.
In SF not eligible for the Hugo, I enjoyed Mike Shepherd's Mutineer
(though the others haven't yet been as good) and Janet Edwards' Earth
Girl. Sean McMullen's Souls in the Great Machine was mixed but
surprisingly decent. On the fantasy side, Dru Pagliasotti's Clockwork
Heart was excellent, and of course the Hugo-nominated The Goblin
Emperor by Katherine Addison. Fantasy tropes aren't often my thing,
but books that slide them a bit sideways can work well for me.
In mystery James Oswald's Inspector McLean series is the one that
comes to fondest memory, while there were no real stand-outs among the
few works of military fiction.
Mostly I finish the books that I start. There's just one I gave up on
this year, though it was enough to put me off the rest of the series:
Doubleblind, Ann Aguirre (and Killbox, Endgame, Aftermath):
the first one was pretty good, the second one was sort of OK-ish, but
the third one just rubbed me wrong from the outset, and since there
was clearly going to be an ongoing theme of the One True Couple
feeling really bad about not being able to be together I dropped the
series here. Grimspace is a pretty decent self-contained story; I
don't think it's worth going on from there.
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