RogerBW's Blog

In 2017 I read 124 books, down again from the previous year.

I was a Hugo voter again, and thought that the shorter fiction in particular was vastly improved compared with other recent voting years; I had serious choices to make among multiple good stories in almost all categories. I'd already read three of the Best Novel nominees before the list was announced, and I still reckon Ninefox Gambit was the best of them by my lights.

In SF not eligible for the Hugo: Linda Nagata's The Red: First Light and Karen Traviss's Going Grey both impressed me, but there weren't any other really amazing books.

On the other hand, the non-fiction The Rules of the Game does a hard job superbly well, and I continue to recommend it to everyone who has even a slight interest in the subject, or the period. That was my big fat slow-to-read book for the year.

I managed to avoid giving up on any books this year, hurrah! Which is not to say that I'm less willing to give up, but I got better at not starting books that I wouldn't want to finish. Too Like the Lightning came close; the other book that went into my In Brief, Avoid category was Ernest Cline's Armada.

I've carried on with my chronological (re-)read of Allingham, Marsh and Brand, and nearly finished; just two more books to go. I'm still mostly enjoying them, and I managed not to overdose this time, by interleaving plenty of other books. I welcome suggestions for the next series-reading. Probably Sayers first, since I've only reviewed one of hers so far.

I've been keeping up with Neil Bowers's book-per-month re-read of the joint Hugo and Nebula winners; the ones I've read before mostly don't stand up well, but Rendezvous with Rama did better than I expected, and there were a couple of gems, particularly Dreamsnake. As I write, I've just forced myself to plough through Ender's Game, which I hated first time round and which (spoiler!) didn't get much better on re-reading.