In 2023 I read 204 books, the most of any year since the pandemic
began.
Many of the reviews of those books are forming a backlog in the
blog-post queue, and haven't gone up yet—using the master
list is probably the easiest way to check.
In among a great many good books and series, five really stood out:
- Kate Elliott, Furious Heaven
- Emma Newman, The Split Worlds (especially its conclusion)
- Melissa Scott, Five-Twelfths of Heaven (re-read)
- Emily Tesh, Desperate Glory
- Martha Wells, The Fall of Ile-Rien
and I would be nominating the Tesh for next year's Hugo if I were
nominating. (The Elliott I'd quite possibly nominate for series, when
the series is complete.)
Nothing else really leapt out at me as amazing this year, though I
did enjoy K B Wagers' NeoG trilogy (a bit heavy on the wonderfulness
of found family and talking out your problems, but still well worth
reading) and her earlier Indranan War series.
I finished David Drake's RCN series with what seemed more of a
whimper than a bang; being fair, I think Drake's ill-health (he died
on 10 December) forced him to leave it where he'd got to rather than
giving him time to craft any sort of conclusion.
I also finished Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Diving Universe series, at
least the volumes published to date. Will it ultimately go anywhere
and solve its mysteries? I don't know; it's very deliberately
slow-moving. But I'd like to read more.
I finished my re-read of Simon Hawke's Time Wars series, alas ending
up with some trouble working out what I had found appealing in them
back in the day. They have their moments, but really I think the first
few are the best; I may have carried on from nostalgia and hoping the
series would pick up again, but those memories from the late 1980s
aren't readily accessible.
Of this year's Hugo-nominated novels, I've read two (Nona the Ninth
and Legends & Lattes), and one (Nettle & Bone, the eventual
winner) is on my list for when my chronological reading of T
Kingfisher reaches the present day. One (The Daughter of Doctor
Moreau) I'll probably read at some point, because I've found
Moreno-Garcia often enjoyable though certainly not great; and two
(The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Spare Man) I don't plan to
read, because I've hated other things by these authors, and since
I'm not voting I don't feel any obligation. Even if The Spare Man is
Nick and Nora in space.
I read Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series, which overall
was worth it, but to my taste volumes 4-5-6 (out of 8) dragged rather.
In non-SF&F, I finished the novels of Patricia Moyes, and will say one
last time that it's an unreasonable injustice that she isn't more
widely known among fans of traditional mystery. There are some duds
(usually when she's talking about the Evils of Drugs) but most of them
are very good indeed.
I also finished the mystery novels I've been able to find from
Elizabeth (E. X. in the USA) Ferrars; for my taste she's a bit prone
to "hysterical" women, but she definitely has her moments.
I've read pretty much no non-fiction this year. Haven't really been in
the mood. The closest was John Biggins' Otto Prohaska series, the
misadventures of an Austro-Hungarian naval lieutenant in the Great
War, which is fiction but ferociously well-researched.
Books I didn't finish, which therefore didn't get individual reviews:
The Anodyne Necklace, Martha Grimes (1983): I just can't cope with
this utterly American England: as the last of a long line of examples,
on the first page someone has "a Cadbury bar" in her bag, which
probably sounded fine to the American Grimes (as "a Hershey bar" would
have been in the US), but to my ear is just wrong. England is not
just off the coast of New York; it's a different country. Really I
should have stopped after The Old Fox Deceiv'd but I had hoped this
would improve.
The Passenger, Lisa Lutz (2016): OK I'm just giving up on Lutz. Yet
another woman with a mysterious past, this time with the story
starting in the middle as she changes identities more often than her
underwear. Lots of did this, did that, made this very poor decision,
but the basic problem is that she knows why she's on the run and we
don't, which constrains what she can say (also, who is the
hypothetical audience for this first-person narrative)? There just
isn't any personality left to engage me.
And yet, I would have given anything to be me again, whoever she was.
It's a Charmed Life, Selene Charles (2018): in a fairy-tale world,
it's all terribly hard-boiled, and Ariel (The Little Mermaid) is now
Elle, a tough cop who works cold cases. But all it has to offer is
this one joke in endless variations, plus sexual tension.
Armstrong Station, D. M. Pruden (2020): everything's turned to crap,
organised crime owns everyone (explicitly or not), and yeah there are
some people trying to do good but it's all too grim and lacking in fun
for my taste. (Also, all in present tense (except when it isn't), and
one of the several viewpoint characters gets first person narration,
which isn't a reason to stop reading in itself but certainly didn't
enthuse me.)
The Duke Undone, Joanna Lowell (2021): Victorian romance; she's one
of the first female painters to study at the Royal Academy, he's a
ducal rake forced to live sober by his father's will. Promising start,
but… I'll forgive "tenements" in Victorian London, just barely, if you
aren't bragging about your research like Connie Willis, but I couldn't
take it seriously after Lowell gave a list of famous queens of the
stage that included Cymbeline.
A Very English Murder, Verity Bright (2020): another American tries
to write 1920s England, apparently using Downton Abbey as their
primary reference. Point one: an educated Englishwoman would not say
"around ten fifteen on Saturday" or "You look like it might actually
be your idea of fun". Point two: although this lady is meant to be
adventurous, having spent years travelling solo in places like the Lut
Desert and the Silk Road (during the Great War, given that it's now
1920), she's a complete wet when it comes to any kind of minor
physical privation, and she needs her butler even to remind her to
consider a list of suspects. Point three: when she gets to the house
she's unexpectedly inherited (presumably with the means to keep it up,
though that's never mentioned), she's told at once that her deceased
uncle has left some papers for her to read. And then everybody
including the author completely forgets about them for the rest of the
book.
Slow Horses, Mick Herron (2010): intelligence work is relentlessly
unglamorous, and if you screw up as a spy, you get sent to the office
for pointless and degrading work until you take the hint and resign.
Everyone hates everyone else while trying to score points off them.
Probably jolly good if you like that sort of thing, and many people
do, but I don't care for or about anyone here. (Now a TV series.)
A Lady's Formula For Love, Elizabeth Everett (2021): early Victorian
bluestockings secretly make scientific advances, but can't tell
anyone, because men. An enjoyable conceit, but my goodness, spray cans
in 1842? And the villains are a proto-union. And… it just leaves a bad
taste.
The Perfect Ghost, Linda Barnes (2013): I've very much enjoyed
Barnes's detective books, but this is trying to be more literary.
First-person narration that doesn't let the author know things that
the narrator knows, serious agoraphobia that's suddenly not a problem
any more, and a gradual build-up to a Big Reveal that I had regarded
as a likely option from the beginning. Oh dear. Well, I knew the
literary novel style wasn't my thing, but after the quality of
Barnes's writing elsewhere I really thought she could make one that
would fit my taste.
The Children of Men, P D James (1992): I knew what I was getting
into but I'd hoped this might be a decent James to go out on, with
something away from the contemporary setting. No, it turns out that
it's very much the same underlying motifs, particularly that everyone
who isn't like me is Wrong and should be ashamed of it, coupled with
the non-SF-reader's contempt for the worldbuilding of SF. Some of her
early books had some interesting things to say, but my journey with
James ends here.
Her Majesty's Royal Coven, Juno Dawson (2022): the sort of thing
that would usually suit me well, but I found it actively
un-engaging—from its unquestioning description of male witches as
"warlocks" to its lead characters who are much more interested in
their personal squabbles than in preventing the actual literal end of
the world. I mean, yeah, fine, being a witch as a parallel for other
sorts of personal secret is fine (to the extent of "coming out" to
one's partner being a thing), but that doesn't fit well with having a
whole (secret) government department that employs them. Horribly drab
writing doesn't help.
The Flux, Ferrett Steinmetz (2015) ['Mancer 2]: I had mixed but
positive feelings on the first book, but this one doubles down the
stuff I didn't enjoy to the point that suicide starts to seem like the
best available option for all the sympathetic characters. And then,
just as I was deciding whether to push on and see if the early
"everything is horrible" turned into a later "everything is great", a
vomiting agent that gas masks protect you from was described as a
"nerve gas", and that was enough to tip me over.
Hid From Our Eyes, Julia Spencer-Fleming (2020) [Fergusson-Van
Alstyne 9]: spoiler for my reviews of the previous books that haven't
gone up yet, I guess. Alas, even after a seven year gap, this is
basically more of the same: soap opera, people behaving badly to
either themselves or each other, and this time flashbacks to
investigations in 1952 and 1972 as well as multiple streams in the
present day of 2006… which in turn makes it very obvious roughly what
must have happened, and the author's limited toolbox of character
personalities fills in the rest. But the predictability of the mystery
story isn't as important as my lack of enthusiasm for the personal
stories of unhappiness which are clearly the author's main interest.
It's soap-operatic in the sense that there's a constant flow of random
disruption, tragedy, dark secrets being revealed, in order to put the
characters under even more stress (and thus, I assume, give the reader
the pleasure of seeing them show their true colours).
The Appeal, Janice Hallett (2021): the basic gimmick is that of The
Documents in the Case, a file of various sorts of material that is
all associated with a possible murder, and I'm not going to claim that
that should only be done once; but one of the lovely things in that
book is that most of the people we hear from are individually quite
likeable. Here everyone wears their horridness openly, from the
blatant pseudo-charity fraudsters to the hopeless obsessive. It's
entirely obvious what will inevitably happen, and then it does. No
surprises, no interesting people.
The Outcast Dead, Elly Griffiths (2014) [Ruth Galloway #6]: the
little things niggle, like Ruth confidently sexing a skeleton again
(this used to be a thing people believed, I was taught it at medical
school in 1990, but it's really not considered valid any more as
people have started to pay more attention to the range of variation),
or she and an historian explaining to each other things they already
know perfectly well about (when DI Nelson is right there to be the
person who has archaeology explained to him). And there's another man
for Ruth to fall for, only for (a) her to dump him because she's still
stuck on Nelson or (b) him to turn out to be a murderer, one or the
other of which has been the fate of all her previous beaux. But what
finally broke my tolerance was the determination of a few minor
characters to make what they all know perfectly well are the worst
possible decisions, because they are soap-opera people and have no
self-control. I enjoyed Griffiths' 2018 The Stranger Diaries and
I'll carry on with her non-Ruth books at least for now.
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