2018 Favourite Books

I am SO BAD at year-end lists. I don't think I've ever actually managed to scrape one together! So, here we go. Having tucked away over 100 books in the last year, you'd think I have some standouts, right? Right! But I'm bad at ranking things, so, in no particular order (besides #1):

1) A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle

Whatever, friendos, I still blame every single one of you that didn't tell 5th-grade me to read this. This gap in my oeuvre is entirely other people's fault, clearly. (This is also very much my #1 read of the year.)

2) The Wayfarers Trilogy (The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet; A Closed and Common Orbit),  Becky Chambers

Probably my favourite "grownup" read of the year. Definitely the one I want to tell all of you to read, so I have other people to talk with about it. I liked it because it has bits of all my favourite things about speculative fiction: good flow and pacing to the writing, accessible diction that's space-y without being hard SF, excellent world building, excruciating detail in to those worlds, breaking down present-day social barriers by playing with the possibilities of social constructs. This book is home to one of the single stickiest things I read all year, in the Aandrisks and how they construct family units (and specifically, how they confer 'personhood' upon their younglings.) I devoured the sequel and am excited to see what else Chambers will put out.

3) Omnia, Laura Gallego García

What's this two-star rated book doing in my year-end list?? I may not have liked the writing in Omnia (though to be fair, it probably suffers more than a bit from lost-in-translation), but there was something captivating in this take on an intergalactic (maybe even inter-dimensional?) Amazon-like company, and it was easily one of my most talked about books of 2018. Appropriately, this is only available via Amazon Kindle.

4) Octavia's Brood, edited by Adrienne Maree Brown and Walidah Imarisha

I checked this book out from the library roughly 10 times this year, and is the only library book that I had to turn in to a purchase. Octavia's Brood is a collection of POC speculative fiction, inspired by Octavia Butler, written by authors, community leaders, social justice activists, and more. Every story is speculative, but not every story is told by a SFF writer, and that's what makes it fascinating. It's more like a conversation with a bunch of people who have ideas of what the future could be. Not every story is a home run, but the entirety of this collection is deeply satisfying.

5) The Grishaverse (Shadow and Bone, Siege and Storm, Ruin and Rising), Leigh Bardugo


6) The Forgetting, Sharon Cameron

Who loves a fully fleshed out world rooted in the absence of memory, even if the characters are silly and some of the prose is clunky? I do, I do! The Forgetting is here for all of your "I sure do wish The Giver had a female narrator instead" needs.

7) Trashed, Derf Backderf

Definitely the best comic about municipal waste I've ever read. Also features some cute trash pandas on p.237.

8) Dept. H, Matt & Sharlene Kindt

What's sort of a stock-standard Matt Kindt story (science, intrigue, weird shit, murder) is brought to life by the phenomenal colorwork of his wife, Sharlene Kindt. I don't know where Matt has been hiding her all these years, but I am super fucking excited to see more of her work.


9) Being Human, William Wegman


This retrospective of Wegman's work is a standout not only for the art, but for the interviews and essays included about his process and work with his doggo-collaborators. I never gave much thought to Wegman's photos over the years, but seeing them collected, learning about his process, and finally realizing the breadth and depth of what he's been doing for the last forty years was delightful.

10) Warcross, Marie Lu


I struggled with picking a 10th standout read for 2018. I hate-read a lot of books, so a lot of things that I spent a lot of time yelling about really don't belong on a list like this. I read a lot of interesting, but not particularly engaging, novels - stuff I'd recommend to people who were specifically interested, but that I didn't feel a particular connection to. And then there's Warcross, which, honestly, I didn't even really like, but it's the sort of novel that I want there to be more of. Y'see, Warcross is the book that, by every measure, Ready Player One should have been. At least, if we didn't live in a cis-het patriarchy that favored the needs and pleasures and even retro kitsch of boring white guys over literally anyone else at all. Warcross isn't for me. But it's absolutely for every teenage gamer that doesn't identify as a white guy, who is interested in video games for what they are and what they can be, and who appreciates source material as reference, not as substance. It's not an eye-opening, world-melting novel, by any means. It's just... it's fine. It's fine in a way that female written, female fronted books don't ever get to just be fine, because they're always carrying the entire weight of an entire genre-type in their rarity. And I want there to be more of that. I want more representation in SFF, in YA: better archetypes, better heroes, even better villains; and the only way we're going to get that is if we have more diversity, more voices, more ideas. So bring on more Marie Lus, more Warcrosses. Let's open this pit up.

Honorable Mentions:
The Power, Naomi Alderman
Vox, Christina Dalcher
Ms. Marvel, G. Willow Wilson

2018 Books in Review

I never do year-end wrap up lists, but I'm trying to be accountable, even just to myself. So here we are! (I use GoodReads to track this, otherwise I'd never remember anything. Even using a tracking tool like this, I'm absolutely positive that I've missed things. Sorry, year end data, you fall vicitim to my bad memory, just like everything else.)

Contented generated by GoodReads

105 books read

26,741 pages

My shortest and longest books don't really mean anything, as the aggregate data that gets me to 254pp per books is ultimately corrupted by my love of graphic novels (41% of my total books were graphic novels), which are sort of a fundamentally bogus page count. GoodReads also counts my DNF (Did Not Finish) books as fully read, which, on the other hand, may even things out. (I DNF'd 8 books this year, or wholly 7% of my total reads! Including, for the first time to the best of my recollection, a graphic novel!)

It also doesn't count any stray short stories I almost certainly consumed, whether online, via e-reader, or in pieces through collections that I couldn't in good faith mark as "read".

Based on this, you might think that I was reading (or quitting) two books a week. In reality, I read in enormous spurts. I'll grind through an entire series in a week, then maybe not touch any books for a month.  This is also why I tend to wait until a series is a completed until I read it, I have zero patience in waiting for "the next one." (I mistakenly picked up Neil Shusterman's Scythe this year, thinking it was a standalone novel. Now Thunderhead was one of my most enjoyed books of the year, and I am livid that he dare do anything at all besides finish up that threequel for me.)

78 of these books were library books, which means that I only read 25 books from my personal collection. On its face, that seems inaccurate, but I couldn't tell you which books in my library I should be adding to this total, so it stands.

Of course, I did make a resolution at the beginning of this year to use the library more, so good job, me! (And let's be honest, I bet even some of those 25 books personal collection books probably came from a library's discard pile or used book sale. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SOCIALIST BOOK REPOSITORY.) In doing so, I saved myself approximately $1479.77, if you're going to believe my own math on how much I would have paid retail (or nearly retail) on all of the books I got from the library.

What would I change for next year? I'd like to be better bout quitting books that I don't enjoy. I got a little better at it this year, but I still had a lot of things that I could have quit, or quit earlier, and saved myself some time. This includes shaking my tendencies towards being a completionist, even after it's apparent that I'm no longer enjoying the series. (I see you, DMZ.)

Next year, I think my challenge will really be to read down my own personal library. I think completing one bookshelf book for every library book is a reasonable ask of myself. (And, really, the only way to insure that I don't die as one of those creepy Ripley's Believe It or Not stories, buried by my own hobby.)

Other Factoids:
<1% of my books were art books. I would like to change that in 2019!
10% of my books would be considered "YA" fiction.
15% of my books were "children's" literature. This is actually surprisingly low, I feel like I usually consume much more YA/kid lit than that! (This also ignores overlap between graphic novels and YA/kid lit.)
38% were written by women (though many graphic novels had female illustrators/colorists/letterers, it's just too difficult to doublecheck all of that while I'm running these loose numbers. Go read Dept H and enjoy Sharlene Kindt's incredible colors!).

Did you crunch any numbers on your hobby this year? Miles flown, Pokemons caught, VHS tapes melted? Let me know!