2004: Stuff: Reading
Jan. 7th, 2005 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentSo I read a bunch of books last year, and some of them were quite good.
You want more than that?
Depending on how you count (whether you include standalone novellas, whether you include graphic novels), I read between 75 and 85 books in 2004. That's quite a lot more than in 2003, and possibly more than I can comfortably assimilate--I think that this year I might go slower, and give myself more time to think about each book.
About half of the books I read were new, which is to say they were published in 2004, and the vast majority were sf of some kind. Authors new or mostly new to me in 2004 included Alasdair Gray, David Mitchell, Jeff Vandermeer and Gene Wolfe; you could, if you liked, draw some lines between those authors, in terms of their fondness for metafictional or postmodern writing. [1]
Older books
A significant chunk of the older books I read this year were picked by the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
instant_fanzine book group. We ended up reading a quite diverse selection of books over the eight months the group has been running, and I think it's done me good. Not because I liked every title--I didn't care much for Transmetropolitan or The Eyre Affair, and I couldn't even finish Midnight's Children--but because it prompted me to read books I'd been planning to get around to for ages (such as Fahrenheit 451 or Lanark), as well as books I would never normally have thought of picking up (most notably Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, but also Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I enjoyed both). My favourite of the selections was probably David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which isn't as impressively diverse as Cloud Atlas but is plenty clever and enjoyable nonetheless. Honourable mention goes to The Name of the Rose, despite the fact that it's one of those books I don't feel nearly clever enough for (I haven't watched the film, yet, either, though the DVD is now sitting within arm's reach).
In other reading, I caught up with a number of recent sf novels. I read Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk sequence--Pashazade, Effendi and Felaheen--and came away somewhat disappointed. The world of Grimwood's stories is fascinating, and when he's writing about that world he can be vivid and exciting; but I found much of the rest of his writing fairly pedestrian, or even bad, and few of the characters really came to life for me. The best of the three was certainly Effendi--I thought it had the most interesting plot, and showed the most of Grimwood's strengths. On the other hand, I liked both Jeff Vandermeer's Veniss Underground, a surreal, far-future sf novel in three parts (though not as much as I liked his collection City of Saints and Madmen), and Justina Robson's Mappa Mundi, a near-future thriller about a conceptual breakthrough in the science of the mind (although again, not as much as I liked her subsequent novel Natural History). And I reread Charles Stross' Cthulu spy thriller The Atrocity Archives, and enjoyed it just as much the second time around.
I read Maul by Tricia Sullivan, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and Darwin's Children by Greg Bear because they were nominated for either the BSFA or the Clarke award (or both). The Bear I thought very clunky, and not particularly bold on the ideas front; the Sullivan I thought witty, intelligent and very good, although possibly fifty pages could have been trimmed from the middle of the book; and Pattern Recognition I found to be a fascinating novel. I still have no idea whether it's sf, but as a portrait of the modern world I haven't seen anything else to match it.
Classic novels didn't feature strongly in my reading; it's one of those weaknesses I plan to rectify 'at some point', since when I do make time for them I very often find they're classics for a reason. Case in point: I thought Brave New World was superb--and I prefer it to the obvious comparator, 1984, on just about every level. I think Huxley's book is stylistically and conceptually more interesting than Orwell's, and more relevant too. Big Brother is certainly a reality, it's not in the way Orwell imagined; but by contrast, the Brave New World is on some level already a reality, and will always be a reality. At its core, Huxley's novel is about how society is, not how it might be. I also read and liked: Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We (otherwise known as 'the inspiration for 1984) this year; Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (though I think I'm going to have to read it again sometime to fully understand it); and Rudy Rucker's insane transreal extravaganza, White Light. I wasn't so impressed by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness--it's structurally interesting, but it didn't move me. Perhaps I was already too familiar with the central story.
Comics
I didn't read a huge amount of comics this year, but there were three that I particularly liked. Y: The Last Man, following the travels of the titular last man (and his monkey) across an America in which all the other men mysteriously dropped dead one day, continued to be excellent. I'm not certain if comics are eligible for the Tiptree Award, but if they are this should certainly be in consideration. Ian McDonald's toyland murder-mystery, Kling Klang Klatch is equally fun, and far more bizarre; and the concluding issues of Grant Morrison's X-Men run, collected as Here Comes Tomorrow are excellent, particularly the future epilogue.
I also liked Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, which I think will make a very good TV series (if that's still happening--I haven't heard anything about it for a while), and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta--although the latter not as much as many, and certainly not as much as I like Watchmen. This was also the year that Fantagraphics started putting together The Complete Peanuts. I have the first two volumes, covering the first four years of Peanuts, way back in the 1950s, and have greatly enjoyed rediscovering strips I last read five years ago or more (as well as ones that have never been collected before. Charlotte Braun was certainly a surprise...)
Non-fiction
Every year I promise myself I'll read more non-fiction, and every year I end up managing only half-a-dozen titles or so. Still, at least I can say that my hit rate was high; the two books that I read by Francis Spufford were both superb. The Backroom Boys is a sort of history of twentieth century British engineering; or to put it another way, a history of the boffin. There are chapters covering Vodafone, Elite, the human genome project and, of course, Beagle 2, and Spufford covers all his chosen topics with an accurate and sympathetic eye. I think even non-geeks would like this book. The Child That Books Built is equally good, but very different, being a short memoir of a reading life. There is much in it that I recognise about myself, although Spufford's experiences of discovering science fiction were somewhat different to mine.
I also enjoyed Making Book, a collection of fannish and other writings by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Electronic Brains by Mike Halley, which is to computers what The Backroom Boys is to boffins.
Short fiction
I've posted a fairly comprehensive roundup of my short fiction reading toshortform. It includes a section on collections and anthologies, but that only lists those published in 2004, of which I liked Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen the best, with special mentions for Ian Macleod's Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, and Lucius Shepard's Trujillo.
I read four older collections that deserve attention. Blood Child and Other Stories by Octavia Butler is a very slim volume, but one of very high quality; 'Speech Sounds', set in a world where a plague has removed people's ability to talk, was the most haunting story for me. The stories in Ian Macleod's first collection, Voyages by Starlight, are perhaps not quite as polished as those in Breathmoss, but almost all of them are beautiful and moving nonetheless. I liked '1/72nd Scale' and, particularly, 'Starship Day'; the latter demonstrates Macleod's talent for taking a fairly standard sf idea and making it fresh again. I didn't find Kelly Link's collection Stranger Things Happen as impressive as many did, but I liked about half the stories a great deal, particularly the pop-and-high culture remix of 'The Girl Detective' (I've liked most of the other stories I've read by Link--the ones published since Stranger Things Happen--a lot, so I'm looking forward to her new collection Magic For Beginners). Cory Doctorow's debut collection, A Place So Foreign & Eight More I enjoyed a lot, though it made me think that Stross and Doctorow should perhaps not be grouped together quite as often as they are. Yes, they collaborate a lot, but their solo works feel quite different (and I think maybe, on balance, I prefer Doctorow).
One thing I didn't do in myshortform post was to pick any sort of overall top ten. That's partly because it's just damn hard, and partly because I was saving it for this post. I ended up with eleven, anyway.
New books
I read 36 new novels this year, almost all of them sf, and it seems to me that it's been a good to excellent year for the field. There are some titles that I'm sure you've all heard me talk about many times, but once more, with feeling (as they say):
My favourite novel of the year is either River of Gods by Ian McDonald--a vibrant, dense, fantastically alive portrait of India and the world, fifty years from now--or Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell--a clockwork marvel of a book, all six parts interlinked in numerous ways, that reaches from our past to our future, and tells many truths along the way. They are both big, loud novels. Geoff Ryman's Air is quieter, more thoughtful, perhaps more moving, and I liked it almost as much: the writing is clear and beautiful, and it tells a story that matters. Susanna Clarke's much-hailed fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, meanwhile, is just about as good as the hype would have you believe; no, it doesn't need to be 800 pages long, but I'm glad that it is, because it's a book to get lost in, and marvel at over and over again.
I read four other debut novels this year, and they were all good. Two were fantasy, and two science fiction; all were very different. Tony Ballantyne's Recursion is probably the weakest of the four, although it was the one I was most looking forward to at the start of the year; it has a distinctly old-style feel to it, with a notable Dick influence. Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife is a moving and engaging love story that doesn't short-change its ideas; but it's too long, and the wife is sadly not as well-realised as the time traveler. KJ Bishop's The Etched City is lush and surreal and beautiful; and Steph Swainston's much-lauded (though latterly overshadowed by Strange & Norrell, it seems) The Year of Our War reinvents epic fantasy by paring it down to the bone and adding great dollops of weirdness and wonder.
Elsewhere, Gene Wolfe reclaimed epic fantasy rather than reinvented it--specifically, in The Knight he reclaimed the quest fantasy, and wove an exciting and meaningful tale around the adventures of Able, a boy from our world who finds himself a man and a knight in another. It's good, but it's only half a novel--for reasons best known to themselves, the publishers have put out the second half, The Wizard, as a separate book. Since I haven't yet finished The Wizard, I can't really pass judgement on The Knight; I don't yet have all the pieces of the puzzle and it's always possible, though I think in this case highly unlikely, that I'll be disappointed by the ending.
Other very good novels that I read this year include Stephen Baxter's Exultant, the second volume of a thematic trilogy and a space opera on an almost Stapledonian scale. One plot thread involves a little too much collecting of magic plot coupons, but otherwise it's one of Baxter's best novels, and I look forward to seeing how the meditation on human destiny concludes in Transcendent, later this year. Kim Stanley Robinson started a new Big Trilogy with Forty Signs of Rain; as the title suggests it deals with climate change, and specifically with the coming of the storm, the buildup to the tipping point. Points, plural, in fact, since there are personal, scientific, political and climactic pivots in the novel. Singularities of a kind, perhaps. The Snow, Adam Roberts' latest novel, at first glance also looks to be about climate change--but you shouldn't trust that first glance, because the novel is about the difference between surfaces and realities, and its central metaphor, though cunning and well-handled, is not what you think it is.
Ken Macleod's latest, Newton's Wake, is also good--and highly entertaining--but perhaps not as thought-provoking as some of his earlier books. Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds is a fast-paced and intriguing thriller ... at least up to the last hundred pages or so, where the denouement is dragged out to several times it's natural length. The very end, though, when it comes, is worth the wait.
I didn't read many genuinely disappointing novels, though, which suggests that either it was a very good year, or I'm just good at picking things I'll like. For me the let-downs included Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise, which in terms of quality is more on a par with Singularity Sky than Accelerando; Iain Banks' The Algebraist, although this is possibly unfair because it's hugely readable--I just don't think it's as good as it should be, and the plot 'twist' annoyed me no end; Gregory Benford's Beyond Infinity, which is a fairly weak far-future tale; and Cory Doctorow's second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, which captured certain elements of technology-enhanced modern life well, but was a bit lightweight (I have, however, high hopes for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town).
So, that about covers everything I've read this year. Lists are kinda compulsory with this sort of thing, so I present:
[1] Or just say that this year's reading was all about TEH META, I suppose.
You want more than that?
Depending on how you count (whether you include standalone novellas, whether you include graphic novels), I read between 75 and 85 books in 2004. That's quite a lot more than in 2003, and possibly more than I can comfortably assimilate--I think that this year I might go slower, and give myself more time to think about each book.
About half of the books I read were new, which is to say they were published in 2004, and the vast majority were sf of some kind. Authors new or mostly new to me in 2004 included Alasdair Gray, David Mitchell, Jeff Vandermeer and Gene Wolfe; you could, if you liked, draw some lines between those authors, in terms of their fondness for metafictional or postmodern writing. [1]
Older books
A significant chunk of the older books I read this year were picked by the
instant_fanzine book group. We ended up reading a quite diverse selection of books over the eight months the group has been running, and I think it's done me good. Not because I liked every title--I didn't care much for Transmetropolitan or The Eyre Affair, and I couldn't even finish Midnight's Children--but because it prompted me to read books I'd been planning to get around to for ages (such as Fahrenheit 451 or Lanark), as well as books I would never normally have thought of picking up (most notably Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin, but also Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I enjoyed both). My favourite of the selections was probably David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, which isn't as impressively diverse as Cloud Atlas but is plenty clever and enjoyable nonetheless. Honourable mention goes to The Name of the Rose, despite the fact that it's one of those books I don't feel nearly clever enough for (I haven't watched the film, yet, either, though the DVD is now sitting within arm's reach).In other reading, I caught up with a number of recent sf novels. I read Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Arabesk sequence--Pashazade, Effendi and Felaheen--and came away somewhat disappointed. The world of Grimwood's stories is fascinating, and when he's writing about that world he can be vivid and exciting; but I found much of the rest of his writing fairly pedestrian, or even bad, and few of the characters really came to life for me. The best of the three was certainly Effendi--I thought it had the most interesting plot, and showed the most of Grimwood's strengths. On the other hand, I liked both Jeff Vandermeer's Veniss Underground, a surreal, far-future sf novel in three parts (though not as much as I liked his collection City of Saints and Madmen), and Justina Robson's Mappa Mundi, a near-future thriller about a conceptual breakthrough in the science of the mind (although again, not as much as I liked her subsequent novel Natural History). And I reread Charles Stross' Cthulu spy thriller The Atrocity Archives, and enjoyed it just as much the second time around.
I read Maul by Tricia Sullivan, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, and Darwin's Children by Greg Bear because they were nominated for either the BSFA or the Clarke award (or both). The Bear I thought very clunky, and not particularly bold on the ideas front; the Sullivan I thought witty, intelligent and very good, although possibly fifty pages could have been trimmed from the middle of the book; and Pattern Recognition I found to be a fascinating novel. I still have no idea whether it's sf, but as a portrait of the modern world I haven't seen anything else to match it.
Classic novels didn't feature strongly in my reading; it's one of those weaknesses I plan to rectify 'at some point', since when I do make time for them I very often find they're classics for a reason. Case in point: I thought Brave New World was superb--and I prefer it to the obvious comparator, 1984, on just about every level. I think Huxley's book is stylistically and conceptually more interesting than Orwell's, and more relevant too. Big Brother is certainly a reality, it's not in the way Orwell imagined; but by contrast, the Brave New World is on some level already a reality, and will always be a reality. At its core, Huxley's novel is about how society is, not how it might be. I also read and liked: Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We (otherwise known as 'the inspiration for 1984) this year; Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus (though I think I'm going to have to read it again sometime to fully understand it); and Rudy Rucker's insane transreal extravaganza, White Light. I wasn't so impressed by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness--it's structurally interesting, but it didn't move me. Perhaps I was already too familiar with the central story.
Comics
I didn't read a huge amount of comics this year, but there were three that I particularly liked. Y: The Last Man, following the travels of the titular last man (and his monkey) across an America in which all the other men mysteriously dropped dead one day, continued to be excellent. I'm not certain if comics are eligible for the Tiptree Award, but if they are this should certainly be in consideration. Ian McDonald's toyland murder-mystery, Kling Klang Klatch is equally fun, and far more bizarre; and the concluding issues of Grant Morrison's X-Men run, collected as Here Comes Tomorrow are excellent, particularly the future epilogue.
I also liked Warren Ellis' Global Frequency, which I think will make a very good TV series (if that's still happening--I haven't heard anything about it for a while), and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta--although the latter not as much as many, and certainly not as much as I like Watchmen. This was also the year that Fantagraphics started putting together The Complete Peanuts. I have the first two volumes, covering the first four years of Peanuts, way back in the 1950s, and have greatly enjoyed rediscovering strips I last read five years ago or more (as well as ones that have never been collected before. Charlotte Braun was certainly a surprise...)
Non-fiction
Every year I promise myself I'll read more non-fiction, and every year I end up managing only half-a-dozen titles or so. Still, at least I can say that my hit rate was high; the two books that I read by Francis Spufford were both superb. The Backroom Boys is a sort of history of twentieth century British engineering; or to put it another way, a history of the boffin. There are chapters covering Vodafone, Elite, the human genome project and, of course, Beagle 2, and Spufford covers all his chosen topics with an accurate and sympathetic eye. I think even non-geeks would like this book. The Child That Books Built is equally good, but very different, being a short memoir of a reading life. There is much in it that I recognise about myself, although Spufford's experiences of discovering science fiction were somewhat different to mine.
I also enjoyed Making Book, a collection of fannish and other writings by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, and Electronic Brains by Mike Halley, which is to computers what The Backroom Boys is to boffins.
Short fiction
I've posted a fairly comprehensive roundup of my short fiction reading to
shortform. It includes a section on collections and anthologies, but that only lists those published in 2004, of which I liked Jeff Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen the best, with special mentions for Ian Macleod's Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, and Lucius Shepard's Trujillo.I read four older collections that deserve attention. Blood Child and Other Stories by Octavia Butler is a very slim volume, but one of very high quality; 'Speech Sounds', set in a world where a plague has removed people's ability to talk, was the most haunting story for me. The stories in Ian Macleod's first collection, Voyages by Starlight, are perhaps not quite as polished as those in Breathmoss, but almost all of them are beautiful and moving nonetheless. I liked '1/72nd Scale' and, particularly, 'Starship Day'; the latter demonstrates Macleod's talent for taking a fairly standard sf idea and making it fresh again. I didn't find Kelly Link's collection Stranger Things Happen as impressive as many did, but I liked about half the stories a great deal, particularly the pop-and-high culture remix of 'The Girl Detective' (I've liked most of the other stories I've read by Link--the ones published since Stranger Things Happen--a lot, so I'm looking forward to her new collection Magic For Beginners). Cory Doctorow's debut collection, A Place So Foreign & Eight More I enjoyed a lot, though it made me think that Stross and Doctorow should perhaps not be grouped together quite as often as they are. Yes, they collaborate a lot, but their solo works feel quite different (and I think maybe, on balance, I prefer Doctorow).
One thing I didn't do in my
shortform post was to pick any sort of overall top ten. That's partly because it's just damn hard, and partly because I was saving it for this post. I ended up with eleven, anyway.11 good stories from 2004
'Flat Diane' by Daniel Abraham
'The Pasho' by Paolo Bacigalupi
'Mayflower II' by Stephen Baxter'
'Tetrarchs' by Alan DeNiro
'Arabian Wine' by Gregory Feeley
'Someone Else' by Karen Fishler
'The Annals of Eelin-Ok' by Jeffrey Ford
'Shiva in Shadow' by Nancy Kress
'The Faery Handbag' by Kelly Link
'The Voluntary State' by Christopher Rowe
'Three Days in a Border Town' by Jeff Vandermeer
New books
I read 36 new novels this year, almost all of them sf, and it seems to me that it's been a good to excellent year for the field. There are some titles that I'm sure you've all heard me talk about many times, but once more, with feeling (as they say):
My favourite novel of the year is either River of Gods by Ian McDonald--a vibrant, dense, fantastically alive portrait of India and the world, fifty years from now--or Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell--a clockwork marvel of a book, all six parts interlinked in numerous ways, that reaches from our past to our future, and tells many truths along the way. They are both big, loud novels. Geoff Ryman's Air is quieter, more thoughtful, perhaps more moving, and I liked it almost as much: the writing is clear and beautiful, and it tells a story that matters. Susanna Clarke's much-hailed fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, meanwhile, is just about as good as the hype would have you believe; no, it doesn't need to be 800 pages long, but I'm glad that it is, because it's a book to get lost in, and marvel at over and over again.
I read four other debut novels this year, and they were all good. Two were fantasy, and two science fiction; all were very different. Tony Ballantyne's Recursion is probably the weakest of the four, although it was the one I was most looking forward to at the start of the year; it has a distinctly old-style feel to it, with a notable Dick influence. Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveler's Wife is a moving and engaging love story that doesn't short-change its ideas; but it's too long, and the wife is sadly not as well-realised as the time traveler. KJ Bishop's The Etched City is lush and surreal and beautiful; and Steph Swainston's much-lauded (though latterly overshadowed by Strange & Norrell, it seems) The Year of Our War reinvents epic fantasy by paring it down to the bone and adding great dollops of weirdness and wonder.
Elsewhere, Gene Wolfe reclaimed epic fantasy rather than reinvented it--specifically, in The Knight he reclaimed the quest fantasy, and wove an exciting and meaningful tale around the adventures of Able, a boy from our world who finds himself a man and a knight in another. It's good, but it's only half a novel--for reasons best known to themselves, the publishers have put out the second half, The Wizard, as a separate book. Since I haven't yet finished The Wizard, I can't really pass judgement on The Knight; I don't yet have all the pieces of the puzzle and it's always possible, though I think in this case highly unlikely, that I'll be disappointed by the ending.
Other very good novels that I read this year include Stephen Baxter's Exultant, the second volume of a thematic trilogy and a space opera on an almost Stapledonian scale. One plot thread involves a little too much collecting of magic plot coupons, but otherwise it's one of Baxter's best novels, and I look forward to seeing how the meditation on human destiny concludes in Transcendent, later this year. Kim Stanley Robinson started a new Big Trilogy with Forty Signs of Rain; as the title suggests it deals with climate change, and specifically with the coming of the storm, the buildup to the tipping point. Points, plural, in fact, since there are personal, scientific, political and climactic pivots in the novel. Singularities of a kind, perhaps. The Snow, Adam Roberts' latest novel, at first glance also looks to be about climate change--but you shouldn't trust that first glance, because the novel is about the difference between surfaces and realities, and its central metaphor, though cunning and well-handled, is not what you think it is.
Ken Macleod's latest, Newton's Wake, is also good--and highly entertaining--but perhaps not as thought-provoking as some of his earlier books. Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds is a fast-paced and intriguing thriller ... at least up to the last hundred pages or so, where the denouement is dragged out to several times it's natural length. The very end, though, when it comes, is worth the wait.
I didn't read many genuinely disappointing novels, though, which suggests that either it was a very good year, or I'm just good at picking things I'll like. For me the let-downs included Charles Stross' Iron Sunrise, which in terms of quality is more on a par with Singularity Sky than Accelerando; Iain Banks' The Algebraist, although this is possibly unfair because it's hugely readable--I just don't think it's as good as it should be, and the plot 'twist' annoyed me no end; Gregory Benford's Beyond Infinity, which is a fairly weak far-future tale; and Cory Doctorow's second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, which captured certain elements of technology-enhanced modern life well, but was a bit lightweight (I have, however, high hopes for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town).
So, that about covers everything I've read this year. Lists are kinda compulsory with this sort of thing, so I present:
12 Good Books I Read In 2004
Exultant by Stephen Baxter
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell by Susanna Clarke
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
River of Gods by Ian McDonald
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
Air by Geoff Ryman
The Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
The Year of Our War by Steph Swainston
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer
Y: The Last Man by Brian K Vaughn and Pia Guerra
[1] Or just say that this year's reading was all about TEH META, I suppose.
