Time for the annual rundown of last year’s books! The grand total ended up being 122 (though I suspect that’s actually 123, as I found a book I know I read but didn’t record, and I can’t remember at all what month I read it in. Oh well.) This is down from last year’s number, but I was doing a lot more temari this year, so I don’t consider this a failure.
- 26 were books I bought
- 11 were borrowed/gifts
- 5 were read as free ebooks online
- 81 were from the library
- 0 were rereads
Genre breakdown:
- 87 were SFF
- 33 were mysteries
- 1 was nonfiction
- 1 was a graphic novel
New (to me) series/authors:
- Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series. I started this one on a friend’s recommendation in January, and by September I had read all the books in the series currently in existence (12). So good! I love them. I was actually surprised to see I’d only started these in January, because it feels like I must have been reading them for a lot longer, so much space have they come to take up in my mind now. The short version, for those that haven’t read any of them, is that the main character of these books, Mary Russell, meets the now-retired Sherlock Holmes as a teenager. She becomes his apprentice, and later his partner. They made me come to love the Holmes-ian universe all the more.
- The Bordertown books. How did I not know about these before? Classic early urban fantasy, from back when urban fantasy was more about artistic creative types who saw magic existing in the real world, rather than mostly about solving mysteries (which I also love, don’t get me wrong.) I wrote about this more here. I remain frustrated that I haven’t yet been able to get copies of the earlier anthologies, now out-of-print.
- Alex Bledsoe. I started out by reading The Sword-Edged Blonde, which is a brilliant combination of hardboiled mystery in a classic fantasy setting. (The other two books in that series are good, too, but the first one is so far the best, in part because the other two involve a lot of flashbacks to flesh out the main character’s background, and thus the linearity of the story can be hard to remember.) But then he wrote a book in an entirely different setting, The Hum & the Shiver, and I think I love it even more. It is, in the author’s words, “gravel road fantasy” (as opposed to urban), taking place in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. Bledsoe cites Charles de Lint as one of his influences, and you can see it in the importance music plays in the magic the characters use. There’s some question as to whether this was going to be a one-off novel, but I really hope it’s not. There’s still a lot more I want to know about the main character and all the people of the town in general.
- Jo Walton. I read her newest book first, the stand-alone novel Among Others, and it was just wonderful. I especially loved how the main character explored her thoughts about growing up through her discussions of the science fiction and fantasy books she was reading, because it made her seem so real and so much like an actual friend. But then I decided that since I loved that book so much, as well as all of Walton’s book reviews on Tor.com, I should read her other stuff, too, so I’m now 2/3 through her Farthing trilogy. It’s less fantasy, in that it doesn’t have any magical elements, but definitely alternative reality, as it is set in a post-war England where WW2 ended in 1941 with a truce and Hitler was allowed to take over all of continental Europe except Russia, essentially. Each book features the same police detective being asked to solve a case that turns out to be very politically involved with the growing fascist movement in England. I can’t wait to get the third one.
- Kate Griffin’s Matthew Swift series. These books feature the most detailed and unique approach to the magic of urban fantasy I’ve yet seen. Matthew Swift is a sorcerer whose magic is absolutely tied to being in a urban setting and truly knowing his city. He knows London like it’s a living being, and he interacts with and manipulates it masterfully. Of course, it would be nice if people would stop trying to kill him all the time… I haven’t yet read the third one of these, but I really need to. So many books, so little time! (Oooh, yay, her blog notes that there are going to be at least 5 books in this series, if not more, so things to look forward to!)
- Richard Morgan. I technically started reading his stuff in 2010, but I think I didn’t really appreciate him truly until 2011, so there you go. His books are a lot harder edged, and the writing is what I can only think of as supremely male (and I don’t normally find myself thinking about the gender of the author at all,) but neither of those things are bad. For some reason, his stand-alone novel, Thirteen, (or Black Man, as it was originally known in the UK) is standing out to me as one of the most interesting things I read this year.
And I’m going to stop there, because I read so much new stuff this year, I’m never going to really be able to summarize it all. It’s really strange to notice that I didn’t reread a single book this year. I remember back when I was a teenager sometimes worrying that I would eventually run out of books that I was interested in reading, because I only loved these X authors, but seriously, there’s so much new stuff coming out all the time, and so much stuff I am still discovering, that I don’t have that worry anymore.
In future reading news, I got a Kindle for Christmas. Now I have the difficult decision of how to split up my reading selections. What do I read on the Kindle vs. real book? Library books would be an obvious choice, but currently my library’s ebook selection is… limited. So far, I’ve been buying things for the Kindle that are only available in electronic format, like novellas that authors put out between books, or short story collections, etc. Oh, the hardship!

































