Read this post in italian here.
This year I managed to read 48 books, counting fiction, non fiction and short fiction. I was hoping to reach the 50 books threshold, but I’m still satisfied: I’ve read 11 more books compared to 2016, that’s already something.
Let’s dive deep into some statistics: if I count only the authors and not the books (I’ve read three books by Scalzi and two by Bujold), I’ve read 22 male authors and 17 female authors, without taking into account single short stories and short story collections by multiple authors. Not bad, it’s a satisfying level of equality, especially if compared to last years’ results… if only all anthologies on the market had this amount of female authors!
I still need to read more stories from different voices (authors of color, etc), so if you have recs let me know!
If last year writing this post had been surprisingly easy, I had a hard time this year. To select 5 books I had to let go of stories with women giving birth to planets, aristocrats in a post-scarcity world, an undying love, an ambassador on a cold planet, seasilk spinners, red-clad women, a bunch of desperate refugees crossing a desert Europe, and aliens who cannot lie. (If you can’t recognize all stories I mentioned, there’s a list at the end of this post! :D)
So yeah, not easy. In no particular order, here’s the list:
NINEFOX GAMBIT, Yoon Ha Lee (review here)
In a universe where math is essential to use weapons and strategies, and being in harmony with the official calendar is crucial to guarantee the stability of reality itself (including the aforementioned technologies) captain Kel Cheris is ready to be disgraced due to her use of heretic tactics in battle. She gets another assignment instead: take back the Fortress of Scattered Needles from a bunch of heretics. To do so she needs the help of the arch-traitor general Jedao, kept in a ghost-like state by the empire, to be used when needed. He’s a madman, but he’s also a genius...
A book that throws you into the action without any explanation whatsoever, just as I love it. There’s room for a lot of sense of wonder (math is pretty much magic here, it fits), a lot of action, a lot of intrigue… it’s not a perfect book, but of everything I’ve read in 2017 this is the one who struck me more, with its interesting ideas and charismatic characters.
I’d love to translate it in Italian someday.
THE GREAT DERANGEMENT, Amitav Ghosh
Let’s talk about non-fiction! Amitav Ghosh may be an important author, appreciated by intellectuals, who gets people to queue to see him talk at book fairs… but he’s a nerd and he won the Clarke Award in 1997 with The Calcutta Chromosome.
And this essay starts with the question “how comes when someone talks about climate change they get branded as sci-fi and thus undervalued?” Because climate change isn’t sci-fi, it’s real, and one day this will be remembered as the time of the Great Derangement, since people do not discuss this problem enough. What follows is a captivating analysis of climate change, how it has struck different parts of the world and how it will strike in the future, with a long list of problems caused by colonialism. A must read for everyone: solarpunk warriors, sci-fi authors, and common people interested in knowing what is bound to happen if we don’t change our lifestyles quickly enough.
THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE, John Scalzi (review here)
In a distant future humanity has colonized space travelling through the Flow, a series of extra-dimensional “channels” which can be used to travel through space efficiently. Well, until now. Something weird is happening to the Flow… and this will be trouble for the new Emperox, Cardenia, for the commercial starship captain Kiva Lagos and for her rivals from the Nohamapetan family, and for the son of Count Claremont.
I’m going to remember 2017 as the year in which I discovered John Scalzi: a breath of fresh air, ironic, funny, capable of dealing with complex themes in an “accessible” style.
I chose The Collapsing Empire for this list because, while it’s not perfect (it has a terrible infodump and it’s too cliffhanger-y for my tastes), it’s still a fun read, rich in intrigue and complex characters. Especially Kiva Lagos, she’s best.
INSIDE STORY: THE POWER OF THE TRANSFORMATIONAL ARC, Dara Marks
Almost every story has a character arc, no matter if the character manages to change or not. But how to make the interior and exterior struggles of our characters effective, how to link them properly? How to identify the thematic intention and how to identify and use your main character’s fatal flaw to force them to change themselves and the world around them?
Marks has your answers. Then yeah, the hard work is all yours. But thanks to graphs and charts there’s enough to create a blueprint and to test the strengths (and identify the weaknesses) of every story you want to write.
This is a book I wish I had read years ago, I should have read it years ago, and that everyone who ever wants to try to write something has to nail it to their brain.
A must to read (and to re-read).
SHARDS OF HONOR, Lois McMaster Bujold (review here)
Cordelia Naismith is on a new planet with her team of scientists, but something unexpected happens and she finds herself alone on the aforementioned planet… well, except for one of her severely wounded ensign, and an officer from Barrayar, a militaristic planet for which Cordelia feels little sympathy. But this officer isn’t your standard Barrayaran guy, he’s Aral Vorkosigan, the Butcher of Komarr… and in his case we can talk of a officer and gentleman.
When I had started planning for this post I hadn’t taken into account I could have read more awesome books before the end of the year, I wasn’t expecting to find some other novel I would have deemed to be list-worthy. And yet here we are. Cordelia is a very fascinating character, strong and human, and so is Aral, but in a different way. Between love, intrigue, war and delicate balances, the plot flows in a very interesting way, and at a certain point I realized I didn’t want to put the book down… but I also didn’t want it to finish, ever.
What do you say? Have you read anything you'd love to recommend? I can't wait to see what 2018 will bring me in terms of reading!
[The novels I mentioned earlier are: The Stars Are Legion (x), Aristoi (x), Elysium (x), The Left Hand of Darkness (x), A Door Into ocean (x), The Handmaid’s Tale (x), Qualcosa là Fuori (x), Embassytown (x) ]
