Eugene Fischer

Tag: Ann Leckie

Reading 2015: Final Roundup

MyRealChildren_Jo-WaltonI never did a Reading2015 post for December, but I only read one book during the month, My Real Children by Jo Walton, which I consumed on Christmas day. I adored it. It’s the story of a woman who, in her old age, can remember living two distinctly different lives, stemming from a single choice in her youth. It’s an alternate history of alternate histories, with chapters alternating between two very different life courses that, in the end, ask you to make an impossible ethical and aesthetic judgement, what Ursula Le Guin on the back cover calls “a sort of super Sophie’s Choice.” I’m always a sucker for branching narrative, the way the space between the threads opens room for new resonances and emotions, just as a paper towel doubled over can absorb more than the same sheet applied flat. This book might just be my new go-to example of the form.

So here’s where that leaves my stats for 2015:

  • 67 total books
  • 35 prose books
  • 32 graphic novels
  • 26 women authors (writer or artist)
  • 44 books authored or co-authored by women
  • 33 male authors (writer or artist)
  • 28 books authored or co-authored by men.
  • Best month: September (12 books – all GNs)
  • Worst month: December (1 book – prose)

As with last year, here the the books (not counting re-reads) that stand out in most my memory (which isn’t exactly the same thing exactly as how much I liked them):

  1. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine
  2. My Real Children by Jo Walton
  3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas Disch
  5. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
  6. The Sculptor by Scott McCloud
  7. Tenth of December by George Saunders
  8. Get In Trouble by Kelly Link
  9. Two Girls, Fat and Thin by Mary Gaitskill
  10. Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman
  11. Star Side of Bird Hill by Naomi Jackson
  12. The Wilds by Julia Elliott
  13. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

Some interesting things include the presence of only one graphic novel, despite the form making up nearly half of my reading. That’s largely due to my having re-read all of Dykes to Watch Out For, all of which were ineligible for this list.  Another is which Mary Gaitskill book made the list. I think that in many ways the collection Because They Wanted To is the stronger of the two Gaitskill volumes I read this past year, but it’s her first novel my mind alights on more easily. And I can’t do anything about the wiring of memory, and what it may have to do with two books I read in just the last two month making my top 5.

It was my resolution for 2015 to read 100 books, and I fell short not just of that mark, but of my 2014 mark of 73 books read. I attribute this primarily to having started doing some work for television, which prompted me to massively increase my television watching. I would say the TV I’ve consumed, added to the hundreds of hours of Fallout 4 I played in November, is easily equal to 33 books. But since I don’t have any better ideas, I’m going to go ahead an roll over my 2015 resolution to 2016, and aim for 100 books read in the year to come.

Reading 2015: November

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As predicted, Fallout 4 dominated my media consumption time this past month. The first three books here I read in the week before the game came out, and the last two I read in the final days of the month, while traveling for Thanksgiving and far away from my console.

  1. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie – It took until about halfway through the book for the story to cohere and reveal its stakes, but once it did I was deeply invested. I’m not sure I found the linguistic handling of gender as mind-blowing as other readers did, though I did think it very clever. This is enjoyably chewy space opera, and miles better than I expect first novels to be. My only real complaint was how many places the plot hinges on coincidence, with multiple characters just happening to pop up again despite the passage of decades and centuries. To its credit the book does at least address the issue, by having the main character ruminate on the dominant culture’s religious treatment of coincidence each time, but I found this gesture to mollify more than it excused.
  2. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie
  3. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie – I read these last two back-to-back, as one long story, and so don’t really have opinions on them as distinct entities. It says something that I was invested enough after the first book (which I’d owned since it came out but just finally got around to reading) that I picked up and read the rest of the trilogy immediately. And I think I’m glad I waited until the series was finished, because approaching it this way was quite enjoyable. Books 2 and 3 are palpably smaller in scale than book 1; the Space Operatics feel comparatively muted. But the character work being done is in many ways superior to the first book, in no small part because the premise is already established.
  4. Superman: Last Son of Krypton by Elliot S! Maggin – I last read this book back when my age was in the single digits. While it’s set in a very 70s era of the Superman mythos, and the dialog tics feel dated, there is a tremendous amount here that captures things I love about Superman. This Superman isn’t naive at all, he’s brilliant and principled, and his relationship with Lex Luthor has the resonant complexity of myth. Also, rereading it, this is clearly where I learned the word “philtrum,” (misspelled throughout as “filtrum”) which is notable because, when my parents decided to adopt a child when I was 10, Filtrum is what I suggested that he be named. (Also, on the book cover Maggin’s middle initial is punctuated with a simple period, but he often used an exclamation point instead, which I love so much, I refuse to render it any other way.)
  5. This Shape We’re In by Jonathan Lethem – This book was lent to me by Karen Meisner after I told her how much I loved stories in which the plot is dictated by the physical shape of the setting, especially if that shape is primarily linear. My example was the movie Snowpiercer; they’re at the back of the train, they want to be at the front of the train, and all of human society stands in the way: go! I love stories like that, and Karen correctly predicted I would enjoy this, in which the characters are all living in a giant organism, and slowly make their way from the rear to the head in pursuit of goals it would be spoilery to talk too much about. But this is a short piece, probably a novella, and great fun.