Favorite books of 2018 and year in review

2018 has been an exceptionally good year in terms of my own consumer decisions. I have never read so many books that I would wholeheartedly recommend to others. I started some amazing series and took up some rereads and golden oldies that I appreciated all over again.

BOOKS I READ PUBLISHED IN 2018

I haven’t actually read many books published in 2018. I’ve read mainly science fiction from 2018 and the fantasy novels just didn’t really arouse my interest.

Catling’s The Cloven.

However, my favorite novel published in 2018 happens to be a fantasy novel: The Cloven, by B. Catling. The Cloven is the final part of his deeply weird and disturbing Vorrh trilogy. Catling maintained a level of tension, unsettling weirdness and mystery throughout his trilogy and this one is a very satisfying sendoff. The way he incorporates creepiness and Biblical mythology is very intriguing.

Dempow Torishima’s Sysiphean.

Another deeply weird novel. These are four interrelated stories and the joy comes from figuring out how this world works. Reality has changed so much through genetic engineering that cellular and galactic processes start to look alike. It’s full of mindblowing ideas but not for those who need strong main characters.

Catherynne M. Valente’s Space Opera.

I am absolutely convinced of Valente’s writing talent, and I love Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but this novel was a bit too much. Like eating your way through a swimming pool of toffee to find the golden nuggets at the bottom.

Peter Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution.

A novella but might have been a novel had it been published in the 50s. I liked this one a lot. It has some great ideas and a very interesting setting. Watts is at his best when he writes about isolated groups of psychologically damaged people.

BOOKS FROM 2018 I STILL WANT TO READ

• Richard K. Morgan’s Thin Air.
• Dave Hutchinson’s Europe at Dawn.
• Alastair Reynolds’ Elysium Fire.
• Robert Jackson Bennett’s Foundryside.

FAVORITE BOOKS NOT FROM 2018

Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999)

Catapulted itself into my all-time favorites list. More than a thousand pages of non-stop hilarious awesomeness and a coming together of many of my own interests. Probably Stephenson’s best novel.

 

John Harrison’s Light (2002) and Nova Swing (2006)

Months later, I still think back about these novels and their characters, like Ed Chianese and Vic Serotonin, and the crazy situations they ended up in, and I get a smile on my face. There is just this pathos about Harrison’s writing that speaks to me. More original than nearly anything that is published out there.

Frank Herbert’s Dune series

A great rediscovery for me. I knew Dune, but not the sequels. And what I discovered was a deeply thought out story with many philosophical ideas about human societies. Children of Dune (1976) and God Emperor of Dune (1981) may be my favorites of the sequels. These two novels really form the rest of the series after Dune itself. I hope to repeat this with Asimov’s Foundation series in 2019.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005)

The way Ishiguro crawls into the skin of his characters is absolutely stunning. Ishiguro drip-feeds information in a, deliberate way, step by step with Kathy’s conversational remembrances of her life. It is quite impressive how he manages this in a first-person narrative, at which he is apparently a master. This book shattered me a bit. I kept putting it down every other page because I had to think back to episodes of my own life.

Scott Hawkins’ The Library At Mount Char (2015)

I won’t even try to explain the story since it is so strange and dense, and following its twisting paths to see where they lead is one of the pleasures of reading the thing. Each chapter is a new combination of Weird fantasy, some absurdist black comedy, elements of cosmic horror and twisted violence, unexpected turns and interesting dialogues. Unpredictable and exciting.

GREATEST DISAPPOINTMENTS

Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 (2012)

Robinson’s great ideas are muffled under bad character writing. While its outlook was full of promise, I didn’t really understand the characters, didn’t understand their connection, and didn’t really understand the lacklustre plots either. It was rapidly sucking the life out of me.

Dan Brown’s Origin (2017)

Origin was an immensely painful reading experience where Brown constantly annoyed me with his irrelevant infodumping, transparent namedropping, fake mockups of websites and news stories, dumbed down overexplaining, hamfisted treatment of themes, cliche characters and boring story.