This blog covers science fiction, fantasy, and other adjacent genre reviews, which I tend to read in rapid succession (one to two books a week.) A few of my friends ask me for recommendations, so I decided to start this blog to have a place to log what I’ve read and what I thought at the time. (I love the idea of Goodreads, but in practice find it a little messy to navigate for my own purpose.)
I like to read a lot. Books are magic to me, and the great ones leave a lasting impression. I think there’s joy to be had in high art and pop junk food books and think they’re all worthy of attention–though I do think there is a difference in intent, and it’s weird to pretend there isn’t. So here I may cover books across the full spectrum of SF/fantasy/adjacent.
The rules:
- Review everything I read in SF/fantasy genres, in the order I finish them, whether I loved it or didn’t get it
- Avoid “DNF” and “just didn’t do it for me.” I believe that most authors try hard and want to do something great, so even for the books I don’t like, I’ll try to say why
- Buy every book I review or check it out of the library, so no NetGalley detachment
- I will add an Overly Reductive Summary (ORS) to every review, as a forcing mechanism, in case I wander off the reservation
Full disclosure: I read reasonably quickly, I could and want to try to read more deeply than I probably do. I am not a fanboi/gurl/they, in that books either work for me or don’t, and I’m not dogmatic or loyal to authors or publishers blindly.
In case someone else wanders here by accident and wants to calibrate preferences, here are my all-time personal favourite, desert island books:
- Richard Powers, Goldbug Variations (but really any of his works)
- Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
- Jose Saramago, Blindness
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- Kazuo Ishiguro, Unconsoled, not necessarily popular vote
- George Elliot, Middlemarch
- Italo Calvino, If On a Winter Night a Traveler
- G K Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
- J L Borges, Short Stories
- James Joyce, Ulysses
- Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo Trilogy
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
- William Gaddis, The Information
- Kobe Abe, Kangaroo Notebook
- Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance
And here are some of my all-time favourite sci-fi/fantasy books (not necessarily revelatory, every time I look at it I think I need to add more):
- Isaac Asimov, Foundation Series
- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
- Susannah Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
- Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun series
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
- Ben Bova, The Grand Tour
- Samuel R. Delaney, Dhalgren
- Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass
- Diana Wynne Jones, Chrestomanci series
- Dan Simmons, Hyperion
- Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow
My more recent “ooooh shoooot dangggg” non-genre books:
- Michel Faber, Book of Strange New Things
- Helen DeWitt, Some Tricks
- Rachel Cusk, Transit
And my more recent “ooooh shoooot dangggg” SF/fantasy books:
- Ted Chiang, Exhalations
- Martha Wells, Murderbot series
- M John Harrison, Light (a bit older but still… dang.)
- Drew Hayes, Heroes series (self published and so much fun)
If On a Winter's Night, a Traveler... 