How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens and The Power of KM by Brent N. Hunter.

I rather enjoyed Charlie Stross's Saturn's Children which is about a post-flesh human society. I liked being referred to as 'pink goo' and the ultra-realistic space-travel was fun too. Stross is very hit and miss for me but when he's good I do like him a lot. The followup book, Neptune's Brood was also good but didn't really feel like it added much or progressed a sequence or anything.

Yoon Ha Lee is someone I've been enjoying this year, I think I read two of his books. Dragon Pearl is a pretty simple, but great fun, bit of YA sci-fi. Hard to put down but you'll finish it in a handful of hours so it's not a problem. But Phoenix Extravagant was great and I don't normally like fantasy at all. It's smart, well paced and Lee does, as always, have an interesting take on magic which I can't go in to too much detail about because spoilers. But it's well worth a read.

I think the best thing I've read this year is the book I'm currently reading, Peter F Hamilton's The Saints of Salvation, the final book in his current trilogy. Hamilton does epic-scale space opera like nobody else, on page count alone! I wasn't all that into the first Salvation book but it's been slowly building over the last howevermany thousands of pages to the point where I'm currently losing sleep due to reading late rather than sleeping. This is non ideal when the kid wakes me up at 6am every morning, but it's a sign of a good book. Hamilton's usual ludicrous scale over which the plot arcs applies, but as ever he backs it up with strong characters who you care about. It's not a deeply philosophical book, but it is a very exciting one.

I would also like to mention Can't You Sleep, Little Bear by Martin Waddell because it's just adorable. I find it hard to read the line "I've brought you the moon, Little Bear" without getting a bit emotional.

Related, big shout out to all the many, many picture books I've read this year. Too many to list, but there's some really wonderful stories out there which happen to be being told with big pictures and simple language. One of my favourites is Death, Duck and the Tulip (I suggest muting the video and just reading). I don't just read them with my kid, a good picture book is worth reading just because it's a good book.

Henry Rider Haggard - People of the Mist

Very few books have captured me like this one. Such a great tale of adventure and fantasy. I genuinely love this book.

Also it’s so old you can get it for free.

According to my book-tracking spreadsheet, I've rated three books 5/5.

The Winter of the Witch by Katherine Arden. Wonderfully written, engaging characters, a picturesque setting, and a great weaving of traditional folk tales with historical figures.

The Trouble With Peace by Joe Abercrombie. Excellent world building. Joe does a great fight scene, and his characters are well-rounded out. This is the second book in his second trilogy in the same world, and it's much better than first of this trilogy. Highly recommended to any low-fantasy fans.

Guards! Guards! by Sir Terry Pratchett. My intro to Discworld, of which I have only read about four more so far. I laughed the whole way through. Carrot is definitely my favourite character so far.

In hindsight, that seems about right. I'm about to finish my last book of the year, which I will probably rate a 4/5. That will take me to 26 books read, with three 5s, fourteen 4s, and nine 3s.

I’m somewhat embarrassed, I’m pretty sure I’ve only read one book so far this year, and it’s Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising. I’m almost done with it, and I’ve generally enjoyed it, although the romantic subplot is pretty cringe.

Right now Evicted by Matthew Desmond comes to mind. Absolutely gripping throughout, and provides a very useful lens into American society.

I've written previously about Moby Dick (Herman Melville, 1851) and The Waves (Virginia Woolf, 1931) on here, among others, which I'm quite enjoying.

Earlier in the year I read The God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy, 1997), also a fiction piece, which tackles some of the extant classism and associated racism in post-colonial India; specifically, how its internalization in the psyche of a child absolutely destroys their identity. There's a lot in the way of trauma theory to analyze here (childhood trauma, intergenerational trauma, cultural trauma), and it has some heavy moments, but it has a thoughtful, introspective, perhaps beautiful side too. What stood out to me the most about this novel was its language. Many of the chapters are written from the perspective of one of two children, and the way that they see the world is represented far more accurately than most adult writers are capable of. At a certain age, I think most people forget what it is children really care about and how they formulate thoughts. Their short attention spans, strange imaginations, interest in the mundane, and mischaracterization of objects are described with grace throughout the book. It reminds me a bit of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) in this regard, which I also felt did a good job capturing moments of childhood.

I also recently finished There, There (Tommy Orange, 2018). It is quite simply an expression of Native American life in a country that has all but forgotten that Native communities or people still exist. Orange presents the lived experiences of several characters through a series of converging narratives centered around the reconciliation of modern society and the inherited trauma and general difficulties associated with being a Native person. It's wonderfully complex, although similarly heavy as the previous book I mentioned, for reasons that should be self-evident. I'd recommend it. Here's a quote from the prologue that struck me:

Urban Indians were the generation born in the city. We've been moving for a long time, but the land moves with you like memory. An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. [...] Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. [...] Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.

Lastly, I didn't read anywhere near the whole thing, but the pieces of Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) that I did go through were also extremely worthwhile. I'm very interested in her use of the "wake" as a multi-layered metaphor for the relationship between Black identity and personal/historical trauma; the wake as a funeral, as the path of a ship (or a bullet), as a state of being (to be "awake"; to be conscious), etc.

Keeping each of the definitions of wake in mind, I want to think and argue for one aspect of Black being in the wake as consciousness and to propose that to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding. To be "in" the wake, to occupy that grammar, the infinitive, might provide another way of theorizing, in/for/from what Frank Wilderson refers to as "stay[ing] in the hold of the ship." With each of those definitions of wake present throughout my text, I argue that rather than seeking a resolution to blackness’s ongoing and irresolvable abjection, one might approach Black being in the wake as a form of consciousness.

[...]

My project looks instead to current quotidian disasters in order to ask what, if anything, survives this insistent Black exclusion, this ontological negation, and how do literature, performance, and visual culture observe and mediate this un/survival. To do this work of staying in the wake and to perform wake work I look also to forms of Black expressive culture (like the works of poets and poet-novelists M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, and Kamau Brathwaite) that do not seek to explain or resolve the question of this exclusion in terms of assimilation, inclusion, or civil or human rights, but rather depict aesthetically the impossibility of such resolutions by representing the paradoxes of blackness within and after the legacies of slavery’s denial of Black humanity. I name this paradox the wake, and I use the wake in all of its meanings as a means of understanding how slavery’s violences emerge within the contemporary conditions of spatial, legal, psychic, material, and other dimensions of Black non/being as well as in Black modes of resistance.

What stands out to me in particular about her metaphor in the introduction is primarily the interrelation of the physical and emotional sides of the coin (or of the wake, I should say), and the way in which our discussion of the traumatic all too often hinges upon a framework that fails to properly take each of these variables into account (as well as the environment they are situated in). I do intend to go back and finish the entire text when I have the time, and I would recommend it for anyone looking to delve into some non-fiction about the "quotidian" aspects of Blackness in contemporary American society.

Favourite SFF standalone-ish. The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven

Favourite series. Chung Kuo Redux series by David Wingrove and Night Lords Omnibus by ABD

Favourite Literature. The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell and Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamson

Favourite from 2020. Wintersteel by Will Wight by being the only book from this year that i didnt dislike.

Favourite history. Histories by Herodotus and . India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765 by Richard M. Eaton

Duds. Inside Iran by Medea Benjamin. Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson.

Easily the best was a re-read - The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. It's the personal development book that will make all the other personal development books work.