Books I read in 2018

[Kyle]

Updated list with Adjustment Day and The Bottle Imp.

[mimekiller]

Neverworld Wake
by Marisha Pessl

I normally abhor anything YA but I really enjoyed Night Film, a previous book by the author so I gave this a shot.
Glad I did! A quick read and a fun story, another book that works best if you go in blind!

[Kyle]

Updated to add Night by Elie Wiesel. Wow. If you ever want to get angry at humanity and holocaust deniers, read this book- Elie Wiesel's account of being in several concentration camps at the age of 15. Very powerful. Short read.

[akiva]

[Kyle]

[Kyle]

So I’ve been reading a lot of books in the Laundry Files series...

[mimekiller]

Read the first Expanse book on vacation and OMG am I all in, going to watch the TV show now, purchased the next 3 books in the series, I'm alll in babbbyyyyy

[El Jefe]

[Kyle]

[El Jefe]

[Kyle]

I did it! I finished 30 books this year!

It's a bit of a cheat since I was almost done with The Wise Man's Fear before the year started- but I'm fairly confident I'll finish one or two more before the year is out.

And while some of these books are short- other were very, very long. So I felt I had a good representation.

[Kyle]

I just finished The Lies of Locke Lamora, which brings my book count to 33, which I'm pretty happy with.

In a year that involved a LOT of Laundry Files books, I also discovered two series which I now adore after reading the first book in each series- The Broken Earth series and the Gentlemen Bastards series. So I'll probably be reading a bunch of that next year.

[Phoebe]

[mimekiller]

Finished Expanse book 4 which has a lukewarm response from fans due to the smaller scope compared to previous books but I love space colony stuff so it worked for me. Reading book 5 in the series and taking a break with ANOTHER SF series called Donovan.

[El Jefe]

Thanks to a friendly loaner, I got introduced to some great sci-fi this past year. Much of it was stuff I always meant to get around to, but just never did. Without really being able to afford new fiction, the friendly loans were awesome.

Star Drive - Went back and read the spine trilogy for this old sci-fantasy RPG setting. It's quite good, and a hell of a setting in general. Even holds up pretty well.

The Culture - Fantastic setting, absolutely love everything about the Minds and the harder sci-fi style when it comes to tech, society, and tactics. Hate everything about virtually every human character ever in almost every one of theses books. I don't recall a single human character that wasn't either borderline mentally broken or just plain horrible. (Yeah, that's some exaggeration, but seriously...Banks loves him some awful characters). The Chairmaker broke me. The highlight was definitely the one featuring the Mind Moot (totally can't remember the name of it), because the Minds are awesome and humans should never be allowed to run anything every again.

The Bobiverse - Got to finish off this e-press series. It's definitely not the best written out there, and it absolutely has some white dude view problems. But it's a fun story about Von Neumann probes, and the science is hard enough while still being fun.

The Expanse - I knew absolutely nothing about the show or the books before reading it, save for catching the infamous CQB scene while channel flipping once. The first three books deserve to be enshrined up there with Heat, Dark Matter, and a few others for world-building and tight scripting. They tie together to form one of the most complete and tightly woven stories I've read in the last two decades. The show is good, to at least see some of this visually, but it falls flat when it comes to the characters. (Not due to the actors, just mostly due to directing and the nature of the medium). The characters in the books are probably some of the most interesting I've delved into with sci-fi. Mass Effect characters might come close, but that's a lot easier to do with a 40 hour, $180 million dollar movie. Things tail off as books go on, and the most recent one has some seriously questionable authorial decisions. But, the series holds together well, even this far in. One of the biggest things I can recommend with the books is the boomerang characters. Some seemingly minor, unimportant soul will inevitable come back around to have a great deal of relevance. And this is used consistently and quite well. That's not easy to do with non-mains.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet - Becky Chambers does this series, and it's absolutely lovely. This is almost like reading sci-fi of the 50's and 60's, as she seems to focus in on sci-fi that is designed as a conversation starter. Each volume is a stand-alone tale, giving peeks in random corners of a really diverse, non-human centric setting. There's little in the way of combat, and this isn't in any way military sci-fi. If you're looking for some good exploratory sci-fi that would normally have me in a diner with coffee and two packs of Camels for three hours in discussion (when I still did that, and you could still do that)...this is what you need to get.

Ancillary Justice (The Imperial Radch series) - Ann Leckie wants you toss out everything you think you know about how gender identity, body morphs, and sci-fi interact. I'm not really sure how to describe this setting, other than to say that I loved the hell out of it. It's confusing and jumbled and wonderful.

[akiva]