2019-01-01: 2018 Book Reading in Review
Despite the best of intentions to spread my reading out more evenly across
the year, much of 2018's reading happened in concentrated bursts during
vacation (particularly my fall vacation, during which I read eleven books
in a little over two weeks). Politics and other online reading continued
to be an irritating distraction, although I made some forward progress at
picking up a book instead of Twitter.
My reading goal for last year was to make time and energy for deeper, more
demanding, and more rewarding books. I think the verdict is mixed, but I
didn't do too poorly. I finished Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy
(more on that below), which certainly qualifies and which was one of the
year's highlights, and dug deep into a few other rewarding books. For
2019, my goal is to maintain my current reading pace (hopefully including
the gradual improvement year over year) and focus on catching up on award
winners and nominees to broaden my reading beyond favorite authors.
Two books, both fiction, received 10 out of 10 ratings from me this year:
My Grandmother Asked
Me to Tell You She's Sorry, by Fredrik Backman, and
Record of a Spaceborn
Few, by Becky Chambers. Backman's novel is a delightful character story
— funny, open-hearted, and gracious — with a wonderful seven-year-old
protagonist (and that's something you'll rarely hear me say). It was the
best book I read this year. Record of a Spaceborn Few was the most
emotionally affecting book I read in 2018 (by far): a deeply moving story
about community and belonging and not belonging, and about culture and why
it's important. The narrative structure is unusual and the writing is
less evenly high quality than Backman's, but it was exactly the book I
needed to read when I read it. I think it's Chambers's best work to date,
and that's saying a lot.
The novels that received 9 out of 10 ratings from me in 2018 were
The Obelisk Gate and
The Stone Sky, the
second and third books in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy.
Given Jemisin's three Hugo awards for this series and the wealth of online
reviews, you probably don't need me to tell you how good they are. I
found the series hard to read, since it's full of strong negative emotions
and takes a very sharp look at pain, loss, and oppression, but I also
thought it was worth the emotional effort. This trilogy is something very
special in SFF and fully deserves the attention that it's gotten.
There was one more fiction 9 out of 10 rating this year, which also came
as a complete surprise to me: walkingnorth's online graphic novel
Always Human. This
was one of the year's pure delights: gentle, kind, thoughtful, empathetic,
and sweet. I am very grateful to James Nicoll for
reviewing it; I
never would have discovered it otherwise, and was able to share it with
several other people.
The sole non-fiction 9 out of 10 this year was Zeynep Tufekci's excellent
Twitter and Tear
Gas, a thoughtful, critical, and deep look at the intersection of
politics and online social networks that avoids facile moralizing and
embraces the complex interactions we have with for-profit web sites that
have far outgrown the understanding of the corporations that run them. I
think (or at least hope) there's more awareness now, at the end of 2018,
of the way that totalitarian regimes undermine political engagement not
via suppression but via flooding networks with garbage news, fake
personas, heated opinions, and made-up stories. Tufekci was studying this
before it was widely talked about, and Twitter and Tear Gas is
still a reliable guide to how political engagement works in online spaces.
The full analysis includes some
additional personal reading statistics, probably only of interest to me.
2019-01-06: James Nicoll's 100 SF/F Books
On December 27th, Tor.com published an
article by James Nicoll entitled
100 SF/F Books You Should Consider Reading in the New Year. Since then,
various people I know have been posting the list annotated with the books
they've read and liked. That seemed fun, so I thought I'd join in.
I've read 28 out of the 99 books (and shorter fiction) listed. (One entry
was for a musical work; I appreciate James's inclusiveness, but I
appreciate my orderly classification system more, and it's not a book.)
I'm a bit surprised that's not higher, since James is one of my primary
sources of book reviews. Lots of ones I've not read are in various
to-read piles, though.
Among those that I have read, average rating is 7.43, which shows why I
pay attention to James's reviews. Interestingly, though, that's slightly
below the average rating for the
BookRiot SF/F by Female
Authors list, at 7.48. I thought perhaps the BookRiot list had more
"obvious" good books and James was trying to be more obscure, but looking
it over, that doesn't seem to be the case. The BookRiot list just has
marginally more books I liked, at least of the ones I've read so far
(sometimes via choosing a different book by the same author).
Anyway, here's my version
of the list for anyone who's interested. I recommend reading the
original article for James's short descriptions, covers, and purchase
links.
2019-01-12: DocKnot 2.00
This is a new major release of the utility I use to generate package
documentation. It's the start of a restructure that will eventually let
me merge more of my package maintenance tools into this package (and
possibly eventually my web site building tools).
The functions previously provided by the docknot command-line tool
have been moved to docknot generate, and the arguments have been
changed around a bit. There's also a new docknot generate-all, and
more default values so that one doesn't have to pass in as many arguments.
The Perl module has been similarly restructured, with documentation
generation moved into a new App::DocKnot::Generate module.
On the documentation template front, this release also adds a separate
TESTING section for Perl modules and changes some of the templating for
standard documentation of how to run the test suite.
You can get the latest release from the DocKnot distribution page or from CPAN.
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