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.