Well, what do you know, it’s my first post on the blog since…last year’s wrap up! It’s been a busy year, and I’ve been writing and posting a lot elsewhere; see below for more.

Volume-wise, this was not the best year for my reading goals. We moved from Chicago to Buffalo, which went fine, but it wound up being a very hectic year, with my father getting sick and passing away, and many many road-trips to Pennsylvania as a result. It feels strange to relate my reading levels to something so enormous, but I’ve also been having a very hard time getting my brain to think about anything other than Gaza over the last several months.

I don’t have as big an extra-bibliographic wrap-up as I did last year: a lot fewer conventions, book clubs, and other literary events for me this year. I did make it to Wiscon, which was really lovely, and enjoyed trying to rally folks to write more negative reviews on a critical panel there. Despite struggles, I did a fair bit of writing in 2023, and I’m immensely proud that the Ancillary Review of Books, where I’m the publishing editor, did so well this year. We published a lot of great stuff; I’m particularly pleased with Dan Hartland’s Snap! series, the lovely interview Misha Grifka Wander did with Nicola Griffith, and many of our reviews. I also rushed out a kind of op-ed that I’m pretty happy with, kind of an airing of multiple grievances with science fiction that got prompted by some mild online drama.

All that said, here’s my reading list with brief notes (probably missing a few):

  • Mr. Breakfast, Jonathan Carroll
    A “fine but not for me” modern fantasy. Vaguely reminded me of Gaiman; didn’t grab me.
  • The Necessity of Stars, E. Catherine Tobler
    Absolutely lovely weird first contact novella, packing in friendship, aging, climate change, and really weird aliens. Highly recommended.
  • The Caretaker, Doon Arbus
    A strange, finely crafted novel that’s kind of about…the inherent futility and madness of categorizing the world to know it? Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • Lone Women, Victor LaValle
    A nice Western/horror hybrid; a creature-feature diving into under-represented angles of the western expansion. Perhaps actually too good at clipping along, and at neatly concluding, but some nice stylistic flourishes. Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • The Strange, Nathan Ballingrud
    Another Western/horror hybrid, this one further mixed with Bradbury-esque science fiction. Weakest at the seams but very enjoyable, with some great imagery and vivid weirdness. Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • Feed Them Silence, Lee Mandelo
    A nice dark grim cold novella about fracturing ecosystems and relationships. Great sense-and-body-focused writing, and I really like the moral ambiguity of the protagonist. Reviewed for Locus.
  • Cuckoo’s Egg, C.J. Cherryh
    Hadn’t read this in a quite a while (for me), and really enjoyed returning to it—another glimpse of the kind of society Cherryh would like, built around truly just judges (who are also like werewolfy ninjas) and with a fascinating emphasis on education and what it means to raise someone. Club read.
  • 40,000 In Gehenna, C.J. Cherryh
    Still, I think, the best at representing in one book what Cherryh’s all about (as opposed to needing to read five or six): future history, thinking through long changes. Some really great, weird, disturbing stuff here, and it’s as close as she gets to feminism. Highly recommended. Club read.
  • Scale, Greg Egan
    Egan doesn’t miss, and it boggles my mind that all his new stuff—at least in US availability—are self-published and under-discussed. This is great, a premise that’s so simple & extreme that it sounds silly—a world where humans (and lots else) exist at vastly different scales (of size, primarily). Worked through as rigorously as Egan readers will expect, initially packaged as an investigative mystery before spiraling into larger and more political strangeness.
  • Extended Stay, Juan Martinez
    A phenomenal book, the most genuinely scary and classically horrific thing I read this year. Haunted buildings, body horror, cosmic horror, all alongside more worldly terrors. Reviewed for Locus.
  • The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff
    My first Sutcliff read, quite liked this—kind of gentle, really good at capturing a certain kind of richness to the world and the characters, and with some fine and unexpected haunting bits. Club read.
  • Some Desperate Glory, Emily Tesh
    Very fun book, a bit closer to YA than I usually read, but solid. Quick-moving action sci-fi with big ideas. Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • Titanium Noir, Nick Harkaway
    Immensely enjoyable little book—much shorter than the usual Harkaway but with much of his usual flair. Noir homage with science fiction/superhero angles, great fight scenes and quips. I was gearing up for a big piece on this that didn’t work out, but led to me re-reading a lot of his earlier stuff: no loss.
  • Burning Paradise, Robert J. Wilson
    Read this for another piece that didn’t work out (well, yet). Wilson’s an interesting writer, big ideas here (alt-history about an intelligent organism that lives in the ionosphere and meddles in human politics) and a kind of very slowly-revealed pessimism that dovetails unexpectedly with some of the other cosmic horror elements.
  • A Brief History of Living Forever, Jaroslav Kalfař
    Interesting novel, seemingly a ghost-story that’s also about life extension technology and the interesting life story of a Czech woman (our ghostly narrator); tonally I’m not quite sure where this is trying to land, but the bits about a low-budget film based on Čapek’s War with the Newts will stick with me. Reviewed for Locus.
  • Stations of the Tide, Michael Swanwick
    I wind up re-reading this most years and this year was no different. Seemingly an endlessly re-interpretable little book, a real delight.
  • Starfish, Peter Watts
    Another “for a project” re-read, hadn’t picked this up in ages—really dark stuff, heavily-modified humans working in the crushing ocean depths. Watts suggests playing Sarah McLachlan’s “Possession” at high volume while reading.
  • Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway
    Goddamn this is fun, just absolutely bonkers. Like all the separate bits of something like Indiana Jones—the occult, the action, the politics and espionage—have been turned up until you’d think the machine would fly apart, and instead it takes off into the sky. Has bits of startling realism plunked in that that I still think about (“It just felt like that to you, because you were on the outside”), like a convergent evolution to the kind of effects magical realism sometimes achieves. But in reverse.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
    I say this in the nicest, most appreciative way possibly: for me at least, the thing that is, increasingly, the most interesting about this book is how it’s aging. Many little bits—the ice!—will last as long as we’re reading, though.
  • The Terraformers, Annalee Newitz
    Definitely the best of Newitz’s so far, this is doing a lot of interesting things, particularly in terms of time scale. Still didn’t sit right with me somehow—some things kind of pedantically (like the anaerobic stuff), other things more nebulously, tonally. Some odd ethical gaps or mismatches. Copy-and-pasting heavily-moralized “green” values onto an entirely other planet didn’t work for me.
  • Flux, Jinwoo Chong
    Strange novel, pitched as kind of cyberpunk but actually rather weirder and less genre science fiction than that—lot of play with memory (and maybe time/reality) manipulation. Long recurring bit about a fictional detective show that felt so much more real and intense than the rest of the novel that it kind of tears out of its surroundings.
  • A Tidy Armageddon, BH Panhuyzen
    Strange interesting ambiguous apocalypse, in which unknown forces have sorted all artifacts on earth into giant stacks in Canada; only survivors seem to be a small military outfit who were in an underground bunker. Interesting premise, and the book’s simultaneous strength and weakness is that it doesn’t really have any other ones. Might make an interesting Ballard pairing.
  • The Body Scout, Lincoln Michel
    Finally got around to this, good stuff! The most genuinely cyberpunky thing I’ve read in a bit. I…still can’t care about baseball, I used up all my brain’s careaboutbaseballlorphine on Underworld a few years back.
  • The Thick and the Lean, Chana Porter
    Hands-down the novel I have most mixed feelings about this year. The writing is next-level; it’s doing absolutely fascinating stuff with religion, food, body, and sex culture; it has what feels like major miscalculations in the back half. I dunno, read it and talk to me.
  • The Circumference of the World, Lavie Tidhar
    Very fun, style-and-perspective shifting book that’s kind of an alt-history of…Scientology? A very different creature than, say, Central Station, but I’d definitely recommend. Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • Swim Home to the Vanished, Brendan Shay Basham
    I don’t like to overuse “poetic” for prose works, but it definitely applies here; I was underlining practically everything. A magical, dreamlike book about loss and transformation; great bits of food writing, as well. Reviewed for Locus.
  • Womb City, Tlotlo Tsamaase
    Was hyped for this but found it all but impossible; sentence-level writing issues constantly throwing me out, and it has what seemed like massive, plot-impacting worldbuilding fails. Hoping I just got a too-early ARC or something.
  • Inversion, Aric McBay
    A treat of a book, kind of Le Guin plus Chiang—pastoral utopia & permaculture, in a pocket universe, with space opera waiting outside. Reviewed for Locus.
  • The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
    My book of the year, no question, and likely to be a contender for my book of the decade. Sumptuous, subtle, inventive. Feels real in unexpected ways. Honestly it’s going to take me more readings to get a critical handle on it; I did manage to review it for Locus.
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
    First time reading for me. I found it a bit of a slog, to be honest, not so much for writing as for subject; C19 British lit was a major ingredient in my departure from the academic track I thought I was on, so many years ago, and that’s not Jane’s fault. Club read.
  • The Deep Sky, Yume Kitasei
    Noped out of this one pretty quickly; generation ship story with some writing and set-up issues that really didn’t work for me.
  • Uranians, Theodore McCombs
    Amazing, essential collection. Left me with that vibrating post-book high; there’s some really deep and lovely thought here, and the title novella deserves to change the course of an entire subgenre. Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
    Picked this up for the first time in a long time on his passing. I don’t know what to say that hasn’t been said; read this if you haven’t.
  • The Marigold, Andrew F. Sullivan
    Fantastic super-weird super-urban mashup of a novel, full of rain and sludge and potholes. And dark realtor magic and giant fungal intelligences—this is not to be missed. The variety of perspectives here is the real genius, perhaps.
  • Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson
    Another re-read, another weird and intriguingly grim entry from Wilson. What I love about this is that it takes one very big weird idea and uses it mostly just to obscure an even larger, weirder idea. Wish we got more of the Darwinian ecosystem, though.
  • Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
    Ran out of books on a trip and picked this up at a blessedly open-late bookstore in DC. I read this, as they say, hooting and hollering. My god.
  • Godfall, Van Jensen
    I hope this makes it onto genre folks’ radars; odd interesting SF book, kind of in the mode of The Last Policeman; giant dead alien lands in a hodunk town, local sheriff struggles with all kinds of issues in the wake thereof. ACAB, of course, but the larger issue lies in how the novel doesn’t quite seem to realize how badly it wants to defend and re-throne God.
  • Wave Without A Shore, C.J. Cherryh
    If I haven’t told you to read this, we haven’t properly met. Club read.
  • Blindsight, Peter Watts
    Felt like a re-read. There’s an alternate, better universe in which this novel rerouted science fiction the way, say, Gibson did. But probably not a lot of people can write like this—an energetic, informed, gleefully self-horrified cosmic pessimism, with a kernel of real horror that’s primarily philosophical.
  • Dracula, Bram Stoker
    Remains great; remains thankfully weak at sublimating its barely-repressed queer poly energy. Interesting to look at this structurally, too, and Stoker’s calculated need for verisimilitude; interesting to contrast with the similarly-epistolary but more deeply-felt (and much earlier) Frankenstein. I was also struck a lot by the semi-comic lower class rep on this read. Club read.
  • Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park
    Triumphant, ambitious novel, one of the most fun reading experiences I had this year. Incredibly masterful weaving of different tones, styles, and voices, and genuinely funny in parts. Bonus points for Buffalo. Reviewed for Locus.
  • The Navigating Fox, Christopher Rowe
    Terrifically fun little novel; Rowe does a great job at implying a large, complex world without getting bogged down in describing it. I have the vague sense that one could say something really interesting about this in terms of its positioning within different mythic/fable traditions.
  • City of Last Chances, Adrian Tchaikovsky
    Took me forever to get my hands on this, and so glad I did—normally giant chonky fantasies are decidedly not my thing, but I was willing to give Tchaikovsky a go. Really fantastic, a mosaic novel about an occupied city, reminded me quite a bit of Miéville, Pratchett, and Swanwick; interesting how Tchaikovsky doesn’t really pick a lane, thematically or tonally, as decisively as any of those three do, but still pulls this off. Highly recommended.
  • We the Parasites, AV Marraccini
    As I come to this, I’m realizing that I wasn’t great at tracking my non-fiction reads this year, to which I say: huh. But there’s no forgetting this one—a rich, potent book of criticism, mixing memoir and discursive essay. Absolutely adored the commitment to the parasite metaphor, and am still kind of in awe of how strongly this is asking “what are we doing here” re: criticism, and how strongly it’s answering. My pick for ARB’s Notable Books of 2023.
  • Drifts, Kate Zambreno
    Hey I think this might be one of those (inclines head and lowers voice dramatically) autofictions. Amazingly good. I’ve really been missing having writing groups and writing friends this year, and this felt like having one.
  • An Immense World, Ed Yong
    Okay apparently I also recorded this non-fiction. It’s so good! If you’re interested in science, animals, perception, this is a must read, a philosophical Attenborough doc in written form. Also, essential for anyone thinking about or constructing aliens.
  • Liquid Snakes, Stephen Kearse
    Interesting, angry, funny novel about environmental racism and chemical revenge. Bonus points for getting coffee right. Reviewed for CHIRB.
  • A Stranger in Olondria, Sofia Samatar
    I don’t love the phrase “this book destroyed me” but, once again, this book destroyed me.
  • The Winged Histories, Sofia Samatar
    And this one too, in different ways! This time through, amid lots else, I was really noting some of the playfulness of the narration, the complexity of the polyvocality. Thinking about death a lot! Club read.
  • The Archive Undying, Emma Mieko Candon
    I’m probably going to have to re-read this at some point; I admired the prose and the inventiveness, but the stakes were obscure enough that I found myself completely un-immersed for any given scene. Also feeding into my “mecha are actually only effective in visual format” theory.
  • The Free People’s Village, Sim Kern
    Most unexpectedly, complexly, and I think unintentionally depressing read of the year. I adored Kern’s previous book, but—I’d need to write a lot longer about it to get it all out, but this is essentially if accidentally committed to a weird kind of poly-futility.
  • Rose/House, Arkady Martine
    Gosh this is good. Particularly after the sprawling, break-neck Teixcalaan books, very cool to see Martine nailing a totally different tone and pace, while still picking at some familiar themes. Highly recommended. Reviewed for Locus.
  • This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
    Felt like a re-read; it is still excellent.
  • The Employees, Olga Ravn
    So good. More SF like this please. Weird, inventive, haunting.
  • Erasure, Percivall Everett
    Have been meaning to read some Everett for a bit now and picked this one somewhat at random, not knowing the film adaptation was on the way. Holy cow this is great: funny, complex, manages both scalpels and sledgehammers.
  • Ripe, Sarah Rose Etter
    A book that had me saying “whoof” at regular intervals: a biting and brilliant novel about depression and workplace toxicity. Pretty brilliant in how it captures modern shittiness.
  • I Will Teach You Retribution, Timothy Moore.
    This collection opening with a Barthelme quote is almost too on-point; like Barthelme’s, these stories really have no right to work as well as they do, land as hard as they do, given how bonkers and experimental they are. A frantically energetic, powerful little book. I occasionally run into something that makes we want to impersonate a professor just to teach a course on it; there’s at least a class or two just in Moore’s story about a mistaken ass.
  • The Scar, China Miéville
    Needed a re-read—it’s not the Miéville I recommend the most, but it’s the one I return to the most. I used to think Miéville’s kind of weak at character, but lately I’m not so sure; he’s just more interested in action and the material it’s embedded in.
  • Desert Creatures, Kay Chronister
    Finally got around to this after much hollering about it from critics I trust. They were right, this is brilliant, weird and innovative, goes on the same shelf with Annihilation and The Etched City. Lots going on here, but its investment in faith, in miracles, really caught me.
  • Tigerman, Nick Harkaway
    This is really lovely, very Vonnegut-like in some ways, and also a meditation on superheroes and waning colonial power. Great cast, great set-up, great pay-off.
  • Prophet, Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald
    What a strange book! I had absolutely no idea what to expect when I saw Macdonald attached to an SF project—so I absolutely did not expect this, which if I had to elevator pitch is “Gay X-files slash where they walk away from The Hurt Locker and wind up in Solaris instead”. Does it even matter if it’s good after that pitch? It is, though. Reviewed for Locus.
  • Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
    I’ve gone through a parabola with this where the first time I read it, it blew my mind and changed my life; over time the mis-steps (what the heck is this colonial take? And the less said about women here the better) lowered my feeling for it; but now I find it’s still amazing after all. Club read.
  • The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
    Whoops, another re-read, guess who was depressed. Thinking a lot about the Eöl plotline this time through, and also how Tolkien can’t bring himself to depict horniness so he has people sing a lot.
  • The Violent Century, Lavie Tidhar
    Filling in some gaps in my Tidhar reading, just got to this. Good, and went directions I wasn’t expecting, but I can’t get overly excited about superheroes, even in this alt-history, le Carré-inflected mode. I’ve been trying to float “low cape” as a subgenre, is that anything?
  • The Museum of Human History, Rebekah Bergman
    So I read this and thought it was mostly just okay, though well-written and kind of smoothly intricate, but then the more I thought through its connections and what they’re saying, the more my estimation of it grew. Also with some Vonnegut-like threads! Probably my favorite book to review this year, because my thoughts on the book changed so much in the process of revisiting it. Loss and memory are overt themes here, and I feel like climate disaster is a secret one, or maybe that’s just me. Reviewed for Locus.
  • OKPsyche, Anya Johanna DeNiro
    Gosh dang can DeNiro write—a painful, playful book with elements of science fiction and magical realism, incredibly anchored in the narrator, brimming with devastating lines and several kinds of desire. Reviewed for Locus.
  • Too Loud a Solitude, Bohumil Hrabal
    Still possibly the best novel. Definitely the only novel I was inspired to read this year by the removal of a Yoda statue.
  • Perdido Street Station, China Miéville
    It’s funny, I re-read The Scar a lot and reference Iron Council a lot, but haven’t come back to this one in ages. Remarkable how its rambling, sprawling nature is inextricable; and I had never noticed how closely it’s setting up elements that come up again in Iron Council.
  • Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung
    Great spooky, uneasy collection, lots of good ghosts and curses, with an interesting and not-overplayed interest in aspects of the body and the domestic.
  • Exordia, Seth Dickinson
    Absolutely superb action-thriller-contact novel with deep political/ethical interests. Whip-smart and brutal. Review forthcoming.
  • The Siege of Burning Grass, Premee Mohamed
    I went into this with basically no expectations, and it is lovely—pairs quite nicely with the Miéville and Tchaikovsky I’ve been reading lately. The fantastic elements feel fresh without being too extreme, and the focus on pacifism is really interesting. Review forthcoming.
  • House of Open Wounds, Adrian Tchaikovsky
    Sequel to City of Last Chances, could easily be read standalone. Every bit as good, and with some shifting of thematic focus; more Pratchett-like in good ways. Review forthcoming.
  • The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
    I initially had the fear that this was kind of over-written, but that fairly quickly went away. Saying surprisingly little about Christianity or evangelicalism per se, but a lot about other and related topics; very good in its character/family/psychology dynamics, and the decisions to basically split the book in half, with the latter bit over a longer/later stretch of time, really elevates the whole. Club read.
  • Other Minds and Other Stories, Bennett Sims
    Grade-A collection, by turns weird and funny, cerebral and horrific. Actually, not by turns: Sims somehow layers all of these qualities at the same time. I felt seen by “An Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”, and I do not like it: probably the best single short piece of writing I read this year. Review forthcoming.
  • The Tusks of Extinction, Ray Nayler
    A fine short novella about resurrected mammoths; like A Mountain in the Sea, perhaps a bit talky, but the talking points are good. An interesting follow-up to Feed Them Silence, and has me once again wondering how deep the influence of Peter Dickinson’s Eva goes, or if it’s just convergence. Review forthcoming.
  • The Tainted Cup, Robert Jackson Bennett
    Extremely fun and page-turning new fantasy from Bennett, whose previous series I have quite enjoyed. This one in the mode of a detective story (slightly but not overly Sherlockian in model); fantastic mechanics, imagery, and plotting, though I’m pondering some of the larger implications. Review forthcoming.
  • Arboreality, Rebecca Campbell
    This, this is why awards exist: to get the best books into my hands, mine personally, when I somehow missed them the first time around. This is the absolute best kind of climate fiction, holding hope and despair at the same time. Shook me, and will stick with me.