I go through phases of reading and not reading, but I read a pretty good amount during 2016. Feel free to list your favorites, but try to tell us the “top” book you read as well.
Oh, please don’t just list titles. Tell us some info. about your choices, including why you liked them so much.
I’ll obviously go first:
Best:
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett - Wow, one of the finest novels I’ve ever read. I have tried to get into Discworld a few times, but this was definitely the best one I have read. And just a truly great piece of literature. I recommend it to everyone.
Other recommendations:
Shadows of Self by Brandon Sanderson - The original Mistborn trilogy is one of the finest fantasy works out there, maybe the best recent one. His new series set 300 years later is also excellent. Sanderson is my favorite currently active author. Shadows of Self was a really good read.
Mort by Terry Pratchett - Yes, another Discworld book. Very, very fun. I actually was not a fan of the final quarter of the book, but the first 75% are solid and it was wonderful to see Death, a character in this series, go out into the real world and try to fit in.
The Goblin Emperor: Katherine Addison. A goblin bildungsroman; a few plot issues but generally enjoyable.
Farthing (Small Change, #1): Jo Walton (plus the next two in the series). Alt British history over several narrators/generations.
Ice Bound: A Doctor’s Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole: Jerri Nielsen. Autobiography by the doc who had to do her own breast biopsy at McMurdo.
The Scar (Bas-Lag, #2): China Miéville. Second Bas-Lag novel, with a great, sweeping scope.
NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity: Steve Silberman. Good and varied book on the history of autism.
I’m Just a Person: Tig Notaro. Autobiography focused on her breast cancer diagnosis. Listen to the audiobook.
Paladin of Souls (World of the Five Gods, #3): Lois McMaster Bujold (plus the previous two in the series). Very enjoyable, well-crafted and absorbing series.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: Salman Rushdie. A fun Rushdiean romp through history of a sort.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane: Neil Gaiman. All I’ll say is that this is wonderful, in part because it gets hella weird.
Career of Evil (Cormoran Strike, #3): Robert Galbraith. J. K. Rowling’s 3rd Cormoran Strike novel, rendered even more fun by the Blue Oyster Cult/Patti Smith quotes as chapter headers.
Drood by Dan Simmons. Certainly a flawed work: the ending is truly stupid and Simmons suffers from his penchant of showing all his research. But I’m a big fan of Willie Collins, the protagonist (and a great fiction writer), so I enjoyed it overall.
Armadale by Willie Collins. Not quite his best (The Woman in White and * The Moonstone* are better), but it has his trademark of very smart villains matching wits with very smart heroes. The ending is a nice surprise.
Renato, the Painter by Eugene Mirabelle. Gene was an old college professor of mine, who I got interested in writing science fiction. This is a mainstream novel (though parts of it appeared in * Fantasy and Science Fiction* magazine) about the life of an older artist struggling to succeed. No real plot, but amusing characters and situations.
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. Liu had established himself as one of the top writers today through his short fiction. This is his first novel, an epic story of war and betrayal. Especially good because he wraps it all up in one volume (I hate multivolume epics).
I think the best was probably Skin Game, by Jim Butcher, the latest installment in the Dresden Files books. Dresden is coerced into working a job for his worst enemy, and has to figure out how to foil him without being the first to betray the other. While it’s one of the best of the Dresden Files books, though, it’d be a terrible place to start the series, since a new reader wouldn’t know all of the history that makes Nicodemus such an enemy, and which nonetheless makes it necessary for Harry to take the job.
Another strong contender is C. S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. Even though it takes until halfway through the book to get rolling on the actual plot, the scene-setting before that point is completely engrossing.
I’ve also been working through Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth. It’s easy to see why it’s so iconic, though I confess that the utter lack of morals of most of the characters gets a bit tiresome.
Love That Boy - Political journalist Ron Fournier learns that his son has autism spectrum disorder and takes him on trips to meet former presidents Clinton and W. Bush. Although specifically about autism, it’s more about coming to terms as a parent when your child can’t or won’t be the things you dreamed for them.
Half a King (Shattered Sea #1) by Joe Abercrombie. A fantasy series about a prince who is fighting to regain his rightful crown. Cliched and the main character, Prince Yarvi, is a whiny spoiled brat at first, but gets better by the end.
A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr. A noir still crime thriller that takes place in two different times (1930s Germany and 1950s Argentina) as Kerr’s famous ex-police man, Bernie Gunther, solves a decades old case.
Mischling by Affinty Konar. Twin sisters struggle to survive in “Mengele’s Zoo” during WW2. Surreal, terrifying and loosely based on a real event.
The Anvil of the World by Kage Baker. Comedy/Fantasy about a caravan master who with a secret past who wants to retire but is talked into one more run with a bunch of eccentric characters. Good world building in this one.
Crimson Shore by Preston and Child. Agent Pendergast must travel to a small Massachusetts town to solve a mystery involving an old wine cellar. Spooky, one of the better Pendergast stories.
“Le pere Goriot” by Honore Balzac: A young social climber lives in a rooming house full of colourful characters, including a formerly rich man named Goriot who squandered all his money on his ungrateful daughters. It was a very moving combination of comedy, pathos and tragedy.
“The Prisoner of Zenda” by Anthony Hope: The famous tale of an English dilettante who impersonates the kidnapped King of Ruritania. It was a breezy adventure yarn with just the right splash of sentimentality.
“The Call of the Wild” by Jack London: The classic story of a farm dog from California that is forced into the brutal life of a sled dog in the Klondike. Violent, sad and heartwarming in equal measure.
“Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel” - which has been recommended a number of times on these boards, but I only just got around to this year.
Holy Crap, but that is one hell of a good book.
There are very few thousand-page doorstops of which I would say “yep, that wasn’t a page too long” - this is one of them. The plot is great, the period feel first class - but it’s the footnotes that really make it. You could totally convince yourself that a real representative from some alternate regency-era England had been scribbling away at it with quill and squid ink.
Speaking of Regency - in the Just Plain Fun category, Georgette Heyer’s “The Grand Sophie” and “The Unknown Ajax”. I always thought I hated her romance novels, and in fact some of them are just plain crap, but some are hilarious. Those two have a certain “supposedly needy waif turns out to rule like a boss, kicks butt and rights wrongs” kind of vibe, which I really dig. In an early nineteenth century fashion, of course!
The two that come to mind for me right away: “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” by Neil Gaiman, and “The Last Policeman,” which I officially read in 2016 in that I finished it at about 10:45 last night.
I’ve noticed a fiction theme in this thread so far, but my favorite books of the year were nonfiction.
The stand-out pick is Jewel’s memoir, Never Broken. I went into this expecting your typical celebrity memoir. You know, something short and fluffy. What I got was an absolute transformation of my mental health. Jewel really dives into the concept of emotional vulnerability, and the importance of feeling your emotions and not trying to tamp them down. From this book, I realized the importance of not trying to talk yourself out of the way you feel about something, and to examine your feelings until you tease out the true cause of them and how to best go about improving things. I honestly attribute a huge positive change in my emotional state to this book.
Another great book I read this year was Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. The premise is that American neighborhoods/communities are becoming increasingly segregated by class, so that upper- and lower-class families now have very little interaction with one another. (The classes are defined by level of education completed, rather than income, though of course families in which the two spouses have disparate levels of education don’t fit cleanly into his thesis.) He then goes on to show, with countless studies and statistics as supporting evidence, the ways in which upper class children are given every opportunity to succeed, while lower-class people face countless obstacles. I love this because the class divide in America goes far beyond simple issues of wealth/income, and it was great to learn specifically about how things like a two-parent household, a wide range of available community activities, and the amount of classroom disruption affects a child’s ability to succeed.
Finally, I read *Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs *by Johann Hari. I love this book, because it finally gave me a grounded context for the war on drugs. Let me tell you, I have come across very few people in my life who approve of the war on drugs in the U.S., but when I would talk to my friends about it, I usually got far more indignant opinion than solid fact. This book gave me the solid history, facts, and reasons that I was looking for. Also, it was unusually engaging for such an information-dense book.
The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson. A young man named Orm is captured by Vikings and travels from Spain to Ireland to Denmark to Sweden to the Black Sea, having adventures and increasing his wealth along the way. The introduction to the edition I read was written by Michael Chabon and I echo his (and his aunt’s) recommendation: It’s really good.
Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters edited by Merlin Holland. A selection of Wilde’s letters that give a good memoir-like overview of his life. It gives a great insight into his personality.
How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman. The subtitle is “A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life” which is exactly what it is. From getting up and getting dressed in the morning to going to bed at night, it covers all the details of how the Victorians lived.
Probably The Albert N’yanza, Great Basin of The Nile, by Samuel White Baker. Reading what was essentially the diary of the great British explorer was an interesting perspective.
A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, Andre Resendez. A jaw-dropping ten-year survival story along the southern coast of North America in the 1500s by the survivors of a Spanish shipwreck
Agreed–I’d rank it among the top five fantasy books from the past couple decades, and I read a LOT of fantasy.
I’m biased toward what I read near the end of the year, but Smoke is one of my favorites: an alt history with a few nods toward The Golden Compass, but definitely its own book.
I think I read The Dark Forest this year as well, the sequel to The Three-Body Problem. It’s not quite as remarkable as the first, but it’s still some very excellent hard science fiction; if that’s your bag, I recommend it highly.
Oh–Lovecraft Country, an exploration of Lovecraft and Jim Crow, is pretty cool. But I totally forgot my favorite of the year, The Traitor Baru Cormorant. It’s dark as hell, and the protagonist is a really good accountant, so if that doesn’t appeal to you, give it a miss; but if it does, if you want to read about macroeconomic skulduggery, it’s riveting.
(But it’s just as good.)