Holiday Reads
- Three Parts Dead
and the rest of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence.
- Retribution Falls
and the other three volumes of Chris Wooding’s Tales of the Ketty Jay.
- N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy,
(which starts with The Fifth Season
and just keeps getting better)
deserved all the praise it got.
- Peter Higgins’ Wolfhound Century trilogy
didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved.
- V. E. Schwab’s A Darker Shade of Magic
is the beginning of another great trilogy.
- Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl
is one of the few hard SF books I’ve enjoyed in recent years.
- The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August,
The Sudden Appearance of Hope,
and above all, The End of the Day,
all by Claire North.
- Colson Whitehead’s Zone One
and M. R. Carey’s The Girl With All the Gifts.
(Who says you can’t make art with zombies?)
- Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines, its three sequels,
and the prequel trilogy were all excellent.
- Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Illuminae
and Gemina
are wonderfully inventive.
(The concluding volume of the trilogy is out this spring.)
- Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons
is the start of a five-novel arc that comes to a perfect conclusion.
- Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy
had a great arc as well.
- Matt Ruff’s The Mirage was brilliant.
- G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen
still has me thinking…
- Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union
might be literature, but it’s OK despite that.
- I filed Ben H. Winters’ The Last Policeman
under “sad but necessary”.
- Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine
goes under “scary and subversively funny”.
- Scott Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char
isn’t an easy read, but it’s a good one.
- Robert Jackson Bennett’s City of Stairs
and its two sequels are exciting and satisfying in equal measure.
- Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant
makes The Count of Monte Cristo look like a whiny child.
- The Mechanical starts one of
Ian Tregillis’s enjoyable trilogies,
and Bitter Seeds another.
- No trilogies for Daniel Abraham: The Dragon’s Path
is the first of a perfectly executed five-book series.
- And if we’re talking about “perfectly executed”,
Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Curse of Chalion
has to be front and center.