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.