What I Read in 2022

A few lines on everything I read last year.

Leech | Hiron Ennes (2022)

Thinking Aloud: On Fantasy's Strengths & Weaknesses

As I slowly, haltingly attempt to write out my own epic fantasy, I've been thinking about the nature of the genre. This isn't a formal essay as such so much as an attempt to gather together some inchoate thoughts about it.

Everything that follows - excepting the quotes - is caveated with this: it's all subjective opinion, and any statement carries an implied "I think."

2021: What I Read

As with last year, music and film and literature continues to act as balm and root. Last year, I read 151 books - 154 if you include books I started but didn't finish in 2021. So far I have made it to 132 books this year. 

And so, as with the past two years, I will now dive into some of the books I've read this year, in chronological order, once again excepting any books in a series, and provide my thoughts on them. Title, author, order by start date, and read dates are included. I read multiple books at any given time and so please do not take that I am finishing the longer titles in only a day or two. There are occasional spoilers.

On Graham Greene's Monsignor Quixote

(Spoiler warning for both Cervantes and Greene's Quixote.) 

Book Review: Legacy of the Brightwash (Tainted Dominion #1) | Krystle Matar

So I finally dug myself out of the long reads I've been engaged in since mid-February, and returned to a couple shorter, fictional works, and one of them was Krystle Matar's Legacy of the Brightwash. Minor spoilers, friends.

Brief Thoughts: A Better Crooked

Last year I read Austin Grossman's Crooked, a novel reimagining the Cold War as not merely a diplomatic, economic, and - by way of proxy wars - military conflict but as an occult conflict in which the Soviet Union has raced far ahead of the United States, and Richard Nixon is the last of the sorcerer-presidents. It blends alternate history with political thriller, and layers onto this shades of Lovecraftian horror, Faustian bargains, Cold War-era espionage and intrigue, and suspense. (There will be spoilers.)

The Great Mistake | Jonathan Lee (2021)

Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake is a masterpiece of a novel; a beautiful, enthralling, humane novel of deep sympathy which I devoured in three days.

Underrated: Jo Walton, Master of the Low-Key Story

(This was originally posted to Reddit's r/fantasy on June 24th. It's been a while but I figure I should put this up here, too. There are some minor revisions here and there, and arguably some small spoilers.)

A few weeks ago somebody complained about the deluge of posts about things being overrated and asked, why are there not more posts about things being underrated? I am pleased therefore pleased to present my attempt to fulfill that request.

Jo Walton is one of my favorite writers working today. She writes science fiction and fantasy in a distinctly literary, distinctly low-key style. She writes novels, short fiction, and poems, and has been doing so since the turn of the millennium. She also writes short essays/reviews for Tor, which have been compiled into two books.

I would like to make the case for you that she is one of the finest writers of genre fiction writing today.

Brief Thoughts: Calvino, Eco, and Borges as writers 'of a piece'

Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, and Jorge Luis Borges seem to me to be 'of a piece.' They are all writerly writers - now this is not so uncommon. Many writers, especially modernist and postmodernist writers, could be described as such. In and of itself, that isn't too unique. What make these three unique, in my eyes, is that they're also very readerly writers for a specific value of readerly - all three are fascinated by the act of reading itself. Borges, I would hope, doesn't need to be explained in this regard. Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is about a Reader attempting to find a novel of that same name; and Eco's The Name of the Rose revolves around the contents of a missing work by Aristotle.

(Note: of these writers, I have read Borges's Ficciones, Calvino's Invisible Cities, and I'm in the middle of reading The Name of the Rose.)

2020: What I Read

Finding a Canon

There's an ongoing conversation in the genre world on the subject of canons. Sarah Gailey is running an excellent series called 'Personal Canons' on their substack, and this was meant to be a submission to it, but I forgot about the deadline and missed it. So here you are.

Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light

The Return of Susanna Clarke

An interesting thing seems to be happening: Susanna Clarke is coming back. Two books influenced by her unique blend of real-world history and strange magick and Faerie are coming out this year: H.G. Perry's A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (which will be the first book of a duology) and Alix Harrow's The Once and Future Witches. (There may well be others with Strange & Norrell influences that I don't know about.)