Another year, and in addition to posting the December site update, it's time to reflect on the past twelve months' worth of reviews.
January started light and sweet with Stephanie Burgis's The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart. I also delved into Ken Liu's doorstop silkpunk The Grace of Kings, a refreshingly different epic fantasy based on ancient China, and revisted Carl Hiassen for a fun but ultimately disappointing outing in Scat. (And apparently hardcover coloring books are a thing, as I discovered with Jonny Marx's The Book of Beasts - though I suspect the hardcover price is why I found it so cheap on clearance.)
In February, I ranged from a book on illuminated manuscripts (Janice Anderson's aptly-titled Illuminated Manuscripts) through romance (Samantha Chase's This Is our Song) and politics (Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man), and even an illustrated biography by an internet celebrity (Ryan Higa's How to Write Good, by Ryan Higa.) James Islington's epic fantasy The Shadow of What Was Lost and Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library failed to engage me, though the main theme of the month turned out to be interplanetary sci-fi: Dennis E. Taylor's second Bobiverse book (For We Are Many), the fourth Expanse installment (Cibola Burn, by James S. A. Corey), Killing Gravity by Corey J. White, and Jeff Lemire's graphic novel Descender: The Deluxe Edition Volume 1 universally impressed.
March wasn't a good month for reading. Of six titles posted, five were graphic novels; the exception was the Expanse novella The Churn, a prequel by James S. A. Corey. Two more Descender titles, Katie O'Neill's cutesy but enjoyable The Tea Dragon Society, Grant Snider's examination of creativity in the cartoons of The Shape of Ideas, and the groundbreaking (yet inevitably dated) The Mercenary, Volume 1 by Vicente Segrelles rounded it out.
April got me back into reading a few more word-based stories, kicking off with Tom Reiss's The Black Count, the biography of mixed-race general Alexandre Dumas, who rose to prominence in Revolutionary France only to be betrayed by Napoleon - later immortalized in the works of his son, Three Musketeers author Alexander Dumas. I was unexpectedly impressed by the young adult romance/sci-fi tale Don't Even Think About It by Sarah Mlynowsky, which deftly avoided potential pitfalls of telepathic teenagers and pulled off a rare "first person plural" perspective. Tor's eBook-of-the-month club once again delivered an interesting read as I finally got around to All Systems Red, the award-winning first installment of the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Still, graphic novels and picture books dominated, as I continued with Joshua Williamson's portal fantasy twist Birthright series (volumes 5 and 6) and Brian K. Vaughan's time travel adventure Paper Girls (volume 4), encountered the mysterious shapeshifter at the heart of Noelle Stevenson's Nimona, and took a pleasant trip aboard Dashka Slater's The Antlered Ship.
May started off with a major misfire of a dragon adventure in Stephen Deas's The Adamantine Palace, a throwback fantasy that successfully prevented me from caring about any character, two-legged or otherwise. Further disappointment awaited in the alternate history heist tale River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey, in which hippos - imported as a potential food source following a real-world proposal - have overrun the lower Mississippi, and Mechthild Glaser's The Book Jumper, in which a teenager persistently acted like a preteen while exploring a newfound ability to enter stories. I paid homage to nostalgia with an Andre Norton title, Catseye, that couldn't help showing its age despite the imaginative premise. It wasn't all bad news, though. Katherine Applegate's wishtree offered hope in the face of prejudice and fear, Kurt Busiek's first Autumnlands graphic novel explored a post-apocalyptic future dominated by mages and anthropomorphic animals, and Chris Impey's Beyond offered a glimpse of an interplanetary future already in the works today.
In June, I finally threw the proverbial switch with the year-long main site overhaul. In reading, I revisited Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series with her third installment, Beneath the Sugar Sky, and wrapped up Dennis E. Taylor's Bobiverse trilogy with the enjoyable finale All These Worlds. Sebastien de Castell hooked me into his Greatcoats series, a fantasy homage to The Three Musketeers, with Traitor's Blade. The month's low point was the attempted romance/sci-fi mashup The Down Home Zombie Blues by Linnea Sinclair, which stumbled haplessly into every pitfall imaginable and even a few unimaginable ones.
July again had a bit of a sci-fi bent, starting with the fanciful exploration of our neighboring planets in Olivia Koski and Jana Grcevich's Vacation Guide to the Solar System and continuing with James S. A. Corey's sixth Expanse book (Nemesis Games) and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor, not to mention the graphic novel of astral-projection journeying in Leila del Duca's Afar and Blake Crouch's thriller Pines. Derek Alan Siddoway explored a world of griffin riders in Windsworn, while a wayward dragon cursed into human form sought to rebuild her hoard in the Scales and Scoundrels graphic novels by Sebastian Girner; of the two, Windsworn was the more absorbing, despite the promise of the latter. Political parody met picture book in "Marlon Bundo" and Jill Twiss's A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, a fun tale of bunny love and the "stink bug" who stands in its way. The month wrapped up with an unfortunately pointless graphic novel, Elian Black'Mor's In Search of Lost Dragons.
August started with yet another return to the Expanse universe (so sue me - I like the series) with the Origins comics omnibus by James S. A. Corey, Hallie Lambert, and others, exploring the histories of the main characters as presented on the SyFy/Amazon Prime television show, with mixed-to-good results. High points of the month included Brandon Sanderson's second installment of his mammoth Stormlight Archives series, Words of Radiance, and Peter Cawdron's sci-fi thriller on Mars, Retrograde. Disappointments ranged from Lynn Viehl's alternate-world fantasy/romance Disenchanted & Co. to Tahereh Mafi's middle-grade fantasy Furthermore, capped off by Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning - impressive from a worldbuilding and Literary-with-a-capital-L standpoint, and undeniably different, but an utter failure insofar as giving me a single character to like or maintaining my interest. Michael Dante DiMartino also dropped the figurative ball in Rebel Genius, which reads like a cartoon that never wanted to be pinned down as writing.
September was a wide-ranging month for reading. From the freeform picture book poetry of Margaret Wild's The Dream of the Thylacine to Dan Rather's autobiographical examination of America's past, present, and future challenges in What Unites Us; from Seanan McGuire's adaptation of the "Phantom Prom Date" urban legend in Sparrow Hill Road to the suspense-filled romance in Rachel Grant's Incriminating Evidence; from escaped experimental military animals in Grant Morrison's graphic novel WE3 to Sarah Beth Durst's tale of stone creations seeking a carver to renew the story-marks keeping them alive in The Stone Girl's Story; even from the incredible true tale of a girl partially raised by wild monkeys in Marina Chapman's The Girl with No Name to an exploration of creativity in Art and Fear (David Bayles and Ted Orlando); I wandered all over the literary map. (And, yes, I checked in with the Expanse universe again with the novella Gods of Risk.)
October opened with an impressive novella from P. Djeli Clark, The Black God's Drums, set in an alternate-world New Orleans steeped in voodoo. I found myself less impressed than I'd hoped to be by Andy Weir's Moon-based heist novel Artemis, Jodi Lynn Anderson's alternate-world middle-grade road trip My Diary From the Edge of the World, and Scott Westerfield's spooky The Secret Hour, though I was far more disappointed by C. J. Darlington's Jupiter Winds as it nosedived into religion and Creationism. Bill Nye explained the "nerd" mindset and offered hope that it might someday save our future in his autobiographical Everything All At Once. Naomi Novik's fairy tale adaptation Spinning Silver entertained me, and I also enjoyed yet another Expanse novella by James S. A. Corey, The Vital Abyss.
I started November with the fun picture book Everyone Loves Bacon by Kelly DiPucchio. The classic one-time-award-winner The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge, unfortunately showed its age (or its author's assumptions about women needing men to complete their lives) badly, though the month's true low point had to be Kirk Kjeldsen's The Depths, a thriller that largely failed to thrill. Surprise "hits" were Fonda Lee's Jade City, which mashed up genres I don't generally enjoy (martial arts and mafia) into an engaging fantasy, and Elle Katharine White's Heartstone, a Pride and Prejudice riff with dragonriders that may not have been a favorite, but was more enjoyable than I'd anticipated. Nnedi Okorafor gave Harry Potter-like hidden magical worlds an African twist in Akata Witch, and old Atari classics found new life in the graphic novel Swordquest: Realworld by Chad Bowers and Chris Sims, based on the real Swordquest franchise. Warren Ellis captured the sense of wonder behind the best sci-fi in his graphic novel Ocean/Orbiter Deluxe Edition, and I caught up through Book 6 of The Expanse with Babylon's Ashes. The month wrapped up with another Tor eBook-of-the-month-club offering, Victor Lavalle's tale The Ballad of Black Tom, which gives the bigotry of 1920's New York City a Lovecraftian twist.
December began with Gareth L. Powell's space tale of a self-aware war ship turning its back on combat in Embers of War, which had potential but ultimately felt a little too familiar to stand out. Mary Robinette Kowal explored an alternate history of the space race in The Calculating Stars, as humanity is forced to push interplanetary colonization efforts with Apollo-era tech after an extinction-level event in the 1950's. I revisited a favorite childhood movie with the graphic novel prequel Jim Henson's Labyrinth Coronation: Volume 1, though ultimately I enjoyed the film more. Another movie-inspired read was The Art of How to Train Your Dragon 2, by Linda Sunshine. An anthology by the Western Writers Group, Wanted: A Western Story Collection, failed to break my streak of mixed-bag anthology experiences, and I also found disappointment (despite great potential and glimmering ideas around the edges) in JY Yang's The Black Tides of Heaven. December's high points included Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames, an unexpectedly enjoyable mashup of sword and sorcery with rock and roll culture, and yet another Expanse novella, Strange Dogs, which would work better as a standalone than more than one of those Western tales in that anthology.
Here's hoping 2019 brings pleasant surprises, both on and off the bookshelf.
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