December Site Update and Year in Review

The month's reviews have been archived at the main Brightdreamer Books website.

As the last dregs of 2019 slide down the drain of time, it's also time once again for the Reading Year in Review, an admittedly-haphazard look back.

January started with a book that forever changed how I looked at the woods out back, Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees. It also turned out to be my most prolific reading month. High points included a prequel in Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series, In an Absent Dream, and Katherine Applegate's exploration of extinction in a fantasy world, Endling #1: The Last. I also finished off Nnedi Okorafor's ambitious (if occasionally metaphysical) science fiction trilogy, Binti, and explored the often-harrowing Children of Blood and Bone, by Tomi Adeyemi. There were a few disappointments - I was less impressed than I'd hoped to be by Alex White's deep-space fantasy A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe and the choose-your-own romance of My Lady's Choosing (Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris), and Sebastien de Castell's Spellslinger felt oddly flat - but overall it was a decent month.

In February, I revisited Andre Norton's Fur Magic, a favorite from childhood that lost some luster with adult eyes but retained an imaginative premise. I also returned to Marie Brennan's dragon researcher Lady Trent with The Tropic of Serpents. The high point of the month, though, would have to be The Copper Promise by Jen Williams, an exciting sword and sorcery adventure in the vein of Leiber's classic Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser with some refreshing twists and updates.

I kicked off March with the seventh Birthright graphic novel by Joshua Williamson, continuing the adventures of the boy-turned-warrior Mickey as the darkness he tried - and failed - to defeat in a fantasy world follows him home to Earth. I also explored the anthro noir graphic novel Blacksad, by Juan Diaz Canales, and sampled another series by the prolific Seanan McGuire with the urban fantasy Discount Armageddon. Brandon Sanderson ventured into young adult science fiction with Skyward, with mixed results, and Carrie Ann Noble's The Mermaid's Sister left a lingering fishy taste in my mouth I still haven't completely rinsed out. I also found myself underwhelmed, despite the promise and the hype, by Charlie Jane Anders's All the Birds in the Sky, despite it exploring some interesting ideas. Fortunately, the month also brought me the seventh installment of James S. A. Corey's Expanse series, Persepolis Rising.

April included another Expanse novel, Tiamat's Wrath, which did not fail to impress. It also brought me Mary Robinette Kowal's The Fated Sky, the second of her "punchcard-punk" alternate history science fiction tales positing a space race that didn't sputter out after the moonshot, this time sending astronauts to Mars aboard Apollo-era rockets. And I found myself more impressed than I'd expected to be by Martha Conway's historical adventure tale Thieving Forest. More than one read fell flat this month, unfortunately; Fritz Leiber's classic Swords in the Mist felt stretched by sticking to a single major plot arc instead of the shorter adventures his sword-and-sorcery heroes tend to excel at, and Heidi Heilig's For a Muse of Fire just failed to hit my story sweet spot for some reason, though it had some very good moments. But, then, I found myself unusually amused by Leah Gilbert's silly picture book A Couch for Llama, so my literary opinions aren't to be taken without salt.

In May, I reviewed my first-ever audiobook, an excellent rendition of Adam Rex's middle-grade alien invasion romp The True Meaning of Smekday (prompted by a badly-bruised tailbone; it's impossible to sit long enough to read with a bruised tailbone.) Brooke Bolander's award-nominated tale The Only Harmless Great Thing lived up to the hype, delivering a thoughtful, tragic, and profound story of interspecies exploitation. And Jonathan Stroud's middle-grade horror series Lockwood and Company continued to impress with The Whispering Skull. Disappointments included the graphic novel Coda, by Simon Spurrier, and while I appreciated the premise and writing of Ian Tregillis's Bitter Seeds, I found it just plain too bleak to pursue through the trilogy, especially given the bleak reality I must return to when I close a book these days. Similarly, John Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire was an unfortunate case of "wrong book, wrong time" given certain world and national events.

June started on a sour note when I found myself underimpressed by Samantha Shannon's The Priory of the Orange Tree. Things picked up with K. Arsenault Rivera's Asian-flavored fantasy The Tiger's Daughter and Arkady Martine's A Memory Called Empire. In anticipation of Netflix's adaptation, I ventured into the written world of the Witcher with Andrzej Sapkowski's The Last Wish, at the time considered the entry point to the series, and had sufficient mixed feelings that I still haven't started watching the show. Conversely, having enjoyed Netflix's adaptation of Altered Carbon, I read Richard K. Morgan's book, and while I found it decent I have to admit I enjoyed the arc from the Netflix version better. (I'll admit some minor influence from a shirtless Joel Kinneman here - I'm human, after all - but the plot tweaks also felt more satisfying, particularly the conclusion.) And, after seeing it go through the library again and again when so many autobiographies and memoirs fade after brief spurts of interest, I tried Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, a memoir of his childhood in South Africa, and very much enjoyed it. The month also contained a reading of Wesley King's Dragons vs. Drones, which ties with Snakes on a Plane for the most accurate title I've ever encountered.

July kicked off with a graphic novel about magic-wielding dogs fighting forces of evil in the Appalacians, Evan Dorkin's Beasts of Burden: Wise Dogs and Eldrich Men. I ventured back into the retro-future world of Arabella Ashby in David D. Levine's fantastical romp Arabella and the Battle of Venus, which mostly entertained. And I did my patriotic duty by actually reading The Mueller Report, a long and thorough and very unsettling probe of distinctly shady behavior in the highest offices of America that still remains largely unaddressed. Max Gladstone led me into some very surreal territory with the investigation of a god's murder in Three Parts Dead, and Rick Yancey's The Infinite Sea turned an alien apocalypse into something approaching poetry with his prose.

In August, I finally got back to Jeremy Whitley's "princess who saved herself" with Princeless: Find Yourself, which picked up the pace after some dithering in previous volumes. I also ventured back into Catherynne M. Valente's Fairyland with The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, which lived up to the high bar set by the first Fairyland installment. And Megan O'Keefe's debut space opera, Velocity Weapon, proved exciting and interesting. I also sampled a genre classic with Clifford D. Simak's Way Station, which can't help showing some age around the edges but retains an impressive premise and great mind's-eye-candy moments.

September started with a stumble of a story, a disappointingly formulatic return to the Mistborn world in Brandon Sanderson's The Alloy of Law. It also brought one of the year's best and most imaginative reads, Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse, a story of a stuffed yellow Triceratops solving the murders of forgotten imaginary friends. Amazon Prime's impressive and amusing miniseries prompted me to finally read the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett classic Good Omens, and Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice presented a unique take on artificial and collective intelligence.

October's best read was by far Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl and its impressive exploration of fandom. Jenn Lyons's The Ruin of Kings had admirable ambition and scope (and some great, primal-force-of-chaos dragons), but ultimately left me too exhausted and lost in name-tangles to truly enjoy. I also felt let down somewhat by the wrap-up to Brian K. Vaughan's graphic novel series Paper Girls, though the seventh installment of Noelle Stevenson's Lumberjanes proved fun.

I visited the world of James S. A. Corey's Expanse yet again in November with the newly-released novella Auberon, and again later in the month with The Art and Making of The Expanse, in preparation for the mid-December release of the fourth season of the television show based on the series. (As of this writing, I've already watched it through twice.) While I found myself nonplussed by Jen Calonita's "fairy tale reform school" in Flunked, I greatly enjoyed the twist on Hansel and Gretel offered by the darkly spooky Nightbooks, by J. A. White. I also finally found the first volume of Jeff Lemire's Ascender, his follow-up to the graphic novel series Descender, on the digital lending service hoopla, and am looking forward to continuing the adventure in the post-disaster galaxy.

And December was a very low-volume reading month, owing largely to me spending far too much time and energy on holiday projects. Worlds collided with mixed results in Todd Matthy's Robots Vs. Princesses Volume 1, and I was somewhat let down after years of anticipation when I finally got to Rachel Hartman's Seraphina. Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy took on recent trends that offer an idealized, often imaginary vision of our prehistory as the answer to what ails modern society. I wrapped the month with an enjoyable exploration of one of my favorite film franchises in Linda Sunshine's The Art of How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World.

Thus wraps 2019. I'm looking forward to unearthing fresh gems as I dig into my towering to-be-read pile and add more titles to my ever-growing list.