The Hopeful Librarian

It was a big year for series for me: I discovered five new ones – two of which, fortunately, are complete. I hate waiting for new books. And no, you don’t have to tell me that in that case, I’ve picked one of the worst series to get into.

• Daniel Abraham’s Long Price Quartet, starting with A Shadow in Summer. These are some of the most genuinely original fantasy novels I’ve everread. They are also very, very bleak. Someone once mentioned that one thing that Tolkien did that most of the later epic fantasies never do is destroy his own world – by the end of The Lord of the Rings, the magic is going out of the world forever. Well, Abraham destroys his world too, but he gives his characters plenty of agency in the process. It makes for an incredibly powerful story. Complete, and rightly so.
• Hexslinger by Gemma Files, starting with A Book of Tongues. I picked up A Book of Tongues on a whim from the library and was just sucked in to this wonderful, dark alternate Old West, full of magic-workers and outlaws – and outlaw magic-workers like the Reverend Asher Rook and his partner Chess Pargeter. Throw in a heavy dose of Mayan mythology, and this is one of the most creepy-fun series I’ve read in a long time. If anything, Rope of Thorns improved on the first installment. Ongoing: Book three will be out this year.
• Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, starting with His Majesty’s Dragon. I really don’t know why I waited so long to read this. Napoleonic wars! With dragons! It’s like it was tailor-made for me. They’re a little on the fluffy side, but at the same time, Novik is careful to explore all the corners of her world, not just Western Europe, and pays a lot of attention to exactly how much difference having intelligent, eighteen-ton flying native species would make in the history of the world. (Hint: the European conquest of the southern hemisphere? Not so much.) Ongoing: the next volume’s out this spring.
• The Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy L. Sayers, starting with Whose Body? I can no longer recall what finally compelled me to pick this series up at last, but I am so glad I did. I fell in love with Lord Peter – and then when he fell in love with Harriet Vane, I was completely swept away. Reading the series in order is an education in writing, as well: you can see so clearly the turning point where Sayers realized that she couldn’t make the characters do whatever she wanted them to anymore, and the series mushroomed as she tried to maneuver them into place. Complete – in and of itself, not just because the author died. I always like that.
• Last but most definitely not least, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin, starting with A Game of Thrones. I did it. I caved, even though I kept saying I’d never read this series until it was completed because I’d seen what the wait was doing to people. Fortunately, although I plowed through Game of Thrones in about a month, it’s taken me a little longer to keep going; I still have three books in front of me at the moment. Curse you, George R.R. Martin, and your incredible characters. Ongoing, possibly for the next twenty years.

Of sequels, only one really stood out.

• The Tempering of Men by Sarah Monette & Elizabeth Bear. They’re authors I’d never miss, but even if it wasn’t a Monette & Bear collaboration, I would have read A Companion to Wolves, a deconstruction of the telepathic-animal-companion fantasy genre (and of the Pern series I was so hooked on as a teenager.) The Tempering of Men was less deconstructive, but I enjoyed it more, mostly due to the focus on my favorite characters, Vethulf and Skjaldwulf. Alas, we’ll have to wait another year for the final volume.

I tend to prefer standalone books, all in their own package, for most of my reading, though.

• Room by Emma Donoghue. This was on a lot of best lists for 2010, which was of course what compelled me to pick it up in the first half of the next year. (It won the Irish Bord Gaís award, which is one of those weird awards that I don’t know why I follow other than my unending affection for all things Irish.) Room absolutely deserves all those kudos; it’s a heartwrenching story (clearly based on the Jaycee Dugard case), but what really shines is the narration. First-person is hard enough to pull off, but a whole novel, about a truly horrific situation, written from the point of view of a five-year-old? It shouldn’t work. It does, and beautifully. Donoghue is definitely the author to watch.
• Eutopia by David Nickle. Thanks to Gemma Files’s Hexslinger series, I discovered ChiZine press, and this wonderful gem of a horror novel. Atmospheric and perfectly historical, I loved David Nickle’s novel about the horrors of the quest for perfection.
• The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. I absolutely adored both Lament and Ballad, and was thrilled to snap up a preview copy of The Scorpio Races. Stiefvater writes excellent faerie creatures, inhuman and violent in a way that recalls the pre-Victorian stories about them. While I didn’t love it straight out of the gate, the more I think about this book the more I like it.
• 7th Sigma by Steven Gould. I love dystopias, but what I really loved about 7th Sigma was that although it was set after the end of the world – or at least a small part of it – it wasn’t a terribly bleak or horrific dystopia, just one in which people are getting by as best they can. I also loved the episodic storytelling; it read like an action-adventure serial, and I could always use more of those in my life.
• Predating this blog, possibly the best book I read all year was God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero. A followup to his Religious Literacy (which I also read in early 2011), in his new book Prothero describes the primary characteristics of the world’s major religions with an eye not to universalism but to distinction. All religions are not fundamentally about the same things, he argues, and trying to say that they are in order to promote tolerance is only going to make people crazy. He includes a section on atheism as well, admitting that it isn’t a religion but it needs to be brought up in these discussions. I recommend it highly for just about everyone, religious or not.