There Will Be Time (to Read): Books I Read in 2024

Two years running! 

For the second year in a row, I've read 100 books in 12 months. That number used to be what I considered a minimum annual number for me, but as chronicled here at The Earliad, my speed and focus have diminished somewhat with the growing responsibilities and waning capabilities of middle age. Maybe I'm rebuilding to what used to be my old normal? 

OVERVIEW

In 2024, I read

• 83 works of fiction and 17 works of non-fiction
• 52 science fiction novels, 15 Star Trek media tie-ins, 11 mainstream, three horror, and two fantasy
• 33 books by women and 67 books by men
• 28 books from the 2020s, 18 from the 2010s, 18 from the 2000s, 13 from the 1990s, six from the 1980s, eight from the 1970s, 4 from the 1960s, 3 from the 1950s, and one each from the 1940s and 1890s. 
• Eight books by Hugh Howey, six by Catherine Asaro, four by Stephen Baxter, and three each from Robert Silverberg, Jo Walton, and Connie Willis

   COMMENTARY AND ANALYSIS

Of the books I read this year, 30 were re-reads from authors including Jo Walton, Connie Willis, Stephen King, Robert Heinlein, Patricia Highsmith, Stephen Baxter, Les Daniels, Isaac Asimov, and others. 

I also revisited several works by Catherine Asaro while at the same time reading her newest novels for the first time. Prior to this year I hadn't read her first novel, Primary Inversion, since it was released as a mass market paperback in 1995. I was still in my 20s! The horror. I found myself surprised by how much plot is crammed into Primary Inversion; I could have sworn at least a couple of its major events occurred in later books of the Skolian Empire series. 

Speaking of the 1990s, I picked up B.F. Skinner's Walden Two at the Wee Book Inn sometime during that decade. It sat on a shelf until Skinner's name came up in the infamous orientation film featured in the season two premiere of Lost. Having read only the back cover to that point, I figured I'd read the book to see if there were any clues to what might be going on in the world of the show. Unfortunately, Skinner's prose is incredibly dry, so I put the book aside until, well, this year. Walden Two is really more manifesto than novel, and reads like a professor's self-assured polemic against the status quo as it was back in the 1940s. His solution, which in hindsight absolutely informed the Dharma Initiative backstory for Lost, was utopian social engineering, a method for creating self-sufficient communes free of want and violence. 

Walden Two was something of a curiosity for me this year, so I'll turn to the books that really impressed me (for good or ill) in 2024: 

• The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020. This near-future SF novel begins with a catastrophic heat wave in India that kills millions and triggers, at last, serious global action on climate change. It's a harrowing read, because Robinson describes an all-too-plausible future of diminishing resources and increasing violence. The titular Ministry is tasked with overseeing a kind of holding action against the collapse of civilization, and he goes into some fascinating detail about the societal changes required to achieve a best-case scenario that, from our perspective today, remains terrifying to contemplate. 
• System Collapse, Martha Wells, 2023. Another Murderbot tale, yay! 
  
• Demon Daughter and Penric and the Bandit, Lois McMaster Bujold, 2023 and 2024. More Penric and Desdemona adventures, yay! 
• The Road to Roswell, Connie Willis, 2023. A lovely comedic tale of love, aliens, and UFO enthusiasts pratfalling around the deserts of the US southwest. Seems timely in the wake of all the UAP buzz in the news this year. 
  
• Shift and Dust by Hugh Howley, 2013. I read Wool, the first of Howley's Silo books, way back in the teens, but only finished the series this year. I really enjoyed Shift, which explains the origins of the mysterious silos, and Dust was a satisfying conclusion, though the series epilogue in the Silo collection left something of a bittersweet taste in my mouth. 
• Shadrach in the Furnace, Robert Silverberg, 1976. I've been working my way through the Hugo and Nebula nominations for years now, and Robert Silverberg has his share of those nominations, of which I read three in 2024. Shadrach in the Furnace was my favourite, a psychedelic fever dream of body horror, totalitarian dystopia, and state surveillance. 
  
• Never Let Me Go, Kzuo Ishiguro, 2005. In science fiction there are several examples of a peculiar trope involving societies that grow clones strictly to harvest their organs to extend the lives of the rich and powerful. Ishiguro weaves a dreadful poignancy into the trope, gently bringing us into the world of several such clones who are conditioned from birth to accept and embrace their fate. It's heartbreaking, as any such inhuman system should be. Inhuman? No. All too depressingly human, and something that could plausibly happen someday...if it hasn't already in some dark corner of the world. 
• Planet X, Michael Jan Friedman, 1998). Not all media tie-in novels are bad. Planet X is bad. Very bad. Imagine a world in which Marvel's X-Men meet up with Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise to investigate the sudden appearance of new mutants springing up on a non-aligned world in the Star Trek universe. The original X-Men comics have been rightly identified as a solid vehicle for telling stories about prejudice and othering, and that's the theme Planet X tries to take. It's not an awful idea on its face, but the novel reads like a kid playing with random action figures, mashing them together with sound and fury. 

MONTH-BY-MONTH

January

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (John Godey, 1973) 

Dawn of Rebellion: The Visual Guide (Pablo Hidalgo and Emily Shkoukani, 2023)

The Ministry for the Future (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2020)  

The Jigsaw Assassin (Catherine Asaro, 2022) 

Double or Nothing (Kim Sherwood, 2023) 

The Lost Worlds of 2001 (Arthur C. Clarke, 1972)

The Turning of the Screw (Henry James, 1898) 

Voyage (Stephen Baxter, 1996) 

System Collapse (Martha Wells, 2023) 

The Zombie Survival Guide (Max Brooks, 2003) 

February
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (Max Brooks, 2006)  

Demon Daughter (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2023)

There Will Be Time (Poul Anderson, 1972) 

Moonseed (Stephen Baxter, 1998) 

The Star Fox (Poul Anderson, 1965) 

The Spacetime Pool (Catherine Asaro, 2008) 

Life After God (Douglas Coupland, 1994) 

The Road to Roswell (Connie Willis, 2023) 

Superman: The Complete History (Les Daniels, 1998) 

Primary Inversion (Catherine Asaro, 1995) 

March

Turtles All the Way Down (John Green, 2017) 

The Last Hawk (Catherine Asaro, 1997) 

More Than the Sum of His Parts: Collected Stories (Joe Haldeman, 2020) 

Wool (Hugh Howley, 2012) 

Shift (Hugh Howley, 2013)

Dust (Hugh Howley, 2013) 

Silo (Hugh Howley, 2020) 

Girls, Interrupted: How Pop Culture Is Failing Women (Lisa Whittington-Hill, 2024) 

Space (James Michener, 1982) 

Just the Nicest Couple (Mary Kubica, 2023) 

April

Firestarter (Stephen King, 1980)

Walden Two (B.F. Skinner, 1948)

Homecoming (Christie Golden, 2003) 

The Giver (Lois Lowry, 1993)  

Batman: The Complete History (Les Daniels, 1999) 

Flood (Stephen Baxter, 2008) 

The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (Peter Zeihan, 2022) 

The Farther Shore (Christie Golden, 2003) 

The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories (Isaac Asimov, 1976)

Burn (Bill Ransom, 1995) 

May

A Choice of Catastrophes (Michael Schuster and Steve Mollmann, 2011) 

Crisis of Consciousness (Dave Galanter, 2015) 

Savage Trade (Tony Daniel, 2015)

Beacon 23 (Hugh Howley, 2015) 

With a Mind to Kill (Anthony Horowitz, 2022)  

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005) 

The Downloaded (Robert J. Sawyer, 2024) 

When the Sparrow Falls (Neil Sharpson, 2021) 

Shadrach in the Furnace (Robert Silverberg, 1976) 

The Stochastic Man (Robert Silverberg, 1975) 

June

Thorns (Robert Silverberg, 1967) 

You Like It Darker (Stephen King, 2024) 

Half Way Home (Hugh Howey, 2010) 

Wonder Woman: The Complete History (Les Daniels, 2000) 

Sand (Hugh Howey, 2014)

The Speed of Dark (Elizabeth Moon, 2002) 

Black Fire (Sonni Cooper, 1983) 

Finding Serenity (Jane Espenson, 2004) 

July

Across the Sand (Hugh Howey, 2022)

Foundation’s Triumph (David Brin, 1999) 

Ark (Stephen Baxter, 2009)

Planet X (Michael Jan Friedman, 1998)

Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise (Shane Johnson, 1987) 

The Three-Minute Universe (Barbara Paul, 1988) 

No Time Like the Past (Greg Cox, 2014) 

August

Penric and the Bandit (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2024) 

The Incident Report (Martha Baillie, 2009) 

Nuclear War: A Scenario (Annie Jacobson, 2024) 

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again (Shiguru Kayama, 1955) 

The Man Who Saw Seconds (Alexander Boldizar, 2024)

Serpents in the Garden (Jeff Mariotte, 2014)

The Ministry of Time (Kaliane Bradley, 2024) 

The Rings of Time (Greg Cox, 2012) 

The Last Day (Andrew Hunter Murray, 2020)  

S.H.A.D.O. Technical Operations Manual (Chris Thompson and Andrew Clements, 2022)

September

The Twin Paradox (Charles Wachter, 2020) 

The Down Deep (Catherine Asaro, 2024) 

Report from Planet Midnight (Nalo Hopkinson, 2012) 

The Talented Mr. Ripley (Patricia Highsmith, 1955) 

October

Humans: An A to Z (Matt Haig, 2014) 

Pawns and Symbols (Majliss Larson, 1985)

What Entropy Means to Me (George Alec Effinger, 1972) 

Cast No Shadow (James Swallow, 2011) 

Half Past Human (TJ Bass, 1971) 

Here (Richard McGuire, 2014) 

November

Tunnel in the Sky (Robert Heinlein, 1955) 

The Hollow Man (Dan Simmons, 1992) 

Farthing (Jo Walton, 2006) 

Ha’penny (Jo Walton, 2007) 

Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan (Robin Maxwell, 2012) 

The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger, 2003) 

Half a Crown (Jo Walton, 2008) 

December

Miracle and Other Christmas Stories (Connie Willis, 1999)

The Art of the Amazing Spider-Man (John Romita and Stan Lee, 2024) 

Fantastic Four: Full Circle Expanded Edition (Alex Ross, 2024) 

Time Tunnel (Murray Leinster, 1964) 

DC Comics Style Guide (Paul Levitz, 2024) 

The Wailing Asteroid (Murray Leinster, 1960) 

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (David E. Hoffman, 2009) 

The Life Impossible (Matt Haig, 2024) 

And finally, here are Bruce and Leslie's stats for 2024! 

That's it for 2024. Happy New Year, all. Keep fighting the good fight. 

Last But Not Least: Books I Read in 2023

 

Finally!

Here we are at what has become the traditional final post of the year here at The Earliad: the list of books I read over the course of the last 365 days. As seen in the Goodreads screencap at the top of this post, I have at last crawled my way back to my baseline minimum of 100 books a year, a goal I've failed to achieve for the last few years now thanks to COVID-19, stress, and depression. 

But hey! The world is okay now. COVID-19 is behind us, human rights and decency are ascendant, the wealth gap is steadily shrinking, and we've turned the tide in the fight against climate change. 

. . . 

All right, nothing in that last paragraph is true, but somehow I managed to read 100 books this year anyway.

Overview

In 2023, I read

• 82 works of fiction and 18 works of non-fiction
• 52 science fiction novels, 21 mainstream, five horror, and four fantasy
• 40 books by women and 60 books by men
• 32 books from the 2020s, 29 from the 2010s, seven from the 2000s, five from the 1990s, eight from the 1980s, 10 from the 1970s, three from the 1960s, one from the 1950s, three from the 1930s, one from the 1980s, and one from the 1810s
• Seven books by Charles M. Schulz, five by Kate Beaton, five by Matt Haig, five by John Scalzi, four by Stephen King, four by Nancy Kress, three by Sandy Petersen, three by Katherine Anne Porter, two by David Brin, two by Mona Clee, two by Diane Duane, two by Steven Konkoly, two by Jack McDevitt, and one by each other author on this year's list

Commentary and Analysis

Repeating my experience in 2022, I reread a lot of old favourites in 2023, including novels by Ray Bradbury, Mona Clee, Suzy McKee Charnas, Diane Duane, Daniel Keyes, Stephen King, Nancy Kress, Kate Wilhelm, and Connie Willis. I have only one thing to say about these rereads: I wish Mona Clee had written more novels. The two she published--Branch Point and Overshoot--are wonderful soft-SF tales of human folly and our efforts to do better and be better.

As promised last year, I read Roderick Thorpe's first novel about detective Joe Leland, a character Hollywood adapted twice--once as a straightforward adaptation of this novel starring Frank Sinatra, the second an adaptation of the sequel, Nothing Lasts Forever, as the action hit Die Hard. The Detective is more meditative and slow-paced than its sequel, but still worthwhile, and gives the character's journey added depth. I wish I'd read the two books in order. 

Last year Leslie gave me a novel for my birthday and one for Christmas. I don't remember which book was meant for which occasion, but I read Matt Haig's The Comfort Book first, and it really gave me an emotional lift when I needed it. Haig's style is warm and welcoming, and so is his subject matter, whether he's writing non-fiction, as in this case, or fiction, as in the other Haig books I devoured this year in response to the good feelings granted by The Comfort Book. Those books were The Midnight Library, How to Stop Time, and The Humans, works of speculative fiction with a common theme: making connections and dealing with trauma through empathy and a conscious choice to pursue understanding. All four reads left me feeling better about the world, and they were light but thoughtful. I'll be following Haig's work. 

The other book Leslie gifted me was Gnomon, by Nick Harkaway, a dense science fiction detective story about artificial intelligence, simulated worlds, and history's throughlines. It's a fascinating, nested, interweaving narrative, one I'll revisit again in a few years. 

I've long been a fan of cartoonist Kate Beaton's website, so this year I purchased all of her available works. The most notable was Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, an autobiography covering Kate's time in Fort McMurray, a place I'm familiar with through a couple of personal visits and my work in the public and private sectors. Knowing what I know about the working environment in Fort McMurray, I went into this book hoping that nothing bad would happen to Kate, but . . . well, one very bad thing does happen, and I wish I hadn't anticipated it. It made me wish that I could send Kate a message back through time telling her to pursue other opportunities. The book is very worthwhile and I'm glad I read it, but it's rough going in some places simply because Beaton doesn't shy away from the realities of her experience. 

In 2023 I read three books by fantasist Naomi Novik. The first, The Golden Enclaves, is the finale of a trilogy of works about a university of magic with campuses across the globe. I didn't find the conclusion of the series as satisfying as the first two books, but it was still engaging and enjoyable, and doesn't preclude further exploration of the world. I was more impressed by a pair of standalone novels by Novik: Uprooted and Spinning Silver. They explore the usual fantasy tropes, but Novik's command of characterization and structure make them both entertaining, breezy reads. 

Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream is grotesquely violent, absurd, and troubling--as it should be, because Spinrad posits an alternate world where Adolf Hitler was a science fiction writer instead of the mad dictator of our reality. The book's most chilling section, though, is the framing material, which expounds upon the outsized influence of this alternate Hitler's novel on his world: he achieves a cult-like following which has, if you read between the lines, influenced his world in reactionary directions that might, in the long run, do more damage to humanity than our Hitler achieved in the real world. It's a scary book. 

I stumbled across a fun experiment in 2023--an opportunity to read Bram Stoker's Dracula across the course of the year via emails sent out on the date of the letters and journals that make up perhaps the world's most famous epistolary. (There are some editorial allowances made for the long out-of-sequence section describing what happens on the Demeter.) Reading the book this way really connected me to the characters; it was like I had to wait for the various letters and newspaper clippings just as they did. 

The Road is my first experience with the work of Cormac McCarthy, and he certainly lives up to his reputation. Dystopic, bleak, hopeless, and sparse, this is one of those works that really captures the mood of the 2020s, even though it was written in 2006. McCarthy builds a vivid world, though; even though his prose is sparing, his choices depict his chosen milieu with crystal clarity. 

I had the most fun this year, though, with Leslie Vermeer's Last But Not Least: A Guide to Proofreading Text. As with her earlier The Complete Canadian Book Editor, Last But Not Least is written with great authority--Leslie knows her subject matter backwards and forwards--but just as critical to the book's value is the way Leslie expresses that authority with empathy, kindness, and authenticity. She also peppers her texts with fun little in-jokes, this time with an emphasis on cultural touchpoints in Edmonton, British Columbia's lower mainland, and Vancouver Island. They're lovely touches that don't distract from the message, and fun Easter eggs for those who spot them. 

It must be said that I've known Leslie for years, so I'm predisposed to enjoying her work. Despite this, I'm confident in predicting that Last But Not Least will be incredibly useful to working communications professionals. Indeed, as one such professional, I've had to perform my share of proofreading jobs over the years; in fact, I have a very large proofreading task coming up in January. Leslie's book does an incredible job of clearly and carefully defining the role of the proofreader, its importance to publishing credible text, and how proofreaders can succeed at the task. Last But Not Least will be by my side for my January task and others to come. 

(I did not proofread this post, by the way; had I followed Leslie's excellent guidance, this blog would be error-free, or nearly so. Blame the student, not the teacher.) 

Plus, Leslie was kind enough to include me in the acknowledgements for my teeny-weeny contribution to the book. How cool is that? I'm genuinely thrilled. What a lovely way to end the year! 

Month-by-Month

January: 11

The Detective (Roderick Thorp, 1966)

The Comfort Book (Matt Haig, 2021) 

High School Journalist, Promoter, Jester - Kurt Vonnegut in the Shortridge Daily Echo, 1937-1940 (Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 2023) 

The Effort (Claire Holroyde, 2021) 

Hark! A Vagrant (Kate Beaton, 2015) 

Step Aside, Pops (Kate Beaton, 2015) 

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Kate Beaton, 2022) 

The Princess and the Pony (Kate Beaton, 2015) 

The Midnight Library (Matt Haig, 2020) 

Fractured State (Steven Konkoly, 2016) 

The World of Star Trek, second edition (David Gerrold, 1984) 

February: 10

Rogue State (Steven Konkoly, 2017) 

They’d Rather Be Right (Mark Clifton and Frank Riley, 1954) 

Village in the Sky (Jack McDevitt, 2023) 

The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik, 2022) 

Uprooted (Naomi Novik, 2015) 

Spinning Silver (Naomi Novik, 2018) 

The Official Art of Big Trouble in Little China (Tara Bennett, 2017) 

The Art of Tron: Legacy (Justin Springer, 2010)

Robotic Existentialism: The Art of Eric Joyner (Eric Joyner, 2018) 

Tomb of Annihilation (Christopher Perkins, 2017) 

March: 10

How to Stop Time (Matt Haig, 2017) 

Old Venus (George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, 2015) 

The Dead Zone (Stephen King, 1979)

The Toynbee Convector (Ray Bradbury, 1988)  

Branch Point (Mona Clee, 1996)

Overshoot (Mona Clee, 1998)

Music of the Spheres (Margaret Wander Bonanno, 1990) 

Probability Moon (Nancy Kress, 2000) 

Probability Sun (Nancy Kress, 2001) 

Probability Space (Nancy Kress, 2002) 

April: 8

The Iron Dream (Norman Spinrad, 1972) 

We Think, Therefore We Are (Peter Crowther, 2008) 

Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (Kate Wilhelm, 1976) 

Gnomon (Nick Harkaway, 2017) 

Fallout 4 Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide (David S.J. Hodgson, 2015) 

Dark Mirror (Diane Duane, 1994) 

Intellivore (Diane Duane, 1997) 

The Postman (David Brin, 1985) 

May: 10

The Art of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos (Pat Harrigan, 2006) 

S. Petersen’s Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters: A Field Observer’s Handbook of Preternatural Entities (Sandy Petersen, 1988)

S. Petersen's Field Guide to Creatures of the Dreamlands: An Album of Entities from the Land Beyond the Wall of Sleep (Sandy Petersen, 1989) 

S. Petersen's Field Guide to Lovecraftian Horrors: A Field Observer's Handbook of Preternatural Entities and Beings from Beyond the Wall of Sleep (Sandy Petersen, 2015) 

The Actual Star (Monica Byrne, 2021) 

Murder by Other Means (John Scalzi, 2020) 

Travel by Bullet (John Scalzi, 2022) 

Wondrous Beginnings (Steven H. Silver and Martin H. Greenberg, 2003)

The Simultaneous Man (Ralph Blum, 1971)

A Deadly Affair (Agatha Christie, 2022) 

June: 12

Alien3 (Pat Cadigan, 2021) 

Old Mortality (Katherine Anne Porter, 1937)

Noon Wine (Katherine Anne Porter, 1938) 

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Katherine Anne Porter, 1939) 

Observer (Nancy Kress and Robert Lanza, 2023) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1952-1955 (Charles M. Schulz, 2013) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1956-1960 (Charles M. Schulz, 2014) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1961-1965 (Charles M. Schulz, 2015) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1966-1970 (Charles M. Schulz, 2016) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1971-1975 (Charles M. Schulz, 2017) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1976-1980 (Charles M. Schulz, 2018) 

Peanuts Every Sunday: 1981-1985 (Charles M. Schulz, 2019) 

July: 6

The Shining (Stephen King, 1977) 

‘Salem’s Lot (Stephen King, 1975) 

Down to a Sunless Sea (David Graham, 1979) 

The Practice Effect (David Brin, 1984) 

Flowers for Algernon (Daniel Keyes, 1966) 

The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula K. LeGuin, 1971) 

August: 10

The Last President (John Barnes, 2012) 

Hope Rides Again (Andrew Shaffer, 2019) 

How It Unfolds (James S.A. Corey, 2023) 

Void (Veronica Roth, 2023) 

Falling Bodies (Rebecca Roanhorse, 2023) 

The Long Game (Ann Leckie, 2023)

Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach (Nnedi Okorafor, 2023) 

Slow Time between the Stars (John Scalzi, 2023) 

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee, 1960) 

Lincoln’s Dreams (Connie Willis, 1987) 

September: 4

Dr. No (Percival Everett, 2022) 

The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi, 2022) 

7TV Cinematic Skirmish Rules (Karl Pelleton, 2023) 

Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) 

October: 10

The Humans (Matt Haig, 2013) 

Artwork from Baldur’s Gate (Joachim Vleminckx, 2023) 

The Radleys (Matt Haig, 2010) 

Starter Villain (John Scalzi, 2023) 

King Baby (Kate Beaton, 2010) 

Holly (Stephen King, 2023) 

Return to Glory (Jack McDevitt, 2023) 

On His Majesty’s Secret Service (Charlie Higson, 2023) 

To Be Taught, If Fortunate (Becky Chambers, 2019) 

Walk to the End of the World (Suzy McKee Charnas, 1974) 

November: 2

Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897) 

The Machine Never Blinks (Ivan Greenberg, 2020) 

December: 8

The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006) 

Touch Not the Cat (Mary Stewart, 1976) 

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (Various, 1986) 

Upright Women Wanted (Sarah Gailey, 2020) 

The Defector (Chris Hadfield, 2023) 

Maybe There—The Lost Stories from Space: 1999 (David Hirsch and Robert E. Wood, 2023) 

Last But Not Least: A Guide to Proofreading Text (Leslie Vermeer, 2023) 

Nothing Lasts Forever: Books I Read in 2022

Note: Blogger glitched at the wrong moment and erased most of yesterday’s original post, so I’ve reconstructed it from what little remained plus whatever my frazzled brain can remember of what I wrote. Because this post was supposed to come out yesterday, there are a couple of temporal references that don’t make sense. 

In 2022 I read a paltry 61 books, a performance only slightly better than last year's all-time low. As with last year, the stresses contemplating existential threats to civilization hampered my ability to focus on reading and blunted my enjoyment of reading for pleasure's sake. I spent far too much time doomscrolling, which in all likelihood represented the majority of my reading this year. 

Overview

Fiction v. Non-Fiction

Fiction: 54
Nonfiction: 7

Genres

Fantasy: 7
Horror: 2
Mainstream: 5
Science Fiction: 25
Star Trek: 12

Books by Decade

1890s: 2
1950s: 1
1960s: 1
1970s: 2
1980s: 7
1990s: 5
2000s: 6
2010s: 16
2020s: 19

Gender Split

Books by Women: 14
Books by Men: 47

Commentary and Analysis

Parity between men and women authors slipped away from me this year, and once again I avoided much of the new and retreated into familiarity. About a third of the books I read this year--23 out of 61--were rereads, including most of Michael P. Kube McDowell's output, several favourites by Lois McMaster Bujold, a handful by Nancy Kress and H.G. Wells, and a few old (and new) novels by Stephen King. 

Science fiction dominated my reading as I sought escape from these times, defeating my ongoing efforts to read more mainstream and literary works. Once I had dreams of reading everything in the western canon; now, not so much. As I get older, I’m finding that, more and more, my reach exceeds my grasp. See? Hoary metaphors, the last resort of the lazy and uninspired. 

I didn’t read much nonfiction this year, aside from matters related to pop culture. I feel bad about that, because I used to read serious, long-format non-fiction as a matter of course, feeling it part of my duty as a citizen to be well-informed. For now, it’s too much for me. 

Enriching Reads

Roderick Thorp's 1979 detective thriller Nothing Lasts Forever was one of my favourite surprises of the year. Nothing Lasts Forever is most famous for serving as the story for the 1988 action film Die Hard, and while Die Hard is one of the best examples of the form, the original novel, in my view, has it beat. Nothing Lasts Forever has all the suspense and thrills of the movie, and if you've seen the movie you already know the plot (with a few key differences in character motivations, backgrounds, and relationships. But the novel's great strengths include considerable emotional heft and a poetic cynicism that actually hurts to read--in a good way. Joe Leland is an ex-fighter pilot and detective, and while he does battle with the terrorists that take over the Klaxon Oil building, we dive deep into Joe's current terror and rage and explore the personal traumas that brought him to this point. There's no “yippee-kai-yay” here, just a bruised, broken human being trying to salvage a little bit of happiness for what's left of his life. 

As an aside, I'm currently reading Roderick Thorp's first novel about Joe Leland, 1966's The Detective. I won't finish it before the clock strikes midnight, so it'll more than likely be the first book I complete in 2023. I'm about a quarter of the way through it, and I'm impressed, so far, by Thorp's handling of Leland's character arc; the younger version of Leland is still a bit cynical, but he's definitely more vital and less ravaged than the man we follow in Nothing Lasts Forever. The Detective, like its sequel, also has a film adaptation: Gordon Douglas' The Detective (1968), starring Frank Sinatra, which I screened earlier this year. Sinatra declined to appear in the film that became Die Hard; on such butterflies does the history of cinema change. 

84K, by Claire North, was the novel that depressed me most in 2022. It's a fine novel of a near-future dystopia and one man's effort to find some absolution in a horrible world he helped create, but the problem is North's supercapitalist nightmare is all too plausible; it's a society where corporations run everything and crimes are punished strictly by fines, effectively giving the rich freedom to do whatever they want to whoever they want and shackling everyone else. It took me forever to read this, because I had to keep putting it down in order to retain my mental health. 

On the other hand, I loved two recent novels by Naomi Novik: A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate. Both follow the adventures of a group of students working to graduate from a university that teaches magic, but I found Novik's prose, characterization, and worldbuilding considerably stronger than the most famous series based on this trope. (And I enjoyed the Harry Potter books!) Novik really makes you care about her characters, and the jeopardy they face is often horrifying. And yet, these are fun books. I groaned when I reached the cliffhanger ending of The Last Graduate to discover there was, at the time I read it, an as-yet-unpublished third book in the series. As I was writing that last sentence, I checked and I'm thrilled to say the third and final book, The Golden Enclaves, has come out and I just bought it. So that'll probably be the fourth book I read in 2023. (Numbers two and three will be a pair of books Leslie gave me back in August.) 

Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture by Preston Neal Jones is one of the most interesting behind-the-scenes chronicles of the filmmaking process I've ever read. Though published in 2014, the personal anecdotes that make up the bulk of this huge tome were captured by the author way back in the late 1970s, during the film's famously tumultuous production.

I read another notable Star Trek-related work of non-fiction this year: 2021’s Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier, by Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire. Chavkin and McGuire cover the efforts of the propmasters, production designers, and other talented artists who sourced and modified the furniture, décor, and other set dressing during the filming of Star Trek back in the 1960s. The book is full of gorgeous behind-the-scenes colour photographs and episode stills, and you’ll even learn a little about design principles and history as you read. I never imagined I’d find this particular topic interesting, but the authors did a great job of explaining how mid-20th century design trends informed and shaped the look of Star Trek’s imaginary future. I’ll never look at the show the same way again. 

I took great pleasure in reading Chris Thompson’s Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual, which cleverly serves as an in-universe prop that might have existed on Moonbase Alpha itself; it’s written as a guidebook for new inhabitants of the base, with new material covering the disaster that flung the Moon out of Earth’s orbit in the fall of 1999. The prose elements are crisp, detailed, and meticulously researched, while the graphic design and artwork are really stunning. It’s a gorgeous book, one of the few physical books I bought this year (Designing the Final Frontier being the other notable example). 

I loved this book so much that I pre-ordered the special edition of a follow-up work using the same in-universe conceit: the S.H.A.D.O. Technical Operations Manual, also by Thompson, which describes the technical workings of the fictional anti-alien defence organization featured on UFO, the spiritual prequel to Space: 1999. I haven’t read it yet, but you’ll doubtless see my reaction to it next December 31. 

And finally, in 2022 the two gentlemen who write pseudonymously as James S.A. Corey wrapped up their long-running SF series, The Expanse, with Leviathan Falls. This series pleasantly surprised me from book one, and this series finale is fitting, logical, and bittersweet—a great sendoff for a world and characters I’ve come to really enjoy. It was a series with grand SF ideas and, more importantly, flawed but authentic heroes who were trying to do the right thing in a universe filled with terrible choices. 

Disappointing Reads

Tie-in fiction is a crap shoot at the best of times, but Pocket Books’ recently wrapped up the long-running Star Trek “litverse” because new shows such as Picard and Discovery wrecked the continuity established by the last couple of decades of novels Trek novels. Pocket wrapped things up with a messy, violent not-very-Trek-like trilogy that saw the novelized versions of 90s-era Trek characters sacrifice themselves to prevent a temporal anomaly or some other such nonsense to prevent the destruction of the universe, resetting continuity to allow for more tie-in novels that can take advantage of the new shows. Nonsense, but not a great loss; out of hundreds of novels published, there are maybe two dozen of legitimate quality beyond breezy entertainment. 

Normally I enjoy Philip Pullman’s work, but I didn’t get much out of Serpentine (a His Dark Materials tie-in), The White Mercedes, or The Broken Bridge. None of these books were bad, but they just didn’t engage me as much as some of his other work. In this case, I suspect the problem is me, not Pullman. He’s a gifted guy. 

Because I’d read Nothing Lasts Forever, I figured I may as well read Walter Wager’s 58 Minutes, the inspiration for Die Hard 2. Surprise: 58 Minutes is a better book than Die Hard 2 is a movie, but the decline in quality from Thorp to Wager is pretty much parallel to the decline in quality from Die Hard to its first sequel. Not that Thorp and Wager have anything to do with each other; they just happen to each have written novels turned into movies from the same series. 58 Minutes is engaging for what it is—a high-stakes thriller—but it doesn’t have any of Thorp’s nuance or gift for in-depth character study. 

That’s it for my commentary—here’s what my year in reading looked like, in order of books completed. Scroll to the end for one final thought and a couple of links. 

Month-by-Month

January: 8
Beggars in Spain (Nancy Kress, 1993) 
Beggars and Choosers (Nancy Kress, 1994) 
The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895) 
The Quiet Pools (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1991)
Leviathan Falls (James S.A. Corey, 2022) 
The Future of Another Timeline (Annalee Newitz, 2019) 
Dangerous Visions (Harlan Ellison, 1967) 
A Deadly Education (Naomi Novik, 2020) 

February: 9
The Last Graduate (Naomi Novik, 2021) 
The Galactic Whirlpool (David Gerrold, 1980) 
The Art of John Buscema (John Buscema, 1978) 
John Buscema: Michelangelo of Comics (Brian Peck, 2010) 
Star Trek Coda: Moments Asunder (Dayton Ward, 2021)
Star Trek Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow (James Swallow, 2021) 
The War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells, 1897) 
Star Trek Coda: Oblivion’s Gate (David Mack, 2021) 
Star Trek Shipyards (Ben Robinson, 2018) 

March: 12
The 22 Murders of Madison May (Max Barry, 2021) 
Emprise (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1985)
Enigma (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1986) 
Empery (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1987) 
Exile (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1992) 
Alternities (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 1988) 
Gwendy’s Final Task (Richard Chizmar and Stephen King, 2022) 
Beguilement (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2006)
Sky Captain and the Art of Tomorrow (Kevin Conran, 2021) 
Legacy (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2007)
Passage (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2008)
Horizon (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2009)

April: 2
The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, 1950) 
The White Mercedes (Philip Pullman, 2017) 

May: 4
The Tumor (John Grisham, 2016) 
Underground Airlines (Ben Winters, 2016) 
Space Station Down (Ben Bova and Doug Beason, 2020) 
The Art and Soul of Blade Runner 2049 (Tanya Lapointe, 2017) 

June: 1
A History of What Comes Next (Sylvain Neuvel, 2021) 

July: 2
84K (Claire North, 2018) 
Fitzpatrick’s War (Theodore Judson, 2004) 

August: 4
Return to Tomorrow: The Filming of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Preston Neal Jones, 2014) 
Star Trek Department of Temporal Investigations: Shield of the Gods (Christopher L. Bennett, 2017) 
The Sins of Our Fathers (James S.A. Corey, 2022) 
Serpentine (Philip Pullman, 2020) 

September: 3
To Everything That Might Have Been: The Lost Universe of Space: 1999 (Robert E. Wood, David Hirsch, and Christopher Penfold, 2022) 
Fairy Tale (Stephen King, 2022) 
Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier (Dan Chavkin and Brian McGuire, 2021) 

October: 3
Christine (Stephen King, 1983) 
Klingon Bird-of-Prey Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2012) 
Moonbase Alpha Technical Operations Manual (Chris Thompson, 2021) 

November: 6
The Broken Bridge (Philip Pullman, 1990) 
Nothing Lasts Forever (Roderick Thorp, 1979) 
U.S.S. Enterprise Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2010) 
Klingon Bird of Prey Haynes Manual (Ben Robinson, 2012) 
58 Minutes (Walter Wager, 1987) 
Vectors (Michael P. Kube-McDowell, 2002) 

December: 5
The Lexington Letter (Anonymous, 2022) 
Too Many Tribbles! (Frank Berrios, 2019) 
I Am Mr. Spock (Elizabeth Schaefer, 2019) 
I Am Captain Kirk (Frank Berrios, 2019) 
Marvel Universe Map by Map (James Hill, 2021) 

Conclusion

That is the year that was for Earl J. Woods and his shrinking library. Nothing lasts forever, truly. 

Head on over to see what Bruce and Leslie had to say about 2022. 

Books I Read in 2021

In 2021 I read 58 books, a personal all-time low. As you'll see from the list below, I didn't attempt to tackle anything particularly challenging. The stress of 21st-century existence leaves me with diminished capacity; escaping into film taxes me far less than slipping into a book these days, a truth that profoundly saddens me, but one I can no longer deny. Silver lining: for the first time, I read as many books by women as by men. 

In 2021 I sought out escapist fare, often re-reading old favourites that took me back to comfortable alternate realities and in some sense to a more vital past self. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of the books I read are non-fiction, mainly covering topics in popular culture. 

A couple of novels stand out. Severance, by Ling Ma, uncannily anticipates the COVID-19 catastrophe and, like the real disaster, reveals the silliness and futility of the ways we live and work in the modern world, how the systems we've built serve only a select few. Come Closer, by Sara Gran, is one of the scariest novels I've ever read, and one of the most heartbreaking. It's the internal monologue of a woman who is either going insane or is genuinely being slowly and methodically possessed by a demon, and Gran's touch is so deft and sure that the moments of terror come out of nowhere, seeming to slip between the sentences so that by the time you realize what's happening to you and the protagonist, it's too late to brace yourself for the abyss. 

Martha Wells continues to impress with her Murderbot diaries, and I'm still enjoying my journeys through the works of Jo Walton. I indulged in a couple of near-legendary works of dreadful fan fiction: Jim Theis' The Eye of Argon and Tara Gilesbie's My Immortal. Anyone who enjoys art gone wrong will love these. 

Thanks to Leslie, I learned that I'd fallen behind on Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric series. Catching up was like going on a short trip with an old friend, carefree and pleasant. Bujold remains a favourite, and I hope she keeps writing for a long time. 

Finally, I was delighted to discover that Ulrich Haarburste released his cycle of Roy Orbison in clingfilm stories, expanded to novel length. If you don't feel like buying the book, sample some of the stories. 

Here's the list of what I read this year: 

January: 10
Or What You Will (Jo Walton, 2020) 
Star Trek Adventures Quickstart Guide (Modiphius, 2017) 
Axiom’s End (Lindsay Ellis, 2020) 
The Vanished Seas (Catherine Asaro, 2020)
Lightning Strike, Book One (Catherine Asaro, 2014) 
Lightning Strike, Book Two (Catherine Asaro, 2020) 
Carrie (Stephen King, 1974) 
Way Station (Clifford D. Simak, 1963) 
The Wounded Sky (Diane Duane, 1983) 
My Enemy, My Ally (Diane Duane, 1984) 

February: 7
The Lightest Object in the Universe (Kimi Eisele, 2019) 
DC Comics Covers (Nick Jones, 2020) 
DC Comics Supervillains: The Complete Visual History (Daniel Wallace, 2014) 
Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian (Phil Szostak, 2020) 
The Big Lie (Julie Mayhew, 2015) 
Passage (Connie Willis, 2001) 
The Romulan Way (Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, 1987) 

March: 6
The Eye of Argon (Jim Theis, 1970) 
My Immortal (Tara Gilesbie, 2006) 
Later (Stephen King, 2021) 
Star Wars Complete Vehicles New Edition (Kerrie Dougherty, 2020) 
To Lose the Earth (Kristen Beyer, 2020) 
Severance (Ling Ma, 2018) 

April: 3
The World of Cyberpunk 2077 (Marcin Batylda, 2020) 
Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History, with Illustrations (William B. Jones Jr., 2001) 
Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth (Fredric Wertham, 1954)
 
May: 3
The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix E. Harrow, 2019)
Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory (Martha Wells, 2020) 
Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells, 2021) 

June: 2
Ulrich Haarburste’s Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm: Plus additional stories (Ulrich Haarburste, 2019) 
Forbidden Knowledge: 101 Things No One Should Know How to Do (Owen Brooks, 2019) 

July: 3
Critical Failures (Robert Bevan, 2012) 
Living Memory (Christopher L. Bennett, 2021) 
Come Closer (Sara Gran, 2003) 

August: 5
The Physicians of Vilnoc (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2020) 
Masquerade in Lodi (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2020)
The Assassins of Thasalon (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2021)
Billy Summers (Stephen King, 2021) 
The Princess Saves Herself in This One (Amanda Lovelace, 2016)

September: 2
Then Everything Changed (Jeff Greenfield, 2011) 
The Stand (Stephen King, 1980) 

October: 2
Available Light (Dayton Ward, 2019) 
Knot of Shadows (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2021) 

November: 7
The Apollo Murders (Chris Hadfield, 2021)
Visiting Friends: Or, What I Did on My Summer Vacation (Jo Walton, 2021) 
Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir, 2021)
2034 (Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, 2021) 
Untold Horror (Dave Alexander, 2021) 
The History of Science Fiction: A Graphic Novel Adventure (Xavier Dollo, 2021) 
Forever and a Day (Anthony Horowitz, 2018) 

December: 7
The Steranko History of Comics, Volume One (Jim Steranko, 1970) 
The Steranko History of Comics, Volume Two (Jim Steranko, 1972)
All in Color for a Dime (Richard A. Lupoff and Don Thompson, 1970) 
Comix: A History of Comic Books in America ( Les Daniels, 1971) 
The Psychology of Time Travel (Kate Mascarenhas, 2018) 
The Grownup (Gillian Flynn, 2014) 
Hench (Natalie Zina Walschots, 2020) 

Fiction: 42
Nonfiction: 15
Poetry: 1

Genre
Fantasy: 8
Horror: 3
Mainstream: 11
Science Fiction: 14
Star Trek: 6

Top Authors
Lois McMaster Bujold: 4
Stephen King: 4
Catherine Asaro: 3
Diane Duane: 3
Jim Steranko: 2
Jo Walton: 2
Martha Wells: 2

Books by Women: 29
Books by Men: 29

Books by Decade
1950s: 1
1960s: 1
1970s: 6
1980s: 4
2000s: 4
2010s: 16
2020s: 25 

Reason to Hope: The Empathy of Exotica

I can't be sure, but I believe it was my friend Leslie who urged me to watch Exotica (Atom Egoyan, 1994) shortly after its release back in the long ago and far away 1990s. And yet it took me a quarter-century to finally view what has instantly become one of my favourite films.

Exotica is something very rare in film. It is a story without villains, even though its characters act in ways that could be considered criminal, or at least seedy. It's set mainly in a strip club, and it is erotic, but it's a kind of eroticism that is somehow made wholesome by subverting certain dangerous tropes and turning prurience into the most powerful kind of empathy.

And I think that is why I love this film. Its characters, struggling though they do with jealousy, lust, rage, and horror, each find within themselves not merely tolerance, not merely forgiveness, but the strength to reach out and help--to care for one another even as they struggle with their own unbearable trauma.

How beautiful this film is in its profound decency, how elegant in its delicately unfolding temporal structure. And what a comfort to be reminded that people really do behave this way, finding love to defy horror, finding hope when all seems lost. It's a thing to be celebrated, and Exotica is a truly great celebration of all that's good in us.

Books I Read in 2019

For the first time since 2016, I read more books this year than last, though I still fell short of the 123 books I read in 2017 and my record of 135 the year previous. I read 103 books in 2019, short of my revised target of 136.

Here's how my year in books broke down:

Books by Women: 39
Books by Men: 64
I read more women this year than last, not quite approaching parity, but getting closer with a roughly 60/40 men to women ratio.

Nonfiction: 8
Fiction: 95

I read less nonfiction this year than last, but more than made up for the deficit by reading more fiction.

Genre
Fantasy: 10
Mainstream: 12
Science Fiction: 55
Star Trek: 18

My genre breakdown was roughly the same this year as last year.

Top Authors
James S.A. Corey: 15
Isaac Asimov: 8
Jo Walton: 6
Arthur C. Clarke: 5
Martha Wells: 5
Alan Dean Foster: 4
Vonda McIntyre: 4
John M. Ford: 3
Nancy Kress: 3
Lois McMaster Bujold: 2
Peter David: 2
Jack McDevitt: 2
Elizabeth Mitchell: 2
Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens: 2
Robert Silverberg: 2
Olaf Stapledon: 2

I wasn't much interested in the Expanse series by James S.A. Corey (a pen name), but on a whim I tried out the first of the novels early this year and found myself quite caught up by the characters and their adventures. I wound up reading the entire series, or at least as much as has yet been published; there's one more novel coming out next year.

As part of my effort to clear some of my backlog of classic SF, I read a handful of Asimov and Clarke novels, ticking off a few Hugo and Nebula winners along the way. Jo Walton continues to impress; I've now read almost everything she's published, and I look forward to more. The same goes for Martha Wells and her Murderbot Diaries; Leslie tipped me off to these delightful novellas, and I look forward to reading the first novel in the series in 2020.

Other highlights this year included The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's excellent sequel to The Handmaid's Tale; Dashiell Hammett's unusual hard-boiled thriller, The Glass Key; the disturbing Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis; Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman; and Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott.

Books by Decade
1860s: 1
1930s: 3
1950s: 5
1960s: 4
1970s: 7
1980s: 18
1990s: 5
2000s: 7
2010s: 52

As usual, most of the books I read in 2019 came out within the last decade; the 1980s was a distant second.

Here's the complete list of books I read in 2019:

January: 14
Rejoice, a Knife to the Heart (Steven Erikson, 2018)
The Naked Sun (Isaac Asimov, 1956)
Quantum Space (Douglas Phillips, 2018)
The Robots of Dawn (Isaac Asimov, 1983)
Pebble in the Sky (Isaac Asimov, 1950)
Red Moon (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2018)
Knife Children (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2019)
All Systems Red (Martha Wells, 2017)
The Future of Work: Compulsory (Martha Wells, 2018)
Artificial Condition (Martha Wells, 2018)
A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo (Jill Twiss, 2018)
Rogue Protocol (Martha Wells, 2018)
Exit Strategy (Martha Wells, 2018)
The Stars, Like Dust (Isaac Asimov, 1950)

February: 3
Fade In: From Idea to Final Draft (Michael Piller, 2005)
The Currents of Space (Isaac Asimov, 1952)
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland, 2017)

March: 5
No Short Roads to Flin Flon (Jack Frey, 2012)
Tomorrow’s Kin (Nancy Kress, 2017)
If Tomorrow Comes (Nancy Kress, 2018)
Terran Tomorrow (Nancy Kress, 2018)
Words on the Rocks: Collected Prose and Poetry of Flin Flon Writers (Alex McGilvery, 2016)

April: 4
Batmobile Cutaways (Richard Jackson, 2018)
Robots and Empire (Isaac Asimov, 1985)
Nine Tomorrows (Isaac Asimov, 1959)
A Time of Changes (Robert Silverberg, 1971)

May: 6
Nightfall and Other Stories (Isaac Asimov, 1969)
The Moon and the Sun (Vonda McIntyre, 1997)
The Healer’s War (Elizabeth Anne Scarborough, 1988)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1968)
2010: Odyssey Two (Arthur C. Clarke, 1982)
The Long Sunset (Jack McDevitt, 2018)

June: 12
2061: Odyssey Three (Arthur C. Clarke, 1987)
3001: The Final Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke, 1997)
The Captain’s Oath (Christopher L. Bennett, 2019)
After the Flames (Elizabeth Mitchell, 1985)
The Butcher of Anderson Station (James S.A. Corey, 2011)
Octavia Gone (Jack McDevitt, 2019)
An Informal History of the Hugos: A Personal Look Back at the Hugo Awards (Jo Walton, 2018)
Starlings (Jo Walton, 2018)
Leviathan Wakes (James S.A. Corey, 2011)
Strange New Worlds 2016 (Various, 2016)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2015)
Drive (James S.A. Corey, 2012)

July: 11
Caliban’s War (James S.A. Corey, 2012)
Our Hero: Superman on Earth (Tom De Haven, 2010)
Odd John (Olaf Stapledon, 1935)
Deadly Waters (Theodore Judson, 2016)
The Worlds of TSR (Marlys Heeszel, 1994)
The Art of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (Mary Kirchoff, 1989)
The Art of Dragon Magazine (Jean Blashfield Black, 1988)
The Art of the Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Game (Margaret Weis, 1985)
A Fall of Moondust (Arthur C. Clarke, 1961)
Lent (Jo Walton, 2019)
Imzadi (Peter David, 1998)

August: 12
Imzadi Forever (Peter David, 2003)
The Book of Skulls (Robert Silverberg, 1972)
The Orphans of Raspay (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2019)
Spock’s World (Diane Duane, 1989)
Sand and Stars (A.C. Crispin, 2004)
Chthon (Piers Anthony, 1967)
Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (Vonda McIntyre, 1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Vonda McIntyre, 1984)
Duty, Honor, Redemption (Vonda McIntyre, 2004)
Memory Prime (Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, 1988)
Worlds in Collision (Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens, 2003)
The King’s Peace (Jo Walton, 2000)

September: 10
The King’s Name (Jo Walton, 2002)
Star Trek Log One (Alan Dean Foster, 1974)
The Churn (James S.A. Corey, 2014)
Gods of Risk (James S.A. Corey, 2012)
The Prize in the Game (Jo Walton, 2003)
Abaddon’s Gate (James S.A. Corey, 2013)
The Vital Abyss (James S.A. Corey, 2015)
The Institute (Stephen King, 2019)
Cibola Burn (James S.A. Corey, 2014)
Star Trek Log Two (Alan Dean Foster, 1974)

October: 5
Nemesis Games (James S.A.  Corey, 2015)
Babylon’s Ashes (James S.A. Corey, 2016
Star Trek Log Three (Alan Dean Foster, 1974)
Strange Dogs (James S.A. Corey, 2017)
Persepolis Rising (James S.A. Corey, 2017)

November: 10
Tiamat’s Wrath (James S.A. Corey, 2019)
False Knees: An Illustrated Guide to Animal Behavior (Joshua Barkman, 2019)
Collateral Damage (David Mack, 2019)
The Final Reflection (John M. Ford, 1984)
Less Than Zero (Bret Easton Ellis, 1985)
The Testaments (Margaret Atwood, 2019)
Star Trek Log Four (Alan Dean Foster, 1975)
The Pursuit of William Abbey (Claire North, 2019)
The Andromeda Evolution (Daniel F. Wilson, 2019)
As Big as the Ritz (Gregory Benford, 1987)

December: 11
Fugue State (John M. Ford, 1990)
Under the Wheel (Elizabeth Mitchell, 1987)
Shaft (Ernest Tidyman, 1970)
This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, 2019)
Auberon (James S.A. Corey, 2019)
Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon, 1930)
How Much for Just the Planet? (John M. Ford, 1987)
Famous Men Who Never Lived (K Chess, 2019)
Little Women (Louisa May Alcott, 1868)
The Glass Key (Dashiell Hammett, 1931)
Anatomy of a Metahuman (S.D. Perry and Matthew K. Manning, 2018)

Summary
While I'm glad I read more women this year, and that I read more this year than last, I'm still disappointed by my failure to approach 150 a year, something I'm sure, though I can't say for certain, I used to accomplish regularly in my teens and 20s. Did I have more time then, or am I just getting older and slower?

I also need to take on more challenging work, or at least more mainstream material. I love SF, but a steady diet of it to the exclusion of all else isn't healthy.

Maybe 2020 will be my year. Happy reading! 

Books I Read in 2016

2016 is fading into history, and while it was a hard year for many reasons, I take solace in having discovered some wonderful books, new and old. This year I managed to read 135 books, a new record since I started keeping track in 2011, but still short of the 150 I was hoping for. Maybe next year...

I've still failed to achieve gender balance in my reading, as noted below, even slipping a little since last year. But of the women I read, wow, there was some great stuff. I've mostly finished Margaret Atwood's works, save for the recently released Hag-Seed and a couple of her short story collections. The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride and Cat's Eye were my favourites. I found Surfacing, her second novel, the most puzzling - it doesn't feel at all like an Atwood novel to me, and I can't write it off to early author blues since her first novel, The Edible Woman, feels so fully formed. I was surprised to find that I didn't enjoy her MaddAddam trilogy as much as I had anticipated, and that could be because I'm deeply buried in science fiction tropes; all the speculative elements felt too familiar, and that distracted me from enjoying the character work.

This year I finished off the Harry Potter novels and started in on J.K. Rowling's other work, including The Casual Vacancy and her Robert Galbraith detective stories, worthwhile efforts all.

Finishing Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables books (at least those available in the public domain) lifted my heart early in the year - they're such delightfully innocent fun, so good-hearted and full of life. I want to visit Prince Edward Island more than ever now.

My favourite woman author of 2016, though, is my friend Leslie Vermeer, whose book The Complete Canadian Book Editor was released this fall. Not only is it packed with tons of essential advice for aspiring book editors, it's written with great warmth, crystal clarity and perhaps most importantly, unfailing conscience. I'm obviously very happy for her, and I look forward to her next book.

After many years of promising to get to them someday, I finally read the works of Raymond Chandler, who did not disappoint in the least. As I remarked in an email to my friend Jeff, who I consider something of a Chandler scholar (or at the very least, a gifted analyst of the author), "He built an incredible world full of deeply sympathetic characters - even the villains are mostly just victims of another kind. And Marlowe himself is an astounding character, full of unjustified (in my view) self-loathing and soul-crushing, weary loneliness. And the prose is gorgeous, so very bittersweet."

Because 2016 saw the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, I found myself reading a bunch of Star Trek novels and behind-the-scenes books - as always of varying quality, sadly. The best of the bunch was the two-volume, roughly 1800-page Fifty-Year Mission, an oral history of the show and its spinoffs from the actors, writers, producers and crew who worked on the various series and movies. Even for a long-term Trekkie like me, these two books had a lot of interesting stories to offer. 

My friends who enjoy SF will doubtless be relieved to know that I've finally managed to read some of the seminal works of Robert Heinlein, long neglected by me: Double Star, Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I still don't think much of Heinlein's near-Randian politics, but I have to admit these were all crackling stories, and they helped me get closer to my goal of reading all of the Hugo and Nebula Best Novel nominees. 

2016 brings with it the end of Fantagraphics' excellent, 26-volume collection of Charles M. Schulz' Peanuts comic strip, some fifteen years in the making. Lovingly crafted, painstakingly indexed and featuring introductions from a wide range of celebrity fans of the strip, these are gorgeous books that I'm happy to have on my shelves for the rest of my life. And now I can say that I've read every strip. What a wonder it was, too - a real work of genius from start to finish. 

Those are the highlights of my year in reading; the gory details can be found below. Will I finally read The Lord of the Rings in 2017? Time will tell...

January: 14
Anne of the Island (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1915)
Anne’s House of Dreams (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1917)
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (Stephen King, 2015)
Rainbow Valley (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1919)
Further Chronicles of Avonlea (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1920)
The Clone (Theodore L. Thomas and Kate Wilhelm, 1965)
Rilla of Ingleside (Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1921)
Phoenix in the Ashes (Joan D. Vinge, 1985)
New Maps of Hell (Kingsley Amis, 1960)
A Bird in the House (Margaret Laurence, 1970)
Alias Grace (Margaret Atwood, 1996)
Surfacing (Margaret Atwood, 1972)
Earthlight (Arthur C. Clarke, 1955)
The Lifeship (Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson, 1985)

February: 10
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (Claire North, 2014)
No Enemy but Time (Michael Bishop, 1982)
Sight of Proteus (Charles Sheffield, 1978)
Brittle Innings (Michael Bishop, 1994)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling, 2007)
The Wild Shore (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1984)
The Gold Coast (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1988)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (J. K. Rowling, 2001)
Quidditch Through the Ages (J.K. Rowling, 2001)
The Tales of Beedle the Bard (J.K. Rowling, 2008)

March: 12
Pacific Edge (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990)
Press Start to Play (Daniel H. Wilson and John Joseph Adams, editors, 2015)
Star Trek The Next Generation: Armageddon’s Arrow (Dayton Ward, 2015)
Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Jesse Andrews, 2012)
Life After Life (Kate Atkinson, 2013)
A God in Ruins (Kate Atkinson, 2014)
The State of the Art (Iain M. Banks, 1991)
The Violent Century (Lavie Tidhar, 2013)
The Man Who Bridged the Mist (Kij Johnson, 2011)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects (Ted Chiang, 2010)
Julian: A Christmas Story (Robert Charles Wilson, 2006)
Oceanic (Greg Egan, 1998)

April: 10
The Casual Vacancy (J.K. Rowling, 2012)
Star Trek Voyager: Atonement (Kirsten Beyer, 2015)
The Cuckoo’s Calling (J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, 2013)
The Silkworm (J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, 2014)
Star Trek Voyager: A Pocket Full of Lies (Kirsten Beyer, 2016)
The Long Utopia (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, 2015)
With the Night Mail (Rudyard Kipling, 1905)
As Easy as A.B.C. (Rudyard Kipling, 1912)
The Book on the Edge of Forever (Christopher Priest, 1997)
I am Crying All Inside: The Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak (Clifford D. Simak, 2015)

May: 6
Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination (J.K. Rowling, 2008)
Cat’s Eye (Margaret Atwood, 1988)
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Alice Sheldon writing as James Tiptree, Jr., 1990)
The Western (David Carter, 2008)
David Lynch (Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc, 2007)
Horror Films (Colin Odell & Michelle Le Blanc, 2007)

June: 10
Aurora (Kim Stanley Robinson, 2015)
The Dog Said Bow-Wow (Michael Swanwick, 2007)
The Ultimate Earth (Jack Williamson, 2000)
Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge (Mike Resnick, 1994)
A Kill in the Morning (Graeme Shimmin, 2014)
Starship Troopers (Robert A. Heinlein, 1959)
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein, 1966)
End of Watch (Stephen King, 2016)
Central Station (Lavie Tidhar, 2016)
Stations of the Tide (Michael Swanwick, 1991)

July: 7
Good News From Outer Space (John Kessel, 1989)
Lady Oracle (Margaret Atwood, 1977)
Double Star (Robert A. Heinlein, 1956)
Who? (Algis Budrys, 1958)
Uprooted (Naomi Novik, 2015)
Hidden Universe Travel Guide: Vulcan (Dayton Ward, 2016)
Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe (Andrew Fazekas, 2016)

August: 19
Star Trek: The Art of the Film (Mark Cotta Vaz, 2009)
The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Susan Sackett, 1980)
Star Trek Enterprise Rise of the Federation: Live by the Code (Christopher L. Bennett, 2016)
Bodily Harm (Margaret Atwood, 1981)
The Complete Peanuts, 1999-2000 (Charles M. Schulz with an Introduction by Barack Obama, 2016)
The Edible Woman (Margaret Atwood, 1969)
Thunderbird (Jack McDevitt, 2015)
Star Trek Legacies Book 1: Captain to Captain (Greg Cox, 2016)
Star Trek Legacies Book 2: Best Defense (David Mack, 2016)
Star Trek: Child of Two Worlds (Greg Cox, 2015)
Star Trek: The Latter Fire (James Swallow, 2016)
The King in Yellow (Robert W. Chambers, 1895)
Five Murders (Raymond Chandler, 1944)
Five Sinister Characters (Raymond Chandler, 1945)
The Simple Art of Murder (Raymond Chandler, 1950)
Finding Serenity (Jane Espenson, 2004)
Serenity Found (Jane Espenson, 2007)
The Maker of Moons (Robert W. Chambers, 1896)
The Mystery of Choice (Robert W. Chambers, 1897)

September: 10
Dancing Girls (Margaret Atwood, 1977)
The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler, 1939)
Farewell, My Lovely (Raymond Chandler, 1940)
The High Window (Raymond Chandler, 1942)
The Complete Canadian Book Editor (Leslie Vermeer, 2016)
Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way (Bruce Campbell, 2005)
Moral Disorder and Other Stories (Margaret Atwood, 2006)
Quantum Night (Robert J. Sawyer, 2016)
The Colossus and Other Poems (Sylvia Plath, 1960)
Star Trek Legacies Book 3: Purgatory’s Key (Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore, 2016)

October: 10
The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years (Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman, 2016)
Emergence (David R. Palmer, 1984)
The Velveteen Rabbit (Margery Williams, 1922)
The Adolescence of P-1 (Thomas J. Ryan, 1977)
Star Trek Errand of Fury Book 1: Seeds of Rage (Kevin Ryan, 2005)
Sid Meier’s Civilization: Civilization Through the Years (Sid Meier, 2016)
Life Before Man (Margaret Atwood, 1979)
Star Trek Errand of Fury Book 2: Demands of Honor (Kevin Ryan, 2007)
Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (Lois McMaster Bujold, 2015)
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series One (Emily Dickinson, 1890)

November: 16
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series Two (Emily Dickinson, 1891)
Poems by Emily Dickinson, Series Three (Emily Dickinson, 1894)
A Colder War (Charles Stross, 2002)
Oryx and Crake (Margaret Atwood, 2003)
The Lady in the Lake (Raymond Chandler, 1943)
The Little Sister (Raymond Chandler, 1949)
Star Trek Errand of Fury Book 3: Sacrifices of War (Kevin Ryan, 2009)
Dark Matter (Blake Crouch, 2016)
Robots Have No Tails (Henry Kuttner, 1952)
The Long Goodbye (Raymond Chandler, 1953)
Playback (Raymond Chandler, 1958)
Double Indemnity (Raymond Chandler, 1943)
The Year of the Flood (Margaret Atwood, 2009)
Selected Essays and Letters (Raymond Chandler, 1995)
MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood, 2013)
The Heart Goes Last (Margaret Atwood, 2015)

December: 11
Stone Mattress (Margaret Atwood, 2014)
Charlie the Choo-Choo (Beryl Evans, 2016)
Lifehouse (Spider Robinson, 1997)
Covergirls (Louise Simonson, 2007)
Delirium’s Party (Jill Thompson, 2011)
The Complete Peanuts: Comics & Stories 1950 to 2000 (Charles M. Schulz with an afterword by Jean Schulz, 2016)
The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains (Jon Morris, 2016)
The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years (Mark A. Altman & Edward Gross, 2016)
The Spirit Ring (Lois McMaster Bujold, 1992)
Irresistible Forces (Catherine Asaro, editor, 2006)
America Lost and Found: The BBS Story (various, 2010)

Nonfiction: 20
Fiction: 115

Genre
Science Fiction: 46
Mainstream: 39
Star Trek: 13
Fantasy: 10
Horror: 3
Peanuts collections: 2

Top Authors
Margaret Atwood: 14

Raymond Chandler: 12

J.K. Rowling: 8

Lucy Maud Montgomery: 5

Kim Stanley Robinson: 4

Robert W. Chambers: 3
Emily Dickinson: 3
Robert A. Heinlein: 3
Kevin Ryan: 3

Mark A. Altman: 2
Kate Atkinson: 2
Kirsten Beyer: 2
Michael Bishop: 2
Lois McMaster Bujold: 2
Greg Cox: 2
Jane Espenson: 2
Edward Gross: 2
Stephen King: 2
Rudyard Kipling: 2
Michelle Le Blanc: 2
Colin Odell: 2
Charles M. Schulz: 2
Michael Swanwick: 2
Lavie Tidhar: 2
Dayton Ward: 2

Books by Women: 55
Books by Men: 80

Books by Decade
1890s: 6
1900s: 1
1910s: 4
1920s: 3
1930s: 1
1940s: 7
1950s: 8
1960s: 5
1970s: 8
1980s: 10
1990s: 12
2000s: 25
2010s: 46

Amazomg

Sylvia thinks I order too much stuff from Amazon. I usually counter by saying it looks like more than it is, since Amazon consistently splits up my orders into multiple deliveries. Unfortunately I drove Sylvia home today, so there was no hiding the evidence when we arrived home to find this...

LATE BREAKING UPDATE! My Amazon shipment included my friend Leslie's new book, The Complete Canadian Book Editor! I can't wait to delve into this; I know it'll be a great tool for real and aspiring editors. 

Newton Place

I lived in Newton Place, on the University of Alberta campus, for about a year. This is one of only three or photos I have of that time. I have only a few memories of Newton Place: it was where I watched the finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I once dropped a glass in the laundry room and stepped on a sliver of it, leaving bloody footprints on the floor, and Pat and Leslie dropped in for an impromptu visit one night. We don't do impromptu visits in our culture very often. I think they're kind of nice, but on the other hand, I'm not brave enough to drop in unannounced myself, and I understand why they don't happen regularly. Or is it just a matter of age? Is it the sort of thing people in their 20s do, then stop as they enter middle age?

What a shame that we only get one go-round to figure out all of these little mysteries. 

2058 Films

Ever since Bruce and Leslie asked me how many books I thought I read in a year, I've felt an increasingly overwhelming urge to catalogue not just what I'm reading now, but everything I've ever read. This mild obsession has extended to cataloguing every film I've seen and television series I've completed.

I've been using Letterboxd to log the films I've seen, and tonight I crossed the 2,000 film mark; indeed, I've catalogued 2,058 films, and I know that doesn't cover every film I've ever seen because I keep remembering more. Only tonight did I realize I'd forgotten to log Zero Effect, Xanadu, Vamp, Stripes, The Mummy, Red Dawn and many others. Remembering which films I've seen recently is relatively easy compared to digging out memories of movie nights from decades ago.

Letterboxd has a wide range of cool features, but I discovered one tonight that I really like a lot: it will sort your list of films by decade or even year. It's easy to see how many films you've watched from each of the dozen or so decades of the art.

So here's my list - at least as it stands today:

1900s: 4
1910s: 15
1920s: 22
1930s: 96
1940s: 109
1950s: 179
1960s: 207
1970s: 245
1980s: 335
1990s: 347
2000s: 300
2010s: 196

It's an almost disappointingly linear increase through the decades, with the exception of a small dropoff from the 1990s to the 2000s and a bigger drop from the 2000s to the 2010s (although to be fair, this decade is only a little half over).

As for individual years, the winner is 1998; I've seen 44 films released from that year. They are: The Thin Red Line, Shakespeare in Love, A Simple Plan, Star Trek: Insurrection, Babe: Pig in the City, Enemy of the State, American History X, Apt Pupil, Soldier, What Dreams May Come, Antz, Pleasantville, Rushmore, Elizabeth, Ronin, Run Lola Run, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, The Avengers, Ever After (which I reviewed in The Peak), Saving Private Ryan, The Mark of Zorro, Pi, Armageddon, The X Files, Free Enterprise, The Truman Show, Godzilla, Bulworth, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Deep Impact, Tarzan and the Lost City, The Big Hit, From the Earth to the Moon (HBO miniseries), Lost in Space, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Dark City, Burn Hollywood Burn, The Big Lebowski, The Replacement Killers, Zero Effect, Gods and Monsters, and Great Expectations. Of these, of course, I caught most on DVD or Blu-Ray or movie channels after their initial release; but I did catch a few of these films in theatres, including Shakespeare in Love (with Leslie, maybe, or do I just associate her with Shakespeare?), A Simple Plan (with Allan, I think), Star Trek: Insurrection, Soldier, What Dreams May Come, Antz, Pleasantville (with Kim, I think), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (with Parvesh in California), The Mark of Zorro, The X Files, The Truman Show (with Allan and Leslie, I think), Godzilla (with Sean?), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarzan and the Lost City (in St. Albert's theatre for some reason), Lost in Space (again with Allan, I think), Dark City, The Big Lebowski, and The Replacement Killers (maybe with Pete, Mike and Jeff Pitts?). Quite a year.

Several years are only represented by one film: 1900 (Cyrano de Bergerac), 1903 (The Great Train Robbery), 1917 (Bucking Broadway), 1918 (Take a Chance), 1921 (The Kid), 1922 (Nosferatu), and 1926 (The General). And of course, there are several years from the 1900s and 1910s from which I've seen zero films. But not for long - thanks, YouTube!

So there's my pitifully small sampling of the world of film as it stands today. As I continue to pore over my records and memories, I'll improve the list's fidelity. Let's see how many I've racked up by the end of the year...

Earl's Fib Poem

In a recent post on her blog, Leslie describes fib poems. Here's my first try at producing one:

Art
Film
Actors
Marketing
Moving hearts and minds
Propaganda steers us like sheep
Unless we watch carefully with a critical eye
Reclaiming our power through analysis, we fight back, telling our stories

Fort Garry House Memories...Such as They Are

For a very brief time that lasted, perhaps, from sometime in 1997 to sometime in 1998, I lived in Fort Garry House, up where Calgary Trail meets Saskatchewan Drive. I had a one-bedroom apartment on the seventh with no balcony, and I remember virtually nothing about the place except that Colin visited once and Bruce and Leslie visited once. Oh, and Bruce and Akemi came by once to shoot photos on the rooftop for I'll Never Marry a Farmer.

There are more photos from that rooftop shoot than I have of my apartment itself; there might be five or six photos, including the one above, clearly taken before I had finished unpacking.

I was living here during the time I transitioned from my job at the Western Board of Music to Hole's - certainly one of the most important moments of my life, at the very least from a career standpoint.

And yet, I can barely recall the place itself. I'm not sure why that makes me sad, but it does. 

Power Puff Earl

Inspired by Bruce and Leslie, who have each made Powerpuff Girl avatars of their own, I present Powerpuff Earl. 

March 2015 Review Roundup

As noted previously, once a month I'll offer some thoughts on a selection of the books and films I've enjoyed (or not) the previous month.

In film, March was a month of nostalgia and exploration. Turner Classic Movies showed a beautiful high definition presentation of When Worlds Collide, the George Pal SF classic; it really looked marvellous, probably better than when I first saw it on the big screen in Leaf Rapids on a double-bill with War of the Worlds. (For some reason the movie theatre in Leaf Rapids made a habit of showing films that were decades old, a quirk of fate that gave me pop culture tastes probably more appropriate for my parents or even grandparents.) Drawing heavily on Christian mythology - specifically the story of the flood - When Worlds Collide is by today's standards slow-paced until the final fifteen minutes or so; I prefer to think of the pace as stately, taking the time to give you reasons to care about the film's plucky band of determined survivors. And that last quarter-hour is thrilling indeed, as the giant space ark is rushed to completion and launched with only seconds to spare. The model work and final matte painting aren't convincing to modern audiences, but I find they fire the imagination in a way that CG still cannot (yet).

I also watched robots-gone-wild thrillers Westworld and Futureworld in high definition for the first time (well, the second time for Futureworld; I saw that on the big screen in Leaf Rapids, too, during its first run). Westworld still holds up as experimental 70s SF; Futureworld, while reasonably entertaining, tries to take the concept in a new direction and falls on its face with substandard execution. I'm really looking forward to the new HBO Westworld television series; the original concept of a hedonistic amusement park filled with robots programmed to serve every perverse human whim is rich with dramatic possibility.

At long last I finally screened anime classic Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988), but I reluctantly confess that as with most Japanese animation, it left me a little cold. The animation itself is gorgeous, with many dreamlike and/or nightmarish sequences particularly compelling or even harrowing, but the exaggerated acting took me out of the story. I'll keep trying, but anime just might not be my particular thing.

I'm trying to watch more comedies, so last month I viewed Best Picture nominee Father of the Bride and its lesser-known sequel, Father's Little Dividend. I always find it a little strange when I screen pictures that feature a young Elizabeth Taylor, especially in these films, where she plays, at best, a supporting role to her screen father Spencer Tracy. The comedy in both films is exceedingly gentle, perhaps even dull for modern audiences, steeped as it is in the cultural foibles of the 1950s; these are movies in which old-fashioned (to us) family traditions are made light of, but in the end rigidly respected and enforced. There's nothing subversive in these films.

Spencer Tracy's character would probably be horrified if he lived to see Woody Allen's 1979 romantic comedy Manhattan, which features a lesbian couple, cheating husbands and wives, and a relationship between a 42 year old man and a 17 year old girl/woman, all notions that are still controversial today. Indeed, aside from, perhaps, the lesbian couple, the other relationships in the film are, in North American culture at least, less acceptable today than they were in the 1970s. Whether you think of this as progress or regression will depend on your particular perspective, of course.

I confess that I appreciate Allen's genius at some remove; while I genuinely appreciate his films and recognize their artistry, I don't often find them as funny or moving as Allen clearly intends. But that's just my particular taste.

On the other hand, I was thoroughly entertained by 1980s ninja movies Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination, the second and third parts of a loose ninja trilogy starring Sho Kosugi. These films are utterly nonsensical, with absurd ninja fights, bad acting, pedestrian production design, direction and cinematography, not to mention writing that is passable at very best and ludicrous at worst. And yet, for those of us who love "bad movies," the ninja craze of the 80s provided some cinematic cheese of fulsome vintage.

March was a good month for gift books. Sean gave me Austin Grossman's second novel, You, a wonderful coming-of-age story that really hit home for me as its lead character was, like me, born in 1969 and grew up deeply enveloped in the emerging world of computer games during grade school in the 1980s. Unlike me, the protagonist and his friends transform that interest into careers, working in game design through the 1990s. It's a great story of young people trying to find their place in the world, of the fragility of friendships, the risks you take when you get close to someone and the risks you take by distancing yourself. Thoroughly satisfying in all respects.

Leslie gave me Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read, a gorgeously illustrated and deeply considered analysis of the very act of reading. When we're moving through a novel, how do the words on the page translate into images in our minds - or does this really happen at all? Mendelsund's argument had me nodding in recognition in many places, but he also gave me a lot of new ideas to consider. This is the sort of book that bears review once a decade or so, I think, as a refresher; and it's gorgeous to boot.

I also enjoyed Murray Pomerance's 2013 non-fiction work, Alfred Hitchcock's America. As the title implies, Pomerance reviews Hitchcock's Hollywood period and reveals how Hitchcock's British sensibilities informed his portrayal of American culture in his films of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. The analysis here isn't particularly deep, but it provides a good introductory overview for new fans of Hitchcock who are curious about the master's American work and its subtexts.

Catherine Asaro released a new book in her Skolian Empire universe this year, Undercity, a prequel introducing a new set of characters, this time a nanotech-infused private eye and her bad-boy lover. Asaro is as much a romance writer as she is an SF author, and I appreciate the soft edges this gives her work. If you're familiar with Asaro's work, don't expect any surprises; this is her usual blend of military SF and star-crossed romance, full to the brim with beautiful, genetically and technologically-enhanced superpeople. Reading Undercity prompted me to pull out her 2006 novel Alpha, which explores the same themes but in the near future instead of hundreds of years from now. Again, this is SF comfort food, dependable if not challenging.

I continued to catch up on Ursula K. LeGuin, finally getting to The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (despite Jeff's protestations, I really don't think I'd read it before now); shame on me for waiting so long to get to these really beautiful works of social-science fiction.

Some time ago Ron recommended Daniel Suarez, who writes near-future technothrillers that really are somewhat revolutionary in the way they deconstruct the failures of the capitalist surveillance state and envision a chaotic but potentially far more equitable future for humanity. His latest, Influx, is Suarez' most speculative work to date; he imagines a world in which a secretive government agency has been hiding technological breakthroughs like cheap fusion, functional immortality, artificial sentience and gravity control from the world in order to prevent societal upheaval, doling out new tech in dribs and drabs to keep the populace reasonably content but holding back general progress by decades. It's not quite as grounded in the real world as his other work, but the novel still raises some interesting questions while providing fast-paced, pulpy thrills.