Every year, I set myself a goal of reading at least 52 books over the course of the year — an average of one a week. This year I made it to 68. Here’s a quick (?) overview…
Continuing a trend from the last few years, this year was almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not.
Non-fiction: A few this year, though for the most part, they were very much in line with my usual science fiction choices. The two best were Frederik Pohl’s memoir The Way the Future Was, encompassing the early decades of SF fandom, and Randall Munroe’s delightful What If? 2, where he once again takes answering silly scientific questions to absolutely ridiculous extremes. Also in this category was a series of books looking at the design work for various Star Trek ships across several series.
Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Only one this year, but that one — Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove — was excellent.
Quality genre fiction: About the same as last year; primarily the Philip K. Dick nominees and my Hugo project, with a few others added here and there.
As usual, I read all of the books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick awards, and once again, I failed to pick the winner. My personal favorite of this year’s slate was Tade Thompson’s Far From the Light of Heaven. This is the second time Tade has been nominated for a PKD award, and the fourth novel of his that I’ve read (after The Wormwood Trilogy, the last book of which was a 2020 PKD nominee), and I very much enjoy his work.
I added eight books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 54% of the way through. My two favorites from this year’s set were Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake and William Gibson’s Neruomancer.
Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Almost entirely Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022, it was very nice to have a bookshelf full of options that wouldn’t take a whole lot of brain power for me to disappear into.
Finally Storygraph’s stats on my year’s reading tell me:
- I’ve read 21,228 pages read across 68 books, with November and December being my reading-est months.
- Longest book: Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson (708 pages)
- Shortest book: The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories by Kel McDonald et. al. (120 pages)
- Most shelved book: A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (148,547 readers)
- Least shelved book: Star Trek: Designing Starships Volume 3: The Kelvin Timeline by Ben Robinson (2 readers)
On to 2023!