Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.
7/2024
The fourth of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
Just a little clarification as to why I’m no longer posting my usual star ratings or mini-reviews for the Philip K. Dick Award nominated books I read.
While I’ve been attending the award ceremony at Norwescon for quite a while now, last year I took on the responsibility of being the award ceremony coordinator for the convention. This position gives me no insight or influence over the nominees, the judging, or the selection of the eventual winner. I just make sure the ceremony comes together.
However, as part of organizing the ceremony, I do have contact with the authors and publisher representatives. Once the nominees have been announced, I contact the publishers to get permission to make poster-size reprints of the book covers to display at the ceremony, and I invite the authors to attend the ceremony at Norwescon (and, if interested, to participate in paneling for the convention as well). For those authors who can attend, I’m one of the primary points of contact before and at the con; for those who can’t, I assist with finding a stand-in reader if they don’t have someone they know already planning on attending.
So, then, a theoretical possibility: One of the nominated works is one I just don’t get into and end up giving a poor review. At some point in the next few years, the same author is nominated for a new work. Cue awkwardness! I’d like to avoid that.
I’ve also noted a few times in the past that I have a history of never managing to pick the winner as my favorite. So if I say which was my favorite, even though that actually has nothing to do with the final choice, then I’m (historically, statistically) predicting that that book won’t win.
It just seems prudent to keep my thoughts to myself for these books.
6/2024
The third of this year’s Philip K. Dick nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
5/2024
The second of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
4/2024
The first of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominees. No review, because I’m the award ceremony coordinator. I’m not remotely involved with selecting nominees or winners, just making sure the ceremony goes as it should, but it’s best to keep my reviews to myself.
3/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Good Pike-era (shortly post-“The Cage”) adventure that has Spock examining his approach to dealing with his mixed heritage while attempting to assist a teenager who as a child had been captured and then raised by Klingons. With a side-order B plot of flu-like virus on the Enterprise, of course. Good insight into Spock that meshes imperfectly, but surprisingly well with the current Strange New Worlds take on his journey.
Day 252: It’s Philip K. Dick Award nominee announcement day! I have five of the books in hand; the sixth was back ordered and should be here next week sometime. Plenty of time to get them all read before the award ceremony on March 29. Looking forward to another good batch of books!
2/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Favorites this month were Chi Hui’s “Stars Don’t Dream” and Marie Vibbert’s “Rail Meat”.
1/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
For a book involving drug addicts suffering paranoia and breakdowns and generally being kind of horrid to each other, it was actually quite a bit funnier than I expected it to be. (I’d never seen the film, so had no preconceived notions of what to expect.) It definitely has Dick’s touch (not least in how the women are treated, which tends not to be one of Dick’s strengths), but there were many of the rambling, somewhat stream-of-consciousness ridiculous conversations among the drug-addled roomies that were perhaps a little too relatable from my less-than-responsible 20s.
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 74 books. Here’s a quick (?) overview…
The trend of the last few years holds true, with another year almost entirely dedicated to escapist fluff. Surprised? I’m not.
Non-fiction: Just two books, counting for 3% of my reading. One was a nice behind-the-scenes look at The Wrath of Khan, the other was an excellent memoir by Deafblind author Elsa Sjunneson. I highly recommend Being Seen, especially if you have any interest in recognizing and combatting ableism.
Non-genre-fiction (where “genre” is shorthand — though, not very short, if you include this parenthetical — for science-fiction, fantasy, and horror): Absolutely nothing this year. Everything that wasn’t non-fiction was “genre” fiction.
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. However, I’m no longer posting my thoughts or review on the nominees, as starting this year I am the coordinator for the Philip K. Dick award ceremony at Norwescon. While I have no input into selecting any of the nominees or the eventual winner, I don’t want to give any appearance of impropriety. So, I’ll just read and enjoy each year’s nominees, and you all will have to make your own judgements as to your favorites.
I added nine books to my Hugo reading project, bringing me up to 65% of the way through. This year’s selections were all good, without any I didn’t enjoy, but the surprises were Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Vor Game and Barrayar (and the other books in that series I read to make sure I got the whole story); I’d never read them before, and likely wouldn’t have picked them up based on the cover artwork and blurbs, but have ended up really enjoying the series and am looking forward to reading more.
Fluff genre fiction: Unsurprisingly, this once again ended up being the strong majority of this year’s reading. Lots of Star Trek novels, with a few detours here and there. And given everything that was going on in 2020 2021 2022 2023, 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.
One change this year is that I read a lot more digitally than I usually do. While I generally prefer physical books, there are times when digital books come in handy, or where they’re the only real option. In the first case, when we went on vacation this year, it was easy to bring along a small library on my iPad; in the second case, I’ve started actually reading the two SF/F magazines I subscribe to (Uncanny and Clarkesworld), both of which are distributed digitally.
Finally, Storygraph’s stats on my year’s reading tell me:
On to 2024!