My best reading of 2020

[sixthlight]

2020 was a weird year, reading wise. Unlike the previous four years, I didn’t go to sea, which is normally when I power through a lot of books, so I only read ninety-five books (including novellas) total - but eighty-four new-to-me, which is closer to on-par with previous years. I couldn’t read anything except serious non-fiction and fluffy comfort re-read fiction during lockdown (late March - mid-May for us in Aotearoa) and then I nearly stopped reading altogether in September/October because words were coming for Old Guard fanfic almost faster than I could type.

Overall I feel like I’ve really learned to zero in on stuff I want to read. Not that it can’t be challenging - The Great War For New Zealand certainly was! - but it has to be enjoyable to read, or what’s the point? Life is too short for reading-as-slogging. I don’t always live up to this, mind, but I try.

Like last year, I’m going to highlight the non-fiction and fiction new-to-me books that really spoke to me over 2020. They’re not necessarily published this year, but this is when I read them.

Non-fiction

I finally caught up on some local history this year and I cannot recommend The Treaty of Waitangi (Claudia Orange) and The Great War for New Zealand (Vincent O’Malley) enough for methodically dissecting our ugly colonial history and all the ways we are still bound by it. If you’re intimidated by the size of the latter (and fair enough), try O’Malley’s much shorter Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa. The End of Everything (Katie Mack) is a fun, pop-culture-engaged (in the good way) look at how the universe might end - oddly comforting in a year when one version of our world ended. #NoFly (Shaun Hendy) is a thoughtful and readable discussion of what it really means to lower your personal carbon emissions, if somewhat ironic in the year we (almost) all stopped flying. While I picked it up for research, 1912: The Year The World Discovered Antarctica (Chris Turner) turned out to be a really readable history of a pivotal year in Antarctic science - and it focuses on the science of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, not the ‘heroism’.

Honourable mentions: Dark Emu (Bruce Pascoe), on Indigenous Australian agriculture, and Entangled Life (Merlin Sheldrake), on fungi. Both were good but ultimately somewhat flawed in different ways (the former by repetition, the latter by authorial self-indulgence. Nobody cares about your LSD trips, Merlin.)

Fiction

Stand-alone novels: the clear stand-outs were Children of Time (Adrian Tschaikovsky), The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected In Water (Zen Cho), The Empress of Salt and Fortune (Nghi Vo), and Starless (Jacqueline Carey). They’re all totally different from each other. One is hard sci-fi, Stephen Baxter but gut-wrenchingly kind; one is zany female-character-centric fanfic of a non-existent Malaysian wuxia tv show (to paraphrase the author); one is half-historical, half-fairytale, rewriting a major point in its secondary-world history from a female perspective; one is a gentle but relentless quest novel about its protagonist saving the world and figuring out his gender identity. They all stuck with me and will for ages.

Series starters: the books that made me hungriest for their sequels in 2020 were Unconquerable Sun (Kate Elliott), Bonds of Brass (Emily Skrutskie), The City We Became (N K Jemisin), and Not Your Sidekick (C B Lee). It’s a pity that Not Your Sidekick’s sequel was...not that great, because I still love the near-future superhero/supervillain dystopia of the setting, but the queer space opera drama that Unconquerable Sun and Bonds of Brass delivered and promised more of? YES PLEASE. And The City We Became was the city-centric SFF novel that 2020 needed.

Series continuers: :Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) and The Empire of Gold (S A Chakraborty). The Locked Tomb trilogy continues to be grotesque, heart-pounding, and extremely funny in the most Kiwi way. For the latter, Chakraborty sticks the landing on her Daevabad trilogy in the most beautiful way: forget Game of Thrones, you can have your political epic fantasy and still have heart and kindness. Apparently her next project is pirates and I can’t waaaaaait.

Honourable mentions: I finally got to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Penric novellas this year and really enjoyed them until she slipped into some old bad habits around the fourth one. Ah, well. Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murder (Aliette de Bodard) is basically an add-on for people who wanted more Thuan/Asmodeus from her Dominion of the Fallen series but as that, absolutely perfect. Network Effect (Martha Wells) took Murderbot for a novel-length spin, and while I’ve read enough Murderbot now that it isn’t as groundbreaking as All Systems Red, it still deserves a mention.