Since I had never read a science
fiction or fantasy graphic novel before, I set a small goal of 5 books for
the Science Fiction & Fantasy Graphic Novel Challenge, which I quickly
upped to 10. After that, I stopped changing the goal but kept reading (torn
between wanting to try a variety of approaches and a strong impulse toward series
completism), winding up with 43 volumes read. At the top of the list stands Saga – fun, thoughtful space opera with
incredible painterly illustrations. Another favorite was the entertaining The Sixth Gun, an action-filled Western
with an engaging cast and wonderful, detailed illustrations (the Thunderbird
remains a highlight). Also standing above the crowd were Y: The Last Man, particularly strong in its opening volumes describing
the responses to a global catastrophe that seems to have killed all the world’s
males and bringing our hero Yorick’s story to a satisfying conclusion in volume
10, and Fables, a less philosophical
series that follows the lives of fairy tale characters living in modern-day New
York, at its best when telling war stories or poignant morality tales.
This challenge also encouraged me to check out some of the
much-vaunted classics of the speculative graphic novel. While I didn’t
especially care for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman:
Preludes and Nocturnes (perhaps I should have heeded Internet advice to
start with a later volume), I enoyed Snowpiercer’s
starkly drawn tale of postapocalyptic class struggle aboard an unstopping train
despite its weaknesses in characterization. It was easy to see why Alan Moore’s
work has been deemed classic, and I certainly thought V for Vendetta and Watchmen
earned their status, although they didn’t necessarily become favorites (a bit
of datedness/the fact that I’ve now seen many variations on these themes – many
of them inspired by Moore’s work – comes into play, as well as the fact that despite
a few attempts to portray well-rounded females, I found Moore’s characterization
of women to be problematic overall). I probably give the edge to V for Vendetta; although I’m not sure I
buy a key relationship, the politics is still interesting; interesting, too, is
how important words are in the way
this graphic story is told, from a full sermon to vaudeville-style lyrics. Reading
Watchman’s reflections of what it
might really mean to possess a superpower or to exist “beyond the law” was made
even more interesting by comparing its 1980s outlook to the current outpouring
of books, films (Man of Steel and Birdman to mention but two), and TV
shows now tackling the same themes.
Then there was the SFF Explorer Challenge to read authors
whose work I hadn’t read before. I expected that this category would lead me to
explore some of the older “classic” science fiction writers whose work I wasn’t
familiar with and perhaps also more military sci fi, which is a genre I often find
entertaining and frustrating at the same time. In fact, what this challenge
mostly prompted me to do was prioritize some writers who’d been on my to-read
list for a while (like N.K. Jemisin with the Dreamblood duology) and some newer
writers (like Madeline Ashby, who explored the ethics of artificial
intelligence, with a lot of action and roadtripping thrown into the mix, in vN and iD). Nalo Hopkinson was one of these writers, and Midnight Robber was one of my top books
of 2014, a book in which a high tech space colony can also be a bastion of
Carribean culture, propelled at the sentence level by vivid dialect, and
exploring (among many other topics) female friendships and coming of age.
I started with a goal of 15 or 20 for the Explorer
Challenge, eventually raised it to 30, and ended with 34 titles fitting the
bill. Of course, completing other challenges had a spillover effect in the “new
to me” category, as did the books and stories I read in order to take place in
online discussions. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s
Window,” was one of my first reads in 2014 and Rachel Swirsky’s haunting short
story collection How the World Became
Quiet remains one of the most memorable. Many of Swirsky’s stories explore
gender through a speculative lens, but How
the World Became Quiet is by no means a one-note collection. It begins with
“The Lady Who…” novella, in which a sorceress from a warrior caste finds her
consciousness preserved and her beliefs challenged as she encounters generation
after generation of descendents and others.
While not every story reaches the same level, there are numerous highs, from a
ghost story set in Japan’s “Sea of Trees” to “A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its
Black Hands,” which takes a personal look at global violence, to a relationship
story that asks how an artificial intelligence experiences “Eros, Philia, Agape.”
Another short fiction standout was On a Red Station, Drifting, part of Aliette de Bodard’s Vietnamese-inflected
Xiyun universe. In the novella, a refugee crisis and uncertain peace are the
backdrop for a multigenerational power struggle on Prosper Station. de Bodard
draws strong, not always likeable, female characters and gives depth to most of
her cast (be they male, female, and/or computer).
I found a lot to enjoy in my 2014 reading -- the great fun
of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and Michael J. Sullivan’s old-fashioned
Riyria books; Jeff VanderMeer’s very weird Southern Reach trilogy; China
Mieville’s marriage of science fiction and linguistics in Embassyville; Samuel R. Delany’s darkly playful The Einstein Intersection; Toby Barlow’s
unique story of Parisian detectives, American spies, and Russian witches in Babayaga; K. J. Parker’s tactical and
tough Fencer Trilogy; the Afro-Celtic scope of Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker
trilogy; The Lathe of Heaven (in
which Ursula K. LeGuin seems to channel reality-bending Philip K. Dick); Jonathem
Lethem’s Chandler-meets-Dick noir with a talking kangaroo Gun, With Occasional Music; and Dick’s own, suprisingly personal,
paranoid yet exuberant A Scanner Darkly.
I read a number of books from C.J. Cherryh’s celebrated Alliance/Union Universe
(conceived in some ways as a mirror of the Cold War), in which I found the recurring
themes I expect from Cherryh (attention paid to economics, politics, and the
mechanics of ships and stations) as well as a few surprises (“damaged” male
adolescents as protagonists or prominent characters). Downbelow Station makes a complicated conflict between planets,
ships, and unions into a pageturner; Rimrunners’
tough vet narrator, Bet Yeager, is compelling in her struggles to leave behind
staion life; Cyteen tells an
expansive and insightful tale of cloning, politics, and parenting.
My reading outside the realms of fantasy and science fiction included the enraging but important nonfiction Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, multigenerational Vietnam memoir The Eaves of Heaven, and Monica Drake’s not-just-chick-lit The Stud Book.
My reading outside the realms of fantasy and science fiction included the enraging but important nonfiction Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, multigenerational Vietnam memoir The Eaves of Heaven, and Monica Drake’s not-just-chick-lit The Stud Book.
A few books and authors merit special mention:
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale
for the Time Being was a January 2014 read that’s stuck with me. It
meditates on Zen, time, and mortality while telling the stories of a West Coast
novelist and a Japanese teenager facing brutal bullying. Ozeki’s stories tend
to be emotional but not sentimental, to ask big questions, and to promote
environmentalism. In 2014, I also enjoyed My
Year of Meats, which begins with a quote from Shonagon’s Pillow Book and introduces two very
different protagonists, a brash Japanese-American documentarian working on a
television series funded by the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate and a
subdued Japanese housewife whose husband is part of BEEF-EX.
I had long heard fantastic recommendations for Mary Doria
Russell’s Jesuits-in-space novel, The
Sparrow. Both it and its sequel Children
of God live up to the hype in their exploration of spacefaring
possibilities; real questions of values, faith, and reason; and how individuals
can change over time or just when looked at from a different point of view.
Although I’ve heard very little about this book and its
author, A Guide for the Perplexed by
Dara Horn would be very close to the top of the list if I was attempting
numerical rankings for my 2014 reading. The central story focuses on Josephine
Ashkenazi, who has designed the program Genizah, which takes social media and
other information to create incredibly detailed personal archives or living
memories. Focused more on her work than her young daughter, Josie has been
invited to do some high-profile consulting work with a library in Cairo. Not
far into the book, you realize that you are reading a modern-day version of the
Biblical Joseph story, but Horn ably walks the line of hewing to many of the
details of the original while allowing enough differences to make the current
tale seem plausible and its outcome uncertain. Into the layers of the novel, Horn
pulls the story of Jewish scholar Maimonides (who like Josie faces political,
religious, and sibling tensions) and the nineteenth-century Cambridge professor
who helped uncover Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed in the geniza (worn-out document storage) room of a Cairo
synagogue. Horn paints a complex view of Josie, her family, and global conflict in a novel that
muses on the importance of memory and tradition. At least one review
characterized this, Horn’s fourth, as her “best novel yet,” which seems likely
to be true. I read Horn’s second novel, The
World to Come, which includes an art theft, Marc Chagall’s early job
teaching in a Soviet orphanage, Yiddish parables, and American Jews in Vietnam
and New Jersey. Although I enjoyed it, I found the multilayered story tended a
bit more toward the vignette than in Guide
for the Perplexed. I’ll read Horn’s other two novels as well, but I’ll also
eagerly look forward to her future work.
The only challenge I didn’t meet was my “14 books of
contemporary poetry for every year of the 21st Century challenge.” I got as far
as 7 books (though some publication years were particularly alluring, so I
actually read nearly a dozen volumes of poetry). I won’t be too hard on
myself for coming short: the two main themes of poetry are love are death; you
could say that the main theme of poetry is ephemerality, and that can sometimes
get a little dark. I’m not always in the mood for that. (Of course there are
other, sometimes overlapping themes, including self expression and promotion of
social change. I’ll admit that sometimes a book like Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography can be more enjoyable
just for the fact that it presents someone else’s struggles, strengths, and
weaknesses.) A lot of the poetry I read last year struck me as “just OK,”
perhaps partly due to the fact that, while reading a full collection allows for
emergence of themes and interesting points of comparison, it may also have a
bit of a dilution effect, with individual verses fading into an overall
remembered blur. Some works stood out as collections: the overall project of
Susan Slavierno’s Cyborgia was
perhaps more impressive than any of the individual poems on their own.
Outstanding in my 2014 poetry reading was Blowout
by Denise Duhamel. The biggest fault of the collection is probably that it
never quite surpasses the height achieved in its opening poem, “How It Will End”
– with a believable conflict that turns and develops, everyday language that is
rhythmic and propelling, humor, a point of view, and a real sense of stakes.
How best to address this missed goal? As the 21st Century
remains young and full of appealing poetry titles, I think I’ll turn it into a
two-year challenge. In 2015, I’ll aim to fill in the years missed plus
something as-yet-unpublished. I was inspired by a collection of newspaper
columns by poet Edward Hirsch (whose taste I’m not sure is very similar to mine
but who seems to have pulled together quite a strong group of world poets)
in which he writes about a poet at a time, giving some broad background on the
writer but focusing on discussion of a single poem. My ambitious goal will be
to review each volume of poetry I read this year in this way, focusing on a single poem
(my favorite, or perhaps one I find most emblematic). I think this might be a
fairer way to discuss and evaluate the poems I’ve read, a way of resisting the
lyric blur.
What are other goals for 2015? I set a relatively modest goal
of reading 100 books overall (I’ll probably read more, but reading is one thing
for which I don’t need to find an incentive) and at least 20 science fiction or
fantasy authors who are “new to me.” I also set a goal to participate in online
discussions. I should probably set a goal for “number of books reviewed on this
blog” … what would a good quantity be? Hmmm, I’ll think on it …
