Year in review: 2018

I managed to read a decent number of books in the last year, although my reading fell off quite markedly in the final few months, as my health issues got worse and worse. I haven’t read anything in at least a month now, probably longer. Too much pain and exhaustion.

There were a lot of excellent books on my list for this year. The ones that really stood out for me were, in no particular order:

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist
Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives
N. K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti - Home
Martha Wells, The Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red, Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy)
Maya Angelou, I Know why the Caged Bird Sings
Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts
Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters

And now for the statistics.

In 2018, I read 227 books or novellas - 181 fiction and 46 non-fiction; 9 of these were re-reads.

A total of 11 of these were anthologies or edited non-fiction collections, and so have been excluded from the demographic analysis of authorship, although I will note that among these works, 9 were edited or co-edited by women, and 5 were edited or co-edited by people of colour.

By gender:
Works written by women: 66 percent
Works written by men: 31 percent
Works written by non-binary people: three percent

By author's nationality:
American: 78 percent
British: 13 percent
Canadian: 12 percent
Other: 11 percent

"Other" nationalities included: Malaysian, German, Nigerian, Singaporean, Icelandic, Swedish, Finnish and Irish. .

Works by writers of colour: 31 percent

Becky Chambers: Record of a Spaceborn Few

I enjoyed Becky Chambers’ first two books, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit, even though, as some have noted, the novels are light on linear narrative and long on character development and interaction. I enjoyed watching the characters grow and interact - together. Each of these novels focused on a small group of people doing things together, an that was what made them work for me.

Unfortunately, Record of a Spaceborn Few, though like her other novels, almost entirely character driven, doesn’t do the same for me, and I think it’s because here, the characters are not, for the most part, in conversation (in the broadest sense of that phrase) with each other. They are all connected through their presence on one particular ship in the Exodan Fleet - the collection of ships that carried almost all of what remained of the human racd away from the ravaged planet they had once called home, in which they had lived and died, creating a culture of ecological self-sufficiency to replace the rapacious and unsustainable culture of humanity on Earth.

Though the human race is not part of the galactic community, it has been given a home planet, where some have settled, and is free to travel, work and live among all the planets and peoples in that community. However, many have remained in the Fleet, holding onto the culture and ship-based way of life that evolved out of the near-death of the Earth. Even though the Fleet no longer wanders, but remains in formation around their new sun.

But, now that humanity has options, and change is inevitable due to new contacts and new technologies, what effect will this ultimately have on the Fleet. Chambers examines that question through her characters, most of whom are natives of the Fleet, one of whom is a human whose grandmother left the Fleet to live planetside, but who is curious about the ways his ancestors developed before they bound themselves to a world again.

The novel thus consists of a number of independent stories, each one focused on a different individual, linked primarily by a commonality of place and circumstance, but not initially interacting with each other. And I think that’s why this novel has not worked for me as her earlier books did, though over the course of the novel I did become invested in the stories of some of the characters, and enjoyed reading about their lives and experiences. The consequences of alien influence on a massive convoy of human refugees isn’t quite a tightly enough focused story for me to open to all of the characters because of their role in the story.

However, when a significant event takes place about two-thirds of the way into the book, and all the characters begin to respond in at least some degree to that, it seems to pull the narrative together, tightening the focus and making the story more engaging, at least for my tastes. It’s safe to say that the book grew on me, rather than capturing me at once.

And in the long run, the examination of what keeps a society together, and what causes some to abandon it, when there are such options, was an interesting meditation, and raised some issues I’ll be thinking about for a while.