wrong train, right time

Here are some relevant stats about last year's reading, courtesy of the tags page:

Here are the stats by format:

novel [21]
short story [4]
novella [3]
graphic novel [3]

Here are the stats by genre:

fantasy [15]
sci-fi [9]
memoir [5]
young adult [3]
non-fiction [2]
horror [1]
superhero [1]
misc. fiction [1]

No surprises in either of these. I still read a lot of novels, I still read a lot of fantasy. I read far more short stories than are recorded here because I generally don't record my short story reading. It would get silly, I think, if I were to make an entry for each and every one, but I want to appreciate them more. Perhaps some kind of round-up format is in order. Monthly, or maybe weekly, or maybe I need to get more organized and review magazine issues as they come out -- I don't know. I'll think about it and experiment with it until I find a format that works.

I thought about doing a further break down by authors but to be honest I feel, perhaps complacently, that the majority of what I read is already by female writers or writers of color. Cis white dudes are under-represented in my choice of reading material and that suits me just fine. This is not a trend I have any desire to interrupt. If there's any demographic of authors I'd like to read more of, it's Asian and Asian-American voices. That, well, is my demographic, one of them at least, and it's the one I'm most interested in exploring and most excited to see represented on the publishing stage.

Going through my reviews, here are what I consider standouts, with links to the relevant reviews. I have decided that rereads are not eligible; obviously I consider them standouts, or I'd never revisit them.

"The Evaluators: To Trade With Aliens, You Must Adapt" by N. K. Jemisin

The House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard

Danger Club Vol. 1-2 by Landry Q. Walker, Eric Jones, and Rusty Drake

All Systems Red by Martha Wells

Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner

All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater

I initially started this blog because I wanted to read more. I've always read a lot, but somewhere throughout university and graduate school and the intervening years, I stopped reading quite so much. I thought if I had a place where I could let myself talk about what I'd read it would help. So far, it has. Knowing I'm writing to review activates the rusty critic part of my brain and keeps me thinking about what I'm reading even when I'm not in the midst of the physical act of reading.

I also started this blog because I wanted to get serious about writing. I thought reviewing would also help me start to analyze the craft of writing more, to start understanding what I wanted to write, what worked for me, what doesn't. I sort of lost that goal halfway along the way, or at least I stopped consciously considering it as part of my reading and reviewing practice.

Overall, I think this blog helped me do what I was hoping it would help me do. I think I've read more in the past year than I did the previous year, which, I was in grad school, but also more than the year before that, when I was just working part time.

Still, I would like to improve in this coming year. I have a tendency to focus on the new, because there's always so much new coming out, but there's a lot of older stuff that I've missed. Swordspoint demonstrated that. So I'd like to try and balance my intake of the new with an exploration of the old. I'd also like to start writing better reviews, and to make my reviews more than just a quick dump of thoughts and impressions.

So here's to 2018: may I read a full 52 books, may I read more of sf/f's greatest hits, may I get better at reviewing, and may I figure out how to give short stories their due.

Kingfisher, T. Clockwork Boys. Self-published, 2017. eBook.

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Here you will find brief reviews of: "The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death", "Red-Cloak", "The Man With the Knives", and "The Death of the Duke." Links included where possible. (Oh, how I wish for an collection of all the Riverside short fiction!)

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Heath, Chip and Dan Heath. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. Crown Publishing Group, 2013. eBook.

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Wells, Martha. All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1). Tor.com, 2017. eBook.

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de Bodard, Aliette. The House of Binding Thorns. Penguin Random House, 2017. eBook.

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