You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post.

This is too difficult to narrow down to one or two, so here's a top five? (As of the start of September, because this has been sitting in my drafts for a WHILE)

In no particular order

Circe, by Madeline Miller - in terms of prose, Miller might literally be my favorite author writing today. She needs to have written more, please. Just perfectly beautiful and tragic and properly mythic and altogether sublime. Lodged in my head as the canonical telling of the myth of Circe to compare others to.

Downbelow Station, by C. J. Cherryh - I've rambled on about this at length already, but this is the rare piece of SFF that really feels plausible to me? Like, not in the sense of technology, but that there's no main character, that chance and contingency and weight of history matter more than the grand destiny of any individual or family, that the world is fundamentally amoral without being fundamentally malevolent, and just, it reads like it could be the history of the future. That's a really rare accomplishment. Also for what a cultural wasteland the 80s are supposed to have been it really didn't feel dated at all. (I've got two other Cherryh books that have been sitting on my dresser for six months I should really get to)

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee - The acknowledgements for this book mention it was inspired by The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and you can tell (in the best possible way). One of the rare pop-sci books that really feels like it expands you understanding of the world and lifts some small few of the scales from your eyes. Also oddly hopeful and inspiring, for all the horrors (the very, very well-described horrors. I went form barely knowing what leukemia was to having nightmares about it).

Radiance, by Catherynne Valente - I do adore Valente's writing, but this is probably the first full length work of hers I've read that lives up to the novellas and short stories. It coasts by almost entirely on style and aesthetic and how perfectly aimed the character and arc of the protagonist is at me in particular, but my god the style and aesthetic are worth the price of admission. The whole thing should really fall apart under the weight of its pretension, and I really love it for the fact that it doesn't.

India in the Persianate Age, by Richard M. Eaton - A rather dry history text, really, and not one I'd really recommend to someone who just asked me for a book to read. But I've got at least a vague view-from-ten-thousand-feet idea of the shape of history from the medieval era on, and India was (and to a lesser extent is) one of the main remaining gaps. So I'm deeply appreciative for providing an organizing narrative of the region's development to use. And just generally, one of those books that really feels like its filling in little blank spots on the map? Sure it's dry, but just incredibly interesting subject matter and well-argued thesis.

to prove I wasn’t just staring out the window the whole time/pressure myself to keep up with one of my numerous resolutions

(not counting two web serials, two rpg supplements, and two comic book issues)

1. Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh

Cherryh’s one of those names that’s been vaguely on my list for forever, but thank you to tk for actually recommending her last year and getting me to actually look her up. (I’ve got the Faded Sun trilogy on order at my bookstore to arrive any day, but Downbelow’s what the library had, so-)

So I honestly really, truly loved this book, but for the exact reasons why I can basically not recommend it to anyone I know irl lol. Which is to say, it kind of doesn’t have a protagonist? Like, even beyond there being approximately six dozen different POVs that are jumped between every three pages, there’s just really no central figure to the narrative? Everyone has their personalities, and their positions, and their obligations and their debts, and they do variably extraordinary things, but there’s no one who really warps the world around them, and basically no trace of anyone who succeeds just because they’re a main character.

The book’s horribly unsentimental towards its characters generally, really. Like, not even in a ‘rooting for the villains’ way – there’s two different points where the guy you think is going to be the main antagonist just gets crushed beneath the wheels of history too. Going by the forward, the book basically started out as a way for Cherryh to set the table and explain the setting for another story, and it really does feel it – like an encyclopedia entry expanded into a narrative

..not a complaint, to be clear. Technology and aliens and timescales aside, it’s one of the only sci fi/fantasy stories I can recall ever reading that actually feel like they could be the history of another world, if that makes any sense? (Another part of that is just the complete lack of justice or rightful deserts in terms of where different characters end up. No karma at all, beyond the relatively happy big-picture ending. Really helps with the believabillity)

Also, don’t want to say it’s the only story I can recall ever reading/seeing where a man’s raped by a woman and it’s actually taken seriously by the narrative, but I can’t really think of any others. But then, ‘Josh Talley Must Suffer’ kind of feels like absolute cosmic law by the time you finish.

But yeah, anyway, if this sounds at all appealing, would recommend.

2. No One Will Miss Her, by Kat Rosenfield

Because for unclear reasons it’s much easier to strike up conversations with non nerds irl about murder mysteries and thrillers than sff.

But honestly this was really fun, basically entirely down to how sharp the writing was. Or possibly ‘cutting’ is the better word. It’s the sort of book where there’s exactly two (okay, three) characters the narrative doesn’t treat with just utter, blood-curdling, withering contempt and you end up feeling like the only real problem with the murder was that it might have happened to the wrong people.

I will say that plot-wise the whole thing hinges around a twist so cliche and obvious that I thought of it ten pages in and discarded it as being way too dumb for the book so far. But, well, here we are. Still, thoroughly enjoyable. Though it does also alternate between pseudo-objective-third-person narration in some chapters and the personal testimonial of one of the victims in others, and I should be clear that it’s the first person testimonial chapters that actually make the book worthwhile/fun to read.

3. Lies of Locke Lamorra, by Scott Lynch

Because a friend irl has been badgering me to read it for literally over a year. I hope you’re happy Cameron.

But really this was both an incredibly fun book and not at all the one I was expecting from my very vague pop culture osmosis. Much more Baccano! than Leverage, if that makes any sense. Both in how brutal the whole story is when you get past the first section, and how utterly vicious and nasty the protagonist gets when his blood is up. There’s like..3? Of the supporting cast left alive by the time you get to the epilogue, and also our boy Locke cuts off every one of someone’s fingers then takes out his tongue.

Brutal-torture-and-murder quotient aside, it is a great bit of pulpy fun through not-even-hiding-it fantasy Renaissance Venice. Also, there are heists and cons and schemes. It is hard to overstate how much I love heists and cons and schemes. Kind of felt like a high fantasy The Gentlemen or The Bank Job?

Though I do feel moderately irked that they spend the entire book building up/alluding to how there was a girl in the crew who Locke had a disastrous fling with and still isn’t over, and who was incredibly skilled on the con, and makes a whole game of never showing her on screen through all the childhood flashbacks – and then she just never shows up! I mean I know there’s two sequels and presumably she does in one of them but at that point she better have fucking wings to be worth all the build up.

(Also the theoretical villain never really gelled as a character or made that much of an impression, but that’s less of an issue since both emotionally and plot wise his wizard was the one who actually mattered for 90% of everything)

4. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Because of course when I attempt to acquire some Culture for myself and read some Real Literature, I accidentally go in blind to an alternate history where clones are mass produced to provide on demand organ donations. Your regular reminder that genre is nothing but a marketing category.

But really, this is very much one of those books where trying to seriously interrogate the worldbuilding is just entirely missing the point, it’s all very clearly allegorical (one of the reader’s guide questions at the back was something like ‘readers often express confusion why the clones are so resigned to their fates and never try to run for freedom, why might that be?’ and you can just feel Ishiguro looking exasperated and going ‘yeah, really makes you think’).

The book does first person narration really well, and also has a cast of extremely well drawn, realistic, alive-feeling characters who I would not be able tolerate dealing with for any time at all. Just six different sorts of truly grating personalities. Which given how most of the book is boarding school vignettes mostly means they’re believable teenagers, I guess.

Anyway there’s a couple passages in this that just feel like incredibly obvious topical subtext, except the book came out 17 years ago. Impressive, really.

5. The Councillor E. J. Beaton

In which a morally ambiguous historian/palace scholar/savant with a substance abuse problem navigates deadly high politics through her learning and a natural talent at intrigue for some confused mixture of vengeance for her dead parent-figure, social reform for the oppressed lower classes, and personal ambition.

I’m very sad I didn’t note down who recommended this to me, but whoever you are, you get me.

Though honestly, probably because this is so close to the platonic ideal of My Shit, I did find the execution a bit lacking? Or, like, going off the author blurb this seems to be Beaton’s first novel, and imo it does kind of show in the prose and plotting

Also, like, the main character is an orphan with a locke of glittering silver hair from the fire which killed her parents, who is de facto adopted by the queen as a pet savant after she translates a famous sequence of classical poetry into the vernacular at age 12, and also over the course of the book she discovers that she is one of the rare minority with magical element-controlling superpowers who are reviled and oppressed and her royal foster mother had executed as enemies of the crown, and despite constantly being anxious about being a commoner in a thoroughly aristocratic world and incredibly hierarchical society, this is literally never once a meaningful obstacle to her. It’s all just a bit much, y’know?

Though I do forgive a lot for how thoroughly un-traditionally heroic her arc is. By which I mean the, like, third-last scene in the book is her telling her attendant/bodyguard/personal spy/friend how fucking amazing stopping someone’s heart with magic feels, and despite about a sixth of the book being Lysande either getting high, thinking about getting high, or worrying about her supply of chimera scale, and her steadily increasing the size of her dose through the book, this just never comes to a climax or really becomes an obstacle. (Right after the scene with the heart-stopping she deals with all the stress and grief of the final battle by getting high again). We stan a functional addict enlightened monarch whose going to give people rights and a wellfare system just as soon as she’s securely in power and it’s politically convenient, I guess.

Anyway it also does that thing that’s a lot of modern SFF does where racism/xenophobia is basically only national lines/between groups of vaguely equal power and some distance, and homophobia and patriarchy just, aren’t even concepts, so all the book’s considerable energies of social critique and desire to have flawed societies is spent on absolutely brutal issues of class and social hierarchy. Something something cultural reflection of rainbow capitalism ig. (Also the thing where the hated and hunted tiny minority really do have awesome superpowers and bunch of them really are trying to take over the world with blood and terror, which I’m just not a fan of generally).