Reflections on 2017: short stories and other reading

Happy New Year to all my readers!

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2017 was a tiring year for me. Not as bad as 2016, so that's something. But I still ended up reading less than I would like. Which is hardly a disaster (and really, is more because of K-dramas luring me in than anything else).

I finished 83 books in 2017, not counting short stories that weren't part of an anthology or collection. From late September I challenged myself to read 100 short stories before the end of the year. They are all listed, with short reviews, at the posts below.

• 100 Short Stories Challenge: Stories 1 to 10 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 11 to 20 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 21 to 30 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 31 to 40 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 41 to 50 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 51 to 60 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 61 to 70 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 71 to 80 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 81 to 90 
• 100 Short Story Challenge: Stories 91 to 100

I managed to reach my goal on the 29th of December, so that was nice. I don't plan to do a similar challenge in 2018, however, I realised that having a way of noting short stories on my blog without extraneous effort was very encouraging. In the past I have felt that reading random short stories took time away from reading books that I could then review here. After the short story experiment/challenge I have decided to keep posting short reviews of all the stories I read. I'm going to group them in fives, though, so that the post doesn't go up too long after I read the first in the batch. I'm going to keep track of them in a proper spreadsheet too, so I can do some nice stats on them at the end of the year.

Speaking of spreadsheets, mine has yielded the usual nice charts that I like to share at this time of year.

First off, lets talk about genre. I have been mainly in the mood for science fiction the past few months, so my genre pie chart is much more evenly split between fantasy and science fiction than usual. I didn't read as many comics this year either, so that wedge is a bit smaller. It's 43% each to fantasy and science fiction, 11% to superheroes and only 1% each to horror and other. And 1% lost to rounding, apparently.

Next up, there's forms. As I said, I didn't read that many comics, and even fewer anthologies or collections — although this is apparently an average percentage for me, something I'd like to improve on. My novella reading is up too. I think this is partly because the shorter form is appealing and partly because so many great novellas have been coming out.

The last pie chart I'm going to include is the gender one. Unsurprisingly, I'm still mostly reading books my female authors. "Multi", in the plot below, is for works with multiple creators of different genders.

One final plot that isn't pie-shaped. This is the plot of how many books I read per month. On average, I read about seven books per month (well, 6.9 if you want a little more precision).

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The last thing for this post is to talk about resolutions for the new year. I did a pretty abysmal job at keeping track of challenges this year. I did participate in the Australian Women Writers Challenge, again, but other than submitting my reviews to the challenge I didn't really make much of a fuss over it.

I am not going to do any challenges in 2018 except for the basic Goodreads challenge (which I've set to 100 bookthings). I do want to make a new year's resolution to read more anthologies and collections that are already in my TBR. When I started doing the short story thing, I took stock and realise how startlingly many anthologies I own that I haven't even made a start on. That's something I'd like to fix.

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What about you, readers, what are your reading goals for 2018?

Paused no longer: a recap of the last 3.5 months

Happy New Year, my lovely readers!

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I said I would probably be back in 2017, and I am. Turns out what I needed wasn't so much a break from blogging per se, but a break from feeling obliged to read. And the space to be completely unproductive in my spare time. Or something. 2016 was hard and often crappy. Here's hoping that 2016 is an improvement.

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In the last few months of 2016 I did not read very many books. I watched rather a lot of K-dramas and played rather a lot of board games. In total I ended up only reading 71 books in 2016. Most of them in the first half of the year. Here's a chart:

I was in Sweden for the first three months of the year, Australia for the second three months and Belgium for most of the last six months. Make of that what you will. Though I did end up seeing in the new year in Melbourne. Also, this year has had 3 summers and 3 winters, more or less. If a seasonal body clock was a thing, mine would be very confused.

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Anyway, I wanted to say a bit about the books I read that didn't get reviews. Two of the books I read I did review and those will be going up in the next few days. I will skip those now. The other books I read were:

• Of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists by JK Rowling
• Of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies by JK Rowling
• Chimera by Mira Grant
• Skin by Ilka Tampke
• Romancing the Inventor by Gail Carriger
• Poison or Protect by Gail Carriger
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secretes Illustrated Edition by JK Rowling
• Seeing Red (Ambassador 1) by Patty Jansen
• Daughters of the Storm by Kim Wilkins — review coming
• Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall — review coming

The two Hogwarts books were interesting and pretty much what I expected after reading the first one. I live in hope that one day we'll get a complete (paper) edition of all the worldbuilding and backstory that JK didn't put into the actual books. I suppose for now that's on hold because of the Fantastic Beasts movies.

Chimera by Mira Grant was the conclusion to the Parasitology which I enjoyed and which was a satisfying conclusion. When I finished it, I contemplated trying to write a review and found that I didn't have much to say that I hadn't either said in a review of the first two books or that wasn't a spoiler. So. Read that series if you like SF horror and don't mind reading about a tapeworm apocalypse. Or if you liked Newsflesh but thought there was too much US politics in it.

Skin by Ilka Tampke was a gorgeous historical fantasy set in pre-Roman Britain and featuring such side characters as Taliesin. It's probably the book I regret not reviewing the most, but it didn't happen at the time and now it's too late. It was really good, though, and I am very much looking forward to reading the sequel when it comes out (later this year, I hope). The review should have also counted towards my Australian Women Writers Challenge. Alas.

Romancing the Inventor and Poison or Protect by Gail Carriger were romance novellas set in the Soulless/Finishing School universe. The first featuring a long-awaited f/f HEA for Genevieve and the latter featuring Preshea and showing us that she's not all bad, despite being Saphronia's school antagonist. Both were fun reads, as one would expect from Carriger. Read them if you have enjoyed either of her series. I look forward to more novellas to come.

The Illustrated Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by JK Rowling and Jay Kay was, obviously, the same story we all know and love with the addition of gorgeous artwork. I enjoyed it, but I think I liked the illustrations in Philosopher's Stone more. Maybe that was just because they were more novel, though. I did discover that you can line up the Diagon Alley illustrations from the two books and get a super long Diagon Alley, so that was cool.

Seeing Red by Patty Jansen is a science fiction novel I've been meaning to read for ages and finally got around to. I enjoyed it but didn't feel a burning need to read the sequel immediately. I am actually more keen to read Soldier's Duty, which is set in the same world but a different time period.

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And as for reading goals this year. Well. I want to avoid burning out again and don't want to put too much pressure on myself and risk enjoying the reading less. Right now, it's important to me to actually enjoy the things I do since a lot of 2016 wasn't enjoyable. (Don't get me wrong, there were high points like the release of Defying Doomsday, finishing my PhD and seeing friends.) But at the same time I'm not ready to completely give up the blog. So my goal is going to be to read and review at least one book a week. I toyed with choosing a day to regularly post the review, but I'm not sure what will end up working best. Also, I hope to read more that that, but that's the bare minimum I will not hate myself for meeting. Or something.

In the meantime, keep and eye out for a few reviews next week. Two from last year and one that I've got a head start on since I ended the year very close to the end of An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows.

Oh, and one more resolution: I plan to put down books I'm not enjoying more easily. More DNF and less feeling guilty about it. Something I've been trying to work towards for a few years now. Which means that right now I'm going to do a purge of my currently reading lists on LT and GR and move the books I'm halfway through to a DNF shelf in iBooks. Cue determination.

A Book/Reading Meme

I don't usually do memes here but Aurealis reading has left my blog a little bereft of content, so why not. Courtesy of SF Signal:

1. What was the last sf/f/h book you finished reading?
• Amok: Antho of Asia-Pacific Spec Fic edited by Dominica Malcolm, read for judging purposes.
2. What was the last sf/f/h book you did not finish reading and why?
• None this year (obviously not counting the two books I'm actively halfway through). Going back to last year, it depends on your definitions. I started reading the audiobook of Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta, but stopped because I wasn't commuting over the holidays and now I'm reading too much to want to listen to more fiction in the car (I've been catching up on mainly Galactic Chat podcasts instead). Books I left partly read last year I still vaguely hope to finish at some point include The Godless by Ben Peek and Help Fund My Robot Army edited by John Joseph Adams. The last book I consciously decided not to finish was Trucksong by Andrew Macrae because it was just not for me.
3. What was the last sf/f/h book you read that you liked but most people didn’t?
• I'm not sure. I don't pay a huge amount of attention to "most people's" reading habits. I don't think I've read any terribly controversial books recently, or if I did, they were the kind of controversial that people I associate with tend to approve of. If we're talking about quality of writing/story... I just don't know. Maybe Blades of the Old Empire by Anna Kashina. What books have I liked that you haven't, blog-reading people?
4. What was the last sf/f/h book you read that you disliked but most people did [like]?
• Um. The caveat from above still applies, but books I've read in vaguely recent times that I've disliked and that I'm sure someone somewhere has liked include Mars, Inc by Ben Bova and (less recently) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein.
5. How long do your 1-sitting reading sessions usually last?
• On a good day in excess of an hour if I'm reading on the couch (usually that happens only on weekends). In bed I usually read for half an hour to an hour.
6. What are you currently reading?
• Symbiont by Mira Grant for fun and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 8 edited by Jonathan Strahan, which is my last Aurealis book.
7. Do you like it so far?
• Can't comment on the Year's Best, but I am enjoying Symbiont. It's just taken a turn into "I don't know how you're getting out of this" territory, so that's fun.
8. How long ago did you buy the book you are currently reading (or the last book you read)?
• I bought Symbiont in November, which is when it came out.
9. What was the last physical sf/f/h book you bought?
• I bought ten paper YA books just before Christmas, which are listed here. I have read four of them so far.
10. What is the sf/f/h sub-genre you like the most and why?
• On principle I feel like I should say science fiction. I want  to like science fiction best. But in practice, what I like most are the kind of BFF books written by Australian Women since the late 90s/early 00s.
11. What is the sf/f/h sub-genre you dislike the most and why?
• Body horror. Horror with an excess of gore. Some of what I've read has struck me as gratuitous and not an effective way of advancing the plot. Other books have just made me too uncomfortable with their ickiness. I prefer to be made uncomfortable psychologically. (It seems more clever, usually, too.)
12. What is your favorite electronic reading device?
• My phone (iPhone 6+). Before I got my current phone late last year, my answer would've been the iPad, but it's the last device I have with large pixels (my laptop has a "retina display too") and being an iPad 2, there are a few interesting bugs it's acquired. Like I can't dim the screen all the way in landscape mode because it leaves an undimmed slice at the side. (The fix is to switch to portrait, dim, them switch back. And sigh. The sighing is important.) I still mostly read on the iPad because it's easier to prop up rather than having to hold my phone while lying in bed. Sometimes I get Voice Over to read books to me, in which case I use my phone because it has a better voice that the iPad isn't compatible with.
13. What was the last sf/f/h eBook you bought?
• Sourdough and Other Stories by Angela Slatter. Before that, Dangerous by Shannon Hale and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright.
14. Do you read books exclusively in 1 format (physical/electronic)?
• I feel like this question is answered above. I prefer ebooks for a bunch of reasons but I don't hate reading paper books. I'm less fond of audiobooks, but obviously not to the point of not enjoying them. (Well, it can depend on the narrator. Also, I've developed a desire to stab people who format their ebooks poorly enough to make my phone read out "new line" every time, or render the entire book as a link for some reason, or OMG you really learn the ways people can fuck up their formatting when you're using a screen reader.)
15. Do you read eBooks exclusively on a single device (eBook reader/ smartphone / tablet)?
• As mentioned above, I read on my phone and my iPad. Also my computer (the iBooks app syncs across all three mostly nicely). And when I travel I take the Kobo which is a piece of shit I have frequently wanted to throw at a wall, but it's a piece of shit with a week-long battery. It's terrible for reading PDFs, though. I read a PDF on it once only because I couldn't bear to put that specific book down. Have I mentioned my annoyance at PDF ARCs? Especially the trade paperback/hardcover sized ones for which I have to zoom every iPad page by hand. Ugh.

Blogging Against Disablism

Today is Blogging Against Disablism day and I thought I'd join in. I'm going to be mainly talking about the representation of mental illness and neurological conditions in books, partly because that's one of the things the book that inspired this dealt with and partly because, well, it needs to be talked about. Also, there will be miscellaneous spoilers for some of the books I discuss. Thems the breaks.


The book/series that inspired this post was the Assured Destruction trilogy by Michael F Stewart and, particularly, the final volume, With Zombies. The main character's mother has MS and is confined to a wheel chair — another piece of nice representation in this story —and on top of that, she suffers a period of severe depression (like catatonia severe) starting from somewhere in book two. Obviously this has a strong impact on the main character's life (more so since her mother is her sole parent) but what was most incredible was that her mother wasn't stigmatised for suffering from a mental illness, nor for spending time in the psych ward. And quite frankly, the book gets points just for calling it a psych ward (it's concerning how rare that is). Later on, the main character also ends up in a psych ward (a different one, since she's a teenager — love the attention to detail) suffering from plot-induced acute stress disorder. Her friends, while a little confused about what's been going on at first, end up being really supportive and — gasp! — also don't stigmatise her for having mental illness cooties. The terrible thing is how rare this kind of representation is in books and in real life.

In real life, mental illnesses — especially the kind that require time in a psych ward — tend to come with some stigma attached. I shouldn't have to spell out why this is a bad thing. I also believe that the more people know about mental illnesses and the more they understand how they work (and, critically, how they don't work), the better it will be for everyone. A key way of learning about a diverse range of people is by reading about them or by seeing them in other forms of media. I'm obviously biased towards books because I'm a book-blogger, but I do think the way books allow us to get into characters' heads is a particularly powerful tool.

I've already talked about the thinks I think Michael F Stewart does right in the Assured Destruction trilogy, and now I want to talk about some other books that do things both well and poorly. Also, I'm including characters with neurological conditions as well as mental illnesses because, quite frankly, there isn't a huge number of either.

Viral Nation by Shaunta Grimes is a post-apocalyptic novel about an autistic girl with a service dog, her brother, and some other people they befriend. I don't know as much about autism as I do about some other conditions, but to me this was mostly positive representation. For a discussion of some of the things the author didn't quite get right, I recommend this article. One thing I particularly liked about Viral Nation was that the main character needed support from her brother (or a reasonable facsimile) to comfortably survive. So often "non-independent" characters (scare-quotes because no one is truly independent of other people, yet some forms of dependence are normalised while others are stigmatised) are assumed to be killed off as soon as the first disaster strikes, it's refreshing to see one who survives. I would very much like to see more diverse characters appearing post-apocalyptically.

Some other books with good portrayals are Playing Tyler by TL Costa and Pawn by Aimée Carter. Playing Tyler is split between two point of view characters, one of whom is a teenage boy with ADHD. Costa's writing allows us to get into his head and the choppy way she's written some of his thoughts gives us an idea of what it's like for him. Featuring a bit less prominently, the main character in Pawn is dyslexic. In her dystopian world, this means that she has very few opportunities to live a life not hampered by poverty, despite her intelligence and knowledge. The world is set up so that if you can't do well on exams (which she can't because she has difficulty reading them even though she knows all the content), you can't get ahead. Since she's the main character, unusual circumstances take her in an unexpected direction, but even then, not being able to read is an issue. The reader is set up to empathise with the main character and feel the injustice of her not being able to properly convey her talents to a faceless examination board.

Finally, I want to end on a less positive note. The following book was not one I particularly enjoyed and a large part of that was the ableism perpetrated by the main character. It did not help that Cracked by Eliza Crewe opened in an "insane asylum" complete with just about every stereotype you can think of. Part of the problem is that the main character is a terrible person — that's built into the premise of the worldbuilding — but that doesn't mean I had to like it. The book concludes with (among other things) the main character grudgingly accepting that the "crippled" girl (who has a limp from an old injury) is not as much of a waste of space as she'd initially assumed based on her disability. Charming, right? But what's worse, I think, is that while it's clear that the main character's attitude towards the girl with the limp is part of her being a terrible person and evolving from that, her attitude towards the "insane asylum" and it's residents is not explored at all. And that really pissed me off.

There are just some examples from recent YA books that I've read. I feel like mental illness is more likely to be covered in YA books than adult books, but maybe that's just a case of the genres I read in (speculative fiction on all counts). And I have to admit, part of the reason I chose to talk about mental illness and neurological disorders disorders is because I could think of more books that fit into those categories than books that dealt with other disabilities or chronic illnesses. And I've been going out of my way lately to find books with disabled and/or ill characters, so that makes me sad. (It does mean that there are some waiting to be read that I haven't got to yet, but still.)

More books with more diverse casts! Go!

New Booksies (11)

Hal Junior: The Missing Case by Haynes

City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare

Aussie books!

Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

I am back in Australia for a bit and, as promised, I am starting to amass a pile of Aussie books. Whoo!

First up, I bought the second Hal Junior book, The Missing Case by Simon Haynes just before I left because, well, that was when it was released, but shh, it totally counts as being bought here. I mean, it’s an ebook, so, er, something.

Then I bought City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare, because I needed something easy to read to get through the jet-lag (two red-eye flights in a row: not recommended). I’ve actually been reading Existence by David Brin (expect the review up soonish) but it’s not that kind of book that works well when you’re tired or quickly in a few sittings so it’s been slow progress.

Then I bought a small pile of Aussie-authored books in a real life Australian bookshop (Dymocks). From left to right in the photo:

• Diamond Eyes by AA Bell. I’ve also ordered in the sequel, Hindsight, which wasn’t in store.
• Winter Be My Shield by Jo Spurrier of which I received and ARC and have already read and reviewed it. But I wanted to buy a paper copy because I enjoyed it and want to own the whole set in pretty on my shelf.
• Sea Hearts by Margo Lanagan.

Hubby bought the boxed set of the Mistborn trilogy which we happened upon in QBD. Partly because he likes the series (originally he read them from the library) and partly due to my encouragement so I could read books 2 and 3 (review of book 1 here). And they’re included here because, as I’ve mentioned previously, all our books revolve around me ;-p

Finally, Beyond Binary, an anthology of genderqueer stories, was waiting for me in Australia when I arrived. I won it from a Galactic Suburbia Twitter competition a month or two ago. Also my cover is slightly different because it is an ARC.

Yay books!

More Gender-centred Statistics on Australian-Authored SFFH Novels in 2011

After my earlier post about broad gender distributions in Australian novels last year, Tansy valiantly volunteered to add target age groups and genres to the mighty list of SFFH novels published in 2011. She sent the spreadsheet back to me and I poked Numbers into generating statistics and made some pie charts. Yay, pie charts!

Gender distribution in SFFH Australian authors published in 2011

Tansy put out a request on Twitter for someone to compile states on gender breakdown of Aussie SFF novelists and for some reason I volunteered. Because apparently I was bored this morning (actually, it did take my mind off feeling sick, so yay).