Books You Read and Loved in 2018

AW Admin

Administrator
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
18,772
Reaction score
6,285
This is for books that you read in 2018 and loved. Any book. Books that you re-read. Old books that you read for the first time. Newly published books.

What did you read and love in 2018?


I'm one of those people who re-read.

I re-read C. J. Cherryh's Convergence, from her Foreigner series. I re-read all of these about once a year, before the next one comes out. Emergence, Foreigner #19 came out in 2018.

I read all of the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novels by Laurie R. King; these were fun and absorbing.

I read all of Martha Well's Murderbot novellas. I loved all 4 of them, from All Systems Red to Exit Strategy.

I highly recommend Greenblatt's Will In The World, about Shakespeare and James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.

* Post contains AW affiliate links
 

Marissa D

Scribe of the girls in the basement
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 22, 2011
Messages
3,071
Reaction score
365
Location
New England but hankering for the old one
Website
www.marissadoyle.com
Another Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes fan here...and I have the first Murderbot book on my Nook and really need to read it.

I really enjoyed The Philosopher's Flight by Tom Miller--historical fantasy set in the Progressive Era. Hoping there'll be another one, as he hints at a whole history.
 

AstronautMikeDexter

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 30, 2018
Messages
209
Reaction score
168
Location
Massachusetts
Website
michaelprocopiowrites.wordpress.com
I didn't read nearly as much as I wanted to this year but I did read some very enjoyable books nonetheless. I think my favorites were "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" by Claire North and "Burial Rites" by Hannah Kent. They're two wildly different stories from each other but they both packed a punch.
 

Chris P

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Nov 4, 2009
Messages
22,617
Reaction score
7,298
Location
Wash., D.C. area
I think the ones that will stick with me the most are A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, and Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. Both are perfectly written, and Sing is one of the first books in a long time I've wanted to go back to page one and re-read immediately.
 

Brightdreamer

Just Another Lazy Perfectionist
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 22, 2012
Messages
12,977
Reaction score
4,513
Location
USA
Website
brightdreamersbookreviews.blogspot.com
A breakdown of favorites/most memorable by month:

January: The Grace of Kings (Book 1 of the Dandelion Dynasty series, Ken Liu, fantasy): A sweeping "silkpunk" epic inspired by the fall of China's first emperor and the chaotic scramble for power left in their wake.

February: Descender Deluxe Volume 1 (Jeff Lemire, graphic novel/SF): A galactic confederation turns on its resident robots after mysterious mechanical invaders attack, but one boylike companion robot may hold the key to their origins. But all Tim-21 wants is to find his long-lost human friend, a child who grew up to become a robot bounty hunter. Like the film AI done right, on an interstellar scale... (Honorable mention to Corey J. White's space adventure Killing Gravity, about a woman with unusual abilities who escapes her nefarious keepers/captors.)

March: The Tea Dragon Society (Katie O'Neill, MG? fantasy/graphic novel): A unique tale with strong diversity and a message about the power of tradition even in changing times, about a girl who rescues a lost "tea dragon" and becomes part of the dwindling society of those who care for the peculiar little creatures, known for the memory-sharing teas made from the leaves and flowers on their horns.

April: All Systems Red (Book 1 of the Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells, SF): A novella about a nameless, genderless cybernetic being rented out as security to a planetary exploration team, a job that quickly goes very, very wrong and forces it to reveal its free will. Very compelling voice and unique MC. (Honorable mentions to Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson, a graphic novel about heroes, villains, the scars left by past hurts and betrayed loves, and an unusual shapeshifter who insists on becoming a sidekick to the realm's designated bad guy, and Don't Even Think About It, by Sarah Mlynowski, a young adult SF/romance about a class of teens who develop mind-reading abilities after receiving tainted flu vaccines; notable for being the first book I've ever read to pull off a "first person plural" POV for the collective viewpoint that the kids become.)

May: The Invention of Nature (Andrea Wulf, biography): The story of Alexander von Humboldt, the world's first true ecologist (though the term was only coined after his death) who reshaped how nature was perceived and influenced a generation of scientists, including Muir and Thoreau, among others... who also drew connections between human activity and detrimental shifts to water tables and overall climate.

June: Beneath the Sugar Sky (Book 3 of the Wayward Children series, Seanan McGuire, fantasy): A boarding school for children and teens who have been returned to earth after portal adventures receives an unusual visitor: the daughter of a girl who was murdered (in Book 1), who claims she won't even be born unless she gets help resurrecting her mother. (Honorable mention/tie to Traitor's Blade by Sebastien de Castell, first in the Greatcloaks series, a swashbuckling fantasy homage to the Three Musketeers starring a trio of disgraced heroes still loyal to a dead king.)

July: Binti (Book 1 of the Binti trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor, SF): A girl from an isolationist African tribe defies her family and tradition when she accepts a scholarship to an interstellar university on another planet... but the trip is interrupted by a deadly visit from jellyfishlike aliens.

August: Words of Radiance (Book 2 of the Stormlight Archives, Brandon Sanderson, fantasy): The second installment of a world-sweeping epic continues to visit new and strange locations while building numerous distinct characters, without letting the storyline stagnate.

September: Sparrow Hill Road (Book 1 of the Ghost Roads series, Seanan McGuire, fantasy): The urban legend of the Phantom Prom Queen gets retold in a story that creates an American roadside mythos of ghostly hitchhikers, truck stops on the twilight border between life and death, and predatory spirits seeking immortality at the cost of harvested souls. (Honorable mentions to The Stone Girl's Story by Sarah Beth Durst, an MG fantasy about carved stone life forms abandoned by their dead maker, and A Darker Shade of Magic by V. E. Schwab, a tale of three different Londons linked by magic.)

October: The Black God's Drums (P. Djeli Clark, fantasy): A girl in an alternate-world New Orleans who has a wind goddess in her soul may be all that stands between the city and a devastating spirit weapon, in a story steeped in voodoo with traces of steampunk around the edges.

November: Jade City (Book 1 of the Green Bone Saga, Fonda Lee, fantasy): An improbable mixture of The Godfather, kung fu films, family saga, and Asian mythos pits the Kaul family of the No Peak clan against rivals in a modern city rooted in old rivalries and traditions, all centered around the country's unique jade that grants wearers special powers... powers that can become madness and addiction, even to those trained in its use.

December (so far): Kings of the Wyld (Book 1 of the Band series, Nicholas Eames, fantasy): Rock star culture meets sword and sorcery in this amusing, action-packed tale of a legendary band of mercenaries reuniting to help their former frontman/leader rescue his warrior daughter from a city under siege by a monster army.
 

buz

edits all posts at least four times
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Nov 11, 2011
Messages
5,147
Reaction score
2,040
Audiobooks really, uh, helped me get back into books, after I found I super-suck these days at sitting down and looking at words for any significant period of time ... my favorites from this year, I think (they're all nonfic cos that's just what I'm doing lately, idk) --

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong (on bacterial symbiotes)
The Drug Hunters by Donald R Kirsch and Ogi Ogas (on the development of drugs)
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (on the 1860 murder at Road Hill House)
Get Well Soon by Jennifer Wright (on plagues)
Bellevue by David Oshinsky (on the history of Bellevue hospital)
Pale Rider by Laura Spinney (on the 1918 flu epidemic)
Damnation Island by Stacy Horn (on the history of Blackwell's/Roosevelt Island)
The Man Who Wasn't There by Anil Ananthaswamy (on the neurology/psychology of the self)
The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman (on the use of poison in European royal circles)
Death in the Air by Kate Winkler Dawson (on the London smog of 1952 and also a serial killer active around then)
Starvation Heights by Gregg Olsen (on a woman who ran a somewhat lethal fasting-cure sanitarium in the early 1900s)
Thunderstruck by Erik Larson (on the development of the wireless telegraph and also the story of the Crippen murder)
Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls by Edward E Leslie (survival stories)
The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris (on Joseph Lister, surgeon who championed antiseptic techniques)
The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean (on the periodic table and its elements)
 
Last edited:

sandree

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jan 30, 2018
Messages
352
Reaction score
47
Location
PA
I didn’t read much this year but two I enjoyed were:

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Lisa See - takes you to the world of traditional tea farming.

Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel - post apocalyptic story with a bit of hope.
 

WilkinsonMJ

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Dec 3, 2018
Messages
85
Reaction score
7
I read a fair few classics I've been meaning to get around to, among other things:

Dracula and Frakenstein - Absolutely incredible, there's a reason these stories have endured

DUNE - I was a fool for taking so long to read this book. It was amazing and I've thought about it more or less once a day since I read it. If you haven't I'd recommend it above anything else I've read.

Farenheit 451 - Enjoyed it enough to force my house-mates to read it so I'd have someone to discuss it with

I also read the Annotated Lovecraft by Toshi but I've read most of those stories before, though the added notes were fascinating and really fleshed out the world HP lived in and where his nightmares came from.
 

Chris P

Likes metaphors mixed, not stirred
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Nov 4, 2009
Messages
22,617
Reaction score
7,298
Location
Wash., D.C. area
Wow, it surprises me how few of these books I've even heard of! Just proves there's a ton of good stuff out there. I might use this thread to get ideas for next year's AW Reading Challenge (see my sig, the challenges are fun and all are welcome).

WilkinsonMJ: Frankenstein is one of my all-time favorites. I've read it several times already, and im sure I have a few more reads of it in me. That is, if I ever get to it with so much else to read.
 

mrsmig

Write. Write. Writey Write Write.
Staff member
Moderator
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 4, 2012
Messages
9,884
Reaction score
7,174
Location
Virginia
In 2018 I read about 30 books (less than half what I read last year, but I was doing a lot of waiting around in 2017). The best of them were Ron Chernow's exhaustive biography of Alexander Hamilton, Susanna Clarke's short story collection The Ladies of Grace Adieu, Lucy Grealey's Autobiography of a Face, Gin Phillips' Fierce Kingdom and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
 

Lakey

professional dilettante
Staff member
Super Moderator
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 20, 2017
Messages
2,714
Reaction score
3,967
Location
New England
It’s so interesting to see everyone’s eclectic list. WilkinsonMJ and Chris P: I read Frankenstein this year also. Almost dizzying depths of meaning in that work; knowing Mary W. Shelley was all of 18 when she wrote it almost makes me set down my pen.

Okay, here’s mine. I have not quite reached the 52-book goal I set on Goodreads for 2018, but I think I will get there in the next ten days - if not, I’ll be solidly at 51-and-a-half. I am also a rereader, so some of those 52 were books I’d read previously, and a couple of them are books I read twice this year. Among the ones that affected me the most (in no particular order):

Sol Stein, Stein on Writing: I read a lot of writing books this year, and more than any other this is the one that left me feeling inspired and energized to dive back into my manuscript and start FIXING STUFF. I’m working on a longer review of it; stay tuned.

P. O’Connell Pearson, Fly Girls,The Forgotten Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II: Though aimed at middle-graders, it is a thorough and interesting recounting of the American women pilots who flew ferry missions and often dangerous test missions during WWII. I’m going to read more about WASPs - I’ve got fantasies about writing about them - and this book was just such a pleasant introduction.

Elspeth Barker, O Caledonia: A haunting, wry, and sad story of an adolescent girl trying to make sense of life on a suitably gothic Scottish crag. A friend recommended it to me with comparison to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, another favorite that I reread in 2018.

Gore Vidal, Julian: Vidal’s historical fiction is always amazing for its humanity and detail, and the fact that it manages to be historically rich while not really being historical fiction at all; rather it’s always rich allegory and even polemic. In this story of the 4th-century Roman emperor who tried to stem the tide of Christianity, Vidal expresses all his rage at the modern church.

Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers: I read a lot of Trollope this year, and this was the favorite. Who would have thought the machinations of 19th-century rural church politics could be so compelling? Also one of the most fun of Trollope’s trademark nonconventional women characters in La Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni.

Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, A Life of Patricia Highsmith: I have strong feelings and complex thoughts about Highsmith, both the woman and the writer. Wilson does too, and he expresses them in a compassionate book that probably whitewashes the absolute worst of the woman, while approaching the writer with an appealing mixture of analysis and reverence.

Ann Petry, The Street: A heartbreaking 1948 novel about a woman trying to get by in Harlem. Most depressing is how little has changed in 70 years of the way the twin boots of racism and patriarchy stand on the neck of women like the book’s protagonist Ludie Johnson. I’m also finishing up Audre Lorde’s memoir, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, whose first third covers a lot of the same time and place as The Street and provides an interesting compare-and-contrast.

Helen Eustis, The Horizontal Man: I read a lot of midcentury American fiction by way of research for my novel in progress, and this one was a delightful find, a charming skewering of life in an elite women’s college community, couched in the form of a whodunit. Possibly my single favorite book of the year, except for...

Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man: Paley’s genius for voice and rapier-sharp critique of midcentury patriarchy make this first collection of her stories an absolute treasure from start to finish.

Pearl S Buck, The Good Earth: I read this with a bifurcated mind, my 21st-century-reader’s brain on guard for signs of misappropriation and Orientialism, the rest going willingly where it took me, into the Yangtze valley at the dawn of the modern era in China. Buck did know her subject well, and wrote with an almost biblical cadence that establishes a sense of timelessness. Today, of course, I would favor such stories written by Chinese authors over white Americans. But the 1930s were not today, and Buck’s contribution to the 20th-century American’s picture of China is enormous - for better and for worse.

Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s Bell: This is the one-half that I might not get finished by the new year. Translated from Icelandic, this novel by the Nobel-Prize-winning Laxness takes place in the 18th century among Icelanders and the Danes who ruled them, and is a hilarious wry commentary on 20th-century Icelandic independence. That makes it a little slow-going - it’s full of cultural and political references I don’t understand, which means I have to either stop to look them up, or let them slide on by with incomplete comprehension. But it’s a lot of fun, all the same. (I was in Iceland a few weeks ago, and as my tour guide proudly pointed out the chalet outside of Reykjavik where Laxness wrote his novel Independent People, I excitedly blurted out that I was reading Iceland’s Bell. The guide wasn’t as impressed as I hoped he would be.)

:e2coffee:
 
Last edited:

starrystorm

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jul 9, 2018
Messages
2,987
Reaction score
605
Age
24
My highlights of this year would have to be:

"The Third Twin" by CJ Omololu. A YA mystery/thriller. Probably one of the only books I picked for the title alone. It got me interested in reading a new genre.

Also "172 Hours on the Moon" by Johan Harstad. A YA sci-fi horror told from multiple POV's. Really unique ending.
 

Cobalt Jade

Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Oct 21, 2015
Messages
3,289
Reaction score
1,441
Location
Seattle
Top Five highlights of the year. These are the ones I appreciated as both a writer AND a reader. Some are old, some are new.

Albert Nobbs, George Moore

She Has Her Mother's Laugh, Carl Zimmer

The Worm Ouroboros, E.R. Eddison

Exo, Fonda Lee

The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory

Counting everything, I think I completed around 26 books this year! That is pretty good for me.
 
Last edited:

Verboten

Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 25, 2018
Messages
151
Reaction score
82
Location
Midwest
I read a lot, but not as much as I wanted too. Balancing reading, writing my next short story and life has been a bit of a challenge for me. I'm new to writing, so this a new balance for me. But, if I had to pick a couple, it was the Lady Sherlock Series by Sherry Thomas and "The Sparrow" by Mary Dorian Russell.
 

ap123

Twitching
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Jun 4, 2007
Messages
5,648
Reaction score
1,732
Location
In the 212
A lot of books I didn't love this year, and quite a few I couldn't force myself to finish, but some I loved:

Lake Success, Gary Shteyngart
Heft, Liz Moore
Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer
Thirteen Ways of Looking, Colum McCann
Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward
Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh
The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, Alina Bronsky
 

Siri Kirpal

Swan in Process
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Sep 20, 2011
Messages
8,943
Reaction score
3,151
Location
In God I dwell, especially in Eugene OR
Sat Nam! (literally "Truth Name"--a Sikh greeting)

Completed 24 books in 2018, which is pretty good for me. Enjoyed a number of them.

The ones I remember with the most fondness are

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, a reread of a book I'd read years ago. Delightfully quirky.

Lila by Marilynne Robinson, an accessible and rich stream of consciousness fish out of water story. A woman who's lived as a migrant (and unhoused) farm worker adapts to life as a preacher's wife. Her thoughts on middle class norms and on the religion she wasn't exposed to as a child are astonishing.

The Distant Hours by Kate Morton, a gothic with a slightly humorous frame story. Young woman with a distant connection to the place visits a castle and the three elderly sisters who live there. She sort of does and sort of doesn't uncover what really happened in those ladies very dark past.

Heirs to Lost Kingdoms by Gerard Russell, a book about little-known Middle Eastern faiths. While the books has its faults, it had some memorable and interesting things to say. I am particularly grateful to learn about the Druze, a group of Pythagoreans in Lebanon, who believe in reincarnation. My paternal grandparents came from Lebanon, and I've believed in reincarnation as long as I can remember. Hmmm....

Stormy Petrel by Mary Stewart. I liked this book so much I read it twice. It's romantic suspense that shouldn't work, but does, largely because of her stupendous ability to show the environment, rather than tell about it.

Of the several mysteries I read this year, the ones I liked best were Death and the Dancing Footman by Ngaio Marsh and Death and Letters by Elizabeth Daly (who was America's answer to the British golden age of crime writing).

I read three books by Alice Hoffman and (at the time) especially liked The Probably Future, and Faithful. But these have not stuck with me the way the others have.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal