2018 was a year that produced a staggering number of excellent books. Some of them were by my usual favorite authors, and some were by authors I only recently discovered. The good news is that I always had plenty to choose from whenever I needed something new to read. The bad news is that there are quite a few books that would have probably made my Best Of list that I just never got around to reading.
While I finalize my reading list for the next few months (settle down, Mr. King, I’m reading Elevation next) here’s a list of ten books from 2018 that I enjoyed the most.
Circe
We’ll start with my final book from 2018, a re-telling of Greek Mythology as seen through the eyes of a “villain” from The Odyssey. Madeline Miller’s latest book has everything that I love about a re-told fairytale (a new outlook on a familiar story and a whole bunch of “oh, so that’s why that happened” moments), and some surprising answers to questions I’d never thought to ask before (so Odysseus spends more than twenty years fighting a war and surviving monsters; did you really think he’d come back home to his rocky, goat-farming island and just spend the rest of his life relaxing? Really?)
Read the full review here.
Space Opera
Mankind has to prove to the rest of the universe that it can sit at the grownup’s table of galactic civilization without knocking over the wine glasses and rubbing mashed potatoes in its hair. Sorry, it’s hard to resist a flowery metaphor when describing Catherynne Valente’s gloriously over-the top story of a Eurovision-style musical contest to the stars. Literally. Every sentient race (and sentient wanna-be) is invited. The winner gets fame and fortune; the loser (if it’s a civilization’s first time) gets wiped out. Cheating is part of the rules, and participation is mandatory.
Read the full review here.
The Wonder Engine: Clocktaur War Book 2
T. Kingfisher was apparently inspired to do this series from all the various ways that authors are writing paladins wrong. The two books were also an excuse for her to use all the whimsical, unsettling, and just plan weird story elements that she’s never had a place for before now. The unique characters have all the personality conflicts that I love so much about Kingfisher’s works, and there’s also a beautifully likely/unlikely romance between a disgraced holy warrior and a skilled forger who smells rosemary whenever there’s magical danger nearby.
Read the full review here.
Adjustment Day
Not much I can add about Chuck Palahniuk’s lunatic tale of a USA where all conspiracy theories are true, and all the disaffected, angry, violent men are put in charge, exactly like they’ve always wanted.
Read the full review here.
The Consuming Fire
Human civilization inches closer to destruction in the second book of the Interdependency series. John Scalzi is doing worldbuilding on a galactic scale here, and painting some effectively chilling pictures of what it would be like to be a single ship – or an entire space station – that’s cut off from everyone, forever. Surrounding those pictures are incredibly compelling tales of the individuals trying to save humanity, including an outworld scientist, a brand-new emperox, and Kiva Lagos, whom I adore more than just about any other fictional character anywhere.
Read the full review here.
Limetown
The Limetown podcast is something I can listen to over and over, so of course I jumped at the chance to read the prequel novel written by the show’s creators. The novel tells the story of the teenage Lia Haddock as she tries to figure out her family’s connection to Limetown. It’s also the story of her uncle Emile, the mysterious Man They Were All There For, who’s influence reaches a lot further than one doomed research facility in the wilds of Tennessee.
Read the full review here.
Revenant Gun
The murderous Shuos Jedao has been brought back from the dead with most of his memories missing, so he’s in a unique position to rediscover just how insane the Empire actually is. Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire trilogy wraps up with a stunning novel of a futuristic society where spaceships have poetry for names, shadows can be filled with images of moths and gears, technology only works if you follow the right calendar (and torture and/or sacrifice prisoners on the right dates), and servants are tiny animal-shaped robots who love soap operas and write fan-fiction.
Read the full review here.
Beneath The Sugar Sky
I’ll admit it: the trope of children having to return home after falling through a doorway and spending weeks (or decades) in a fantasy world has always bothered me. Seanan McGuire has taken that discomfort and turned it into her Wayward Children series; stories about what happens after the fairytale ends. Her latest novella is something of a crossover, where several students at Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children travel with Rini, the daughter of a former classmate, to the World of Confection to defeat the Queen of Cakes before she can kill their former classmate and thus cause Rini to disappear in a haze of causality. It’s…complicated.
Read the full review here.
We Are Where The Nightmares Go – And Other Stories
The individual stories in C. Robert Cargill collection are dark, horrifying, and very, very grim. They’re also fascinating and, in their own way, delightful. This is definitely one of my favorite short-story collections out there. After all, how many collections can you find that have slice-of-life stories set in a Clive Barker universe, a small town dealing with trouble in the old mine, zombie T-Rex’s, and a couple of the worst jobs you can possibly imagine, one of them the result of a literal deal with the devil?
Read the full review here.
The Future Is Blue
Yep, Catherynne Valente gets a second entry on the list. If I’d gotten my act together and read her Mass Effect novel then she might have had three. Her short-story collection from last year is one of those magical books that I’ll want to keep nearby so I can re-read the stories whenever I’m in the mood for a post-apocalyptic fantasy land on a floating garbage patch, or the improbable romance of a skilled poisoner, or a Battle Royale between Technology and Mythology, or a murder mystery in a strange eternal city where no one can die.
Read the full review here.