Asking the Wrong Questions

2023 is proving to be a whirlwind reading year—by the end of this month, I will probably have read as many books in six months as I do in most years. One reason for this is that I'm being sent a lot more review copies lately (all but one of the books discussed in this post were read as NetGalley ARCs), which produces an impulse to not only read but discuss, and thus become part of the cutting edge of conversation. Happily, quality seems to be keeping up with quantity. Though I have reservations about most of these books, I enjoyed reading all of them, and I can already tell that some of them will be among my favorite books of the year. The Sleeping Car Porter by Suzette Mayr - There's something of a throwback quality to Mayr's novel, winner of last year's Giller prize. The tight third person narration, the dreamy, sensual quality of the prose, the focus on physical sensation, all put one in mind of early modernist novels. That impression is only intensified by the nove...

This evening will see the announcement of the winner of the 2013 Clarke Award, after the more than normally contentious response to this year's shortlist.  At Strange Horizons , I take on the traditional task of reviewing the shortlist (in two parts )--for the first time since 2008, which means I've had five years to forget how exhausting a task this is, but also how much fun.  At the Strange Horizons blog, Niall Harrison has collected other reviews of the nominated books (including several others from Strange Horizons ), as well as the various responses to the shortlist that have appeared in the last month ( in three parts ). In other self-promotion news, my review of Frances Hardinge's A Face Like Glass was selected to appear in the inaugural volume of SpecFic, a series seeking to highlight online genre criticism, with the first volume edited by Justin Landon and Jared Shurin (as were several Strange Horizons reviews).  A full list of contributors can be found ...

2009 started with a bit of a reading slump, from which I've only recently started to come out, which is why there's been a bit of silence on the recent reading roundup front. The recent arrival of an Amazon order will probably help with that, but in the meanwhile here are some of the books I did manage to read in the first months of the year. The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway - I was expecting to get a blog post out of Harkaway's much-discussed debut, but instead I ended it completely uncertain of my feelings. I still can't decide whether the novel is wonderful, or just a whole lot of wankery, or a whole lot of wonderful wankery. Harkaway's story takes place in a post-apocalyptic world in which the laws of the physics have been overturned, and most of the planet is a nightmare realm in which reality is fluid and disconnected from reason. The ragged remnants of humanity huddle behind the protection of the Jorgmund Pipe, a massive construction that sprays FOX, a r...