Every year is a great year for reading, right?

I was just looking over my reading list for the year on goodreads, and it made me smile.

First, let’s look at some trends:

This was the year of fantasy for me. Ironically, even though I’m a predominately a fantasy writer, I haven’t historically read a lot of it. Part of this is a numbers game: most of the fantasy I do read ends up being really, really long (like Wheel of Time), so I don’t make it through fantasy books as fast as I do shorter books.

But this year was a bit of a change. I predominately read fantasy and loved almost every minute of it.

Additionally, I’ve found that my average rating for books was pretty high this year. On goodreads, it tells me that my average rating is four stars, which seems a little high to me. I think there’s a few things happening. First, I’m looking at my public author profile. I typically only rate and review books that I enjoyed. Not every book is for me, and I don’t really have any desire to publicly declare my disdain for some of the books I didn’t like. However, I was comparing my public and private ratings, and my private ratings are only a little lower. Which means, I think, that I’m also mostly reading a lot of books that I really enjoy. Looking back through my list, I can only see maybe a half-dozen books I didn’t really like. Out of more than fifty, that’s pretty great.

This year was also the year I started reading Malazan. In January, I fully anticipated finishing the series, but that turned out to be false. I’m currently on number six, and happy with my progress. It’s a series that deserves to be savored.

Let’s do some favorites, with the caveat that these are really hard to claim – there’s a ton of books I really, really loved, and picking just two seems arbitrary, but here goes anyway:

Favorite nonfiction: Sex at Dawn and Stillness is the Key

Favorite Fantasy: Deadhouse Gates and Beyond the Shadows

Favorite Sci-Fi: Cibola Burn and Altered Carbon

Here’s to 2020!

In the past few weeks I’ve had several encounters now with an idea that has really wormed its way into my thoughts. It’s the idea of just how alien alien could actually be. It seems to me that in so much of our sci-fi, aliens are remarkably human.

Before a few weeks ago, I’d never really given much thought to the idea. From the Romulans, Klingons, and Borg in Star Trek to the Wookies, Ewoks, and Bothans in Star Wars, I never thought to question just how similarly we pictured alien species. But in so many ways, they are so similar to us (in deeper ways than is even implied by the “forehead alien” term) from the desire for love and community to the goals they live with. Even species that aren’t humanoid, like the alien from Alien, or the Arachnids from Starship Troopers, possess the (we believe) universal desires to conquer and reproduce.

Recently, I’ve read two stories: Annihilation and Speaker for the Dead, in which the sheer alienness of what is happening feeds directly into the plot of the story. Of the two, I think Annihilation captures the sensation better. For most, if not all of the story, it’s almost impossible for the reader to understand exactly what is going on.  We are on a perpetual journey of confusion and uncertainty. The simple reason is because it’s simply that different. As humans, we have enough trouble trying to understand someone who votes differently than us – how likely is it we would understand anything truly alien?

I’ve been fascinated by this idea in fantasy as well. For the most part, fantasy stories allow us to play with societies that are mirror images, or shattered reflections, of the society we live in. But in a world where magic actually is possible, how deep might the effects on society be? If a world exists that contains multiple species that grew up in dramatically different circumstances, just how much would they be able to relate to one another, if at all? They are fascinating questions that make me think about all the unexplored possibilities.

Well, if you haven’t had enough year-end review from me, are you in for a treat! Here’s my summation of my 2018 year in reading.

The first thing I notice when I look through my Goodreads for the year is that I’ve given an average of 3.9 stars, which was higher than I would have expected. Here’s my general approach to rating books on Goodreads:

1 star: Really, really didn’t like. This needs to be EARNED.

2 star: Didn’t like, but had some redeeming qualities. This is the standard “I didn’t like the book” score.

3 star: Like it. And I mean that – I have no regrets about reading a three star book, and I would assume that is probably close to my average rating. I liked it.

4 star: I really liked it. These are books that go above and beyond, that really made me enjoy them. They weren’t quite perfect, but close.

5 star: My personal perfection. I try to hand these out sparingly.

So, that being said, I was surprised my average was closer to four than to three. But as I’m looking through the list of books I read, I’m not as surprised. 2018 was a great year for books. Let’s break it down:

Series

Probably the highlight of the year was that I finally got around to reading two very famous and well-known series that I hadn’t read. The first was Harry Potter (maybe you’ve heard of it?) and the second was Wheel of Time.

As of this writing, I’m not quite done with Wheel of Time. I’ve got a few hundred pages left in the final book. But I will be done by the end of the year, and there will probably be a post about that as well. In short, I struggled mightily with the middle of this series, but it seems to have redeemed itself at the end. I believe its status as a classic is well-earned.

I’ve also written a series of posts on Harry Potter. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely certain I would like it. I didn’t really enjoy the movies much, and I generally do not read YA lit. That being said, I ended up really, really liking the series. I don’t have the fervor for it that so many seem to, but I thought it was really well done.

Nonfiction

One dramatic difference from previous years was that I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction this year. Part of this was intentional. Doing this review in previous years, I found I was reading almost entirely nonfiction, much of it fairly repetitive. This year I only read nonfiction I was really interested in that promised a fair amount of new learning. So while there weren’t many books, the ones I read I really liked.

Notable books:

Mastery by Robert Greene

The Warrior Ethos by Steven Pressfield

Story by Robert Mckee

Fantasy

Most of the year was taken up by Wheel of Time and Harry Potter, as already mentioned. Beyond that I listened to the First Law trilogy (great writing, incredible journey, but very mixed feelings) and started reading Way of Shadows.

Notable books:

Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks (so good)

Jade City by Fonda Lee (so good and so unique)

Sci-fi

I’ll admit that I didn’t read as much sci-fi this year, primarily because of the huge amount of fantasy I waded through. That being said, I did come across some absolutely fantastic books. Note that I’m not through with The Expanse books, but every single one I read has been amazing thus far.

Notable books:

Fluency by Jennifer Foehner Wells

The Expanse books: by James S.A. Corey

Graphic Novels

I’ve noticed this year that my preference has changed a little bit. I’ve gone from more the Marvel comics universe to desiring the depth of Graphic Novels. I’m hoping to get more into them in the next year. But the work I’ve enjoyed the most so far is Monstress by Marjorie Liu

And that’s that – I’m really looking forward to an awesome year of reading in 2019 – I’ve got so many books on my kindle to get through!

This week will see the launch of a new book, called Code of Vengeance. This book was really fun to write, and came out of a truly unique collaboration.

Let’s discuss the book first: Code of Vengeance follows a young woman as she encounters a robot in the somewhat near future (2050s) that seems to be far more than it appears. But the woman has secrets of her own. If you want the full description and get a peek at the cover, check out the page here: Code of Vengeance.

The book is a soft sci-fi action and adventure. Take some Batman, a hint of Minority Report, and add just a dash of conspiracy, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re in for. If you’re interested, please, check it out!

One of the reasons I enjoyed writing this book so much was because of the research I did regarding AI. The technology has been prevalent in the news lately, but researching this book gave me an excuse to dive deep on the subject. What I found was both terrifying and fascinating.

If I had to summarize, I’d say that AI has the potential to be the most life-altering invention we ever create. That’s why it’s fascinating. When we create it, AI will change everything we know about economics, employment, science, and more.

AI is terrifying for the same reasons. Ultimately, we will be creating something that is smarter than us by any measurement, and we lack the ability to predict what the consequences of that invention will be. It’s no exaggeration to say that true AI could save us all or kill us all, and we can’t predict with any certainty which way it will fall. It’s that very uncertainty that has people like Elon Musk worried.

All of this, of course, is fertile ground for fiction, and its certainly been done before. But I’m not sure it’s ever been written about in the rich world that’s going to be created. The reason for this is that Code of Vengeance is the first book I’ve ever written in what will become an enormous shared world with many other very smart, very talented writers.

This world is called The Inevitable, and eventually will be comprised of hundreds of works. But this book will be one of the first.

To give you an idea of how deep this world is, I once sat in a room with a group of other writers and we spent an entire day working our way through hundreds of years of future history – creating a lasting, believable world with incredible depth.

For those of you who are sci-fi fans, I hope you enjoy.

Ryan