Herewith a belated look back over my 2010 reading (this post has been sneakily backdated to January 2011, though it was actually written quite some time after that...).
I read 67 books in 2010 - discounting books read solely for work - which was a seven-book improvement on last year's total.
Of the 67 (links are to my reviews here):
- 27 were by women, 37 by men; 2 were by multiple authors of different genders, and 1 by an unknown author or authors.
- 17 were non-fiction; these comprised
- 2 digest/textbook histories (including this)
- 1 collection of literary criticism essays
- 2 historical chronicles, including a 17th-century Spanish treatise on the Inca
- 50 were fiction, including
- 32 science fiction and fantasy, broadly conceived
- 6 historical fiction
- 11 were translations into English, including
- 2 from Arabic (including the 1001 Nights)
- 2 from French (including this)
- 1 each from Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, and Finnish
And my top ten of the year were (again, links are to my reviews, here and elsewhere):
1) Marcel Theroux, Far North
Beautiful study of loneliness and gender in a frozen near-future.
2) Yossef Rapoport, Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society
One in three marriages in 15th-century Cairo ended in divorce. Here's how and why.
3) Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Remarkable graphic novel memoir of the author's time growing up in Iran and Europe in the 1970s and 80s, caught between identities.
4) Johanna Sinisalo, Not Before Sundown
The gay troll book. Enough said.
5) Tricia Sullivan, Maul
It begins with the main character masturbating with her gun, and only gets odder from there. Huge amounts of fun, and plenty to think about (once you've spent enough time away from the book to able to think straight again).
6) Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching
Racist haunted house slowly eats its inhabitants alive. And that's the ones it likes.
7) Joanna Russ, (Extra)ordinary People
Brilliant, spiky, achingly well-written collection of short fiction.
8) Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six
Dark, mordant, grotesque collection of short fiction.
9) Ian McDonald, The Dervish House
McDonald does his thing, this time in near-future Istanbul. A dazzling mosaic of a novel.
10) Kelley Eskridge, Solitaire
Years upon years of solitary confinement: Eskridge delves deeply into her protagonist's psyche.
Bubbling under the top ten were Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome (a marvellous history of early medieval Europe), Guy Gavriel Kay's Under Heaven (Kay does a fantastical medieval China), Kim Stanley Robinson's Galileo's Dream (Galileo in spaaaaace), Barry Unsworth's Morality Play (medieval murder mystery), Adam Roberts' Yellow Blue Tibia (Soviet satire), and Michele Roberts' Daughters of the House (claustrophobic buried-secrets-of-the-past tale). Man, it was a good year.
~~Nic