Best Reads of 2011

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and nine volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.

Reading in February

Abercrombie's latest is blood soaked, grit under your nails fun – the kind of fun that's had watching two big groups of men smash into each other for three days and watching their honor, morale, and bodies fall to pieces, all described in starkly modern and sarcastic prose. The book's structure was interesting, and it will certainly be enjoyed by fans of Abercrombie's prior work, though I don't think that he's yet managed to reclaim the revelatory power of The First Law.

 Reading an established author's debut is often an interesting experience, as well as a somewhat worrisome one. Are you going to get to see an unfettered and fresh version of the brilliance you've grown to expect or will it be a sodden, meandering mess? In the case of Consider Phlebas, it's a bit of both. Review coming.

The Face that Must Die is a deeply unpleasant novel, a nightmarish trudge through a deranged and hateful mind, a novel filled with innocents who seem unable or unwilling to save themselves and predators that are twisted, loathsome, and, above all, human. It is, in other words, damn fine horror. Review coming.

 As I said after finishing the first Sandman collection (Preludes & Nocturnes), I simply don't understand how the early issues can be immature compared to the later ones. The Doll's House more than the first collection shows signs of relative immaturity, and there were some weaker moments, but if the rest of the series truly does put the beginning volumes to shame it will have to be quite mind blowing indeed. Review coming when I finish the series.

I've had a fairly mixed experience with Hamilton. He's written scenes and arcs that I've loved, and scenes and arcs that I've hated, and so far I've yet to read a book he's written without at least one of each. This, his debut, is a rather different beast. It's far more focused than his later works, though fans of the author's imagination will probably not be disappointed by it here, even if his creations are a tad reigned in. Still, I'm so far unconvinced that the Greg Mandel novels are capable of the same highs as the Night's Dawn trilogy. I suppose Hamilton's still got two books to prove me wrong. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

 Noctuary is a quieter, subtler work than Songs of a Dead Dreamer was, though it's not quite as refined as Teatro Grottesco. Perhaps the most interesting part of the collection was the final part of three, a collection of a good deal of Ligotti's flash fiction. Besides those miniature tales, Conversations in a Dead Language proved to be my favorite of the collection, a devastatingly sad tale that's fairly unique in Ligotti's catalog. Review coming.

 I think it's pretty well established by now that I read Ligotti's work twice, and Noctuary was no exception. On second read, slower building tales like The Medusa and The Tsalal came into their own.

City of Ruin reads like a supercharged version of Nights of Villjamur, expanding on the strengths of that first novel and patching up many of its weaknesses – though that is not to say that it fixes all of the debut's problems. Review coming.

 This is the kind of book where you finish and then have to mull over what you've read for hours, reveling in the spell woven on you. Palmer's writing is excellent, and his story's deliciously bittersweet. Though it had some pacing problems, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an excellent read. Highly recommended, just don't expect anything even approaching typical.

 To make sure that, after my rather scathing review of Frankenstein, I hadn't simply lost all affinity for classic horror, I went back and reread a dozen or so of Poe's finer tales and  found them just as fine the second time around (though, to be fair, it's closer to the fourth or fifth for a few). While I can't say that I'm as devout a follower of Poe as I am of Lovecraft, his mastery is undeniable.  The Masque of the Red Death, in particular, is pitch perfect, a bare handful of pages that couldn't be improved by a collaboration of the genre's top artists given a decade to improve as much as a single image.

 I was excited going into Frankenstein. No, really, I wasn't setting out to spear the classics. I was expecting a stunning read, a book that showed the origins of one of my favorite genres, a book that scared me, a book that made me think. Instead, I ended up bitterly disappointed. Review here.

Catherynne M. Valente's prose is versatile and opulent, and her writing is a tide of images that bears hapless readers to distant, often beautiful and often traumatizing, shores. Ventriloquism is a spellbinding collection, and, since much of its contents can be found online, there's no reason at all to not go immerse yourself in some of Valente's short fiction. Review coming.