A Nerdly Harvest: What I've been reading recently

(Discussion of this post on Reddit’s r/printSF)

I’ll admit it—I’m too lazy to properly scan and shelve each of my books as I finish reading them. Instead, they pile up on my “done” shelf, and every so often I do a “harvest” to put them all in their places. Well, it’s been a shameful three years since the last harvest, so I had 42 books piled up!

Of the science-fiction books, my favorites were the two slim volumes by Becky Chambers, starting with A Psalm for the Wild-Built. I’m a sucker for hopeful sci-fi, and Chambers squares the circle here, writing a book that’s environmentalist without being doomful or preachy, and hopeful without being smarmy. I was also partial to Scalzi’s The Kaiju Preservation Society. I won’t spoil it for you, but as a guy who’s usually suspicious of thin books written by authors who used to write fatter ones, I didn’t think I was going to enjoy this one nearly as much as I did. I’ve got his Starter Villain waiting its turn on my to-read shelf right now, too.

Then there are the Y.A. books by Kaufman & Kristoff, Novik, Sanderson, and Shusterman. I want to keep up with the zeitgeist, but my time is limited, so I usually only read the blockbuster Y.A. books, like your Divergents or your Red Risings. But my own writing is sort of Y.A.-adjacent, so lately I’ve been trying to read more in the genre to get my head right. My favorites here have to be the Scholomance books by Naomi Novik, which started with A Deadly Education. I suppose you could high-concept pitch the books as “Hunger Games meets Harry Potter”, but that doesn’t nearly do them justice. What if Hogwarts had a good, legitimate reason for wanting to kill its students? It all makes sense, and it’s both cool and horrifying.

I’ve also been trying to branch out from my dependable, go-to authors, to get some fresh blood into my collection. I had not previously read any Arden, Bishop, Blair, Buelman, Clark, Dewes, Elsbai, Eriksen, Gwynne, O’Keefe, Shusterman, or (J.F.) Wells, so I felt pretty good about my 29% new author reading rate! Of those, the one that stood out the most for me was John Gwynne’s The Shadow of the Gods, a Nordic-themed fantasy set in a world where the titanic bones of the dead gods litter the landscape, post-Ragnarök. Okay, that sounds really weird, but it was an interesting and original take, in a genre where it’s a lot easier to just copy what everyone else has already done.

There are also a few odd ducks in this pile, like the four Lindsey Davis books (starting with The Silver Pigs). Set in Rome around 70 A.D., these are essentially private-eye books, but done in a way that really jumps off the page at you. Davis has a rare talent for writing a story set in the ancient world that feels personal, real and richly detailed, without turning into a set of tedious info-dumps. I’m mostly a sci-fi and fantasy reader, which might make these sound like an odd choice. But really, Imperial Rome is so alien to today’s world, that these books are more like reading a fantasy series that just happens to be set in a real universe.

P.S. As a bonus, here’s a fisheye view of where these books go after the harvest. Yep, bookshelves on all four walls :) Putting wraparound shelves in my office was the best quality-of-life improvement ever!