Best of 2017 as read by G

A pretty underwhelming year of reading...

The best (5 stars):

• None! :(

Special mentions (4.5 stars):

• The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
• Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson

The Fifth Season by N.K Jemisin (4 stars)

Hugo winner! This is very unusual fantasy. The world building is complex, it's about as far from your standard medieval setting with elves, swords, and magic as possible. It's a very messy and believable world, no cardboard cutout characters - there's various gender identities and sexual orientations. There's racism, governmental oppression and desperate people surviving a hostile world.

The narration itself is highly unusual, the novel spends a large amount of time in a second-person POV. It's honestly pretty annoying to read:

For the past ten years you've lived as ordinary a life as possible. You came to Tirimo from elsewhere; the townsfolk don't really care where or why. Since you were obviously well educated, you became a teacher at the local creche for children aged ten to thirteen.

At times it feels much more like a puzzle with hints, than a regular novel:

There are things you should be noticing, here. Things that are missing, and conspicuous by their absence. Notice, for example, that no one in the Stillness speaks of islands.

I've waited too long to write this review, so I don't have too much to say.

4 stars.

The Book of Life by Deborah Harkness (1 star)

You read an entire trilogy that you rated as one star each? Yes, I did. I really wanted to see how this thing ended.

Spoilers ahead.

This whole novel lurches from one inconsistency to another, with lots of attention and focus on boring detail that doesn't advance the story at all.

It starts out with implying that a major character Emily Mather has died, which is a fairly crucial plot point given that Knox kills her. Why does that happen off the page? Harkness seems to be deliberately keeping away any scenes that are remotely interesting. I mean Diana and Mr. wine list could have time-traveled back to just after when they left and avoided this weird time gap in which Emily gets killed, but of course that fits with how poorly thought out all the time travel logic was.

There's yet more family squabbles and tense dinners over Diana's acceptance into the family (essentially the same plot as the entire first two books). Matthew gets into doing a bunch of gardening and house renovations to the witches' house, which is described in lots of boring detail.

“If you keep Matthew from renting that steel roller he’s been talking about to resurface the driveway, 

Easy-to-grow plants like elfwort and yarrow helped the children understand the seasonal cycle of birth, growth, decay, and fallowness that guided any witch’s work in the craft. A hollow stump served as a container for mint and other invasive plants.

Matthew is constantly running his fingers through his hair, whenever he's worried or needs to think, which is every couple of paragraphs:

Matthew drove his fingers through his hair.

Diana has this whole dragon familiar thing, which basically hardly ever features in the novel apart from when it needs to be a deus ex machina. It reads like it's some sort of neglected pet.

Harkness introduces a ton of new characters for no real reason, apart from padding, and continues to ignore the most interesting characters:

Fernando was a domestic tyrant—far worse than Em ever was—and his changes to Sarah’s diet and exercise plan were radical and inflexible. He signed my aunt up for a CSA program that delivered a box of exotic vegetables like kale and chard every week, and he walked the property’s fence line with her whenever she tried to sneak a cigarette.

Matthew and Diana continue to be Mary Sue's in a very self-congratulatory tedious way:

“I can create because my father was a weaver, and I can destroy because my mother had the talent for higher, darker magics.” “A union of opposites,” Matthew said. “Your parents were an alchemical wedding, too. One that produced a marvelous child.”

A incredibly implausible best friend Chris turns up that has literally never been mentioned in two whole previous novels:

Why didn’t you tell me? Where have you been? Why didn’t you let me help? 

Yeah, Diana, you are a seriously terrible friend. What was this guy supposed to think happened to you? And of course, Chris drops his entire professional career direction to go off and research all the crazy shit that his supposed best friend is talking about. Seems plausible.

We find out Ysabeau has PTSD or something since she's created an insane set of alarms that are going off multiple times a day:

Other alarms marked the hour of Hugh’s death and Godfrey’s, the hour when Louisa had first exhibited signs of blood rage, the hour when Marcus had demonstrated definitively that the same disease had not touched him.

There's a weird "drinking during pregnancy is OK" message being pushed, it's mentioned more than once:

“My own mam drank whiskey every day of her pregnancy—and

Marcus had assured me that a single glass every now and again wouldn’t affect the babies, provided I waited a couple of hours before I nursed. 

The whole Congregation is apparently on the hunt for Diana and Matthew, but they are telling their story to pretty much everyone, so the Congregation is pretty terrible at being an ominous all-powerful organization. A sentiment which is reinforced by turning scary vampire Gerbert into grandpa-on-the-internet who gets viruses and needs to call up geek squad:

Sadly for Gerbert—though happily for Ysabeau—an addiction to the Internet and an understanding of how best to use it did not always go hand in hand. Because of the sites he frequented, Gerbert was plagued by computer viruses.

Still with the yoga.

Matthew continues to make completely unilateral important decisions without consulting Diana:

“What is this about?” I asked Matthew when he opened my door. “I thought we should divide the ceremony into two parts: a pagan naming ceremony here, and a Christian baptism at the church,”

and Phoebe quits her career at Sotheby's: another professional woman enters an abusive relationship and throws her life away. Great role models in this book.

There's nothing satisfying about any of this, and I have no idea why these books are rated so highly on Amazon.

1 star.