2021 Reading: Q3 update

My reading pace in the third quarter of the year was the same as the previous three months with 7 books completed, adding up to a total of 27 books so far this year, which I’ve covered off in my Q1 update part 1 and part 2 published in April and Q2 update published in July. This time around, the books were predominantly fiction, and perhaps for the first time ever in a three-month block, every author was a first-time read for me.

Persephone Station by Stine Leicht (2021): This scifi adventure has elements of a Western, with a plot that borrows from Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Frank Herbert’s Dune. On an outback planet named Persephone Station, a stereotypical evil corporation has been attempting to discover the native population’s secret of extended life into hiding. The corporation representative Vissia eventually discovers where the natives have been hiding out and hires mercenaries to wipe them out. The natives turn to a local crime boss Rosie (with a proverbial heart of gold) and request them for help, so Rosie puts together a team to do so. This rag-tag group of social outcasts come together aided by plenty of heavy weaponry and travel to the natives’ hidden enclave in the desert in a dropship named Kurosawa (wink! wink!) to await the mercenaries sent by the Serrao-Orlov corporation. The first half of the book focuses on the coming together of the team, while the second half features the battle in the desert. Author Stine Leicht has filled the novel with an ensemble of interesting characters, receiving kudos for inclusivity, given the number of prominent roles played by LGBTQ and BIPOC individuals. I found it difficult to keep track of all the different characters, but overall, this was a fast-paced read.

People Like Them by Samira Sedira/translated by Lara Vergnaud (2021): This short (just 192 pages) but hard-hitting novel is simultaneously a crime thriller and an exploration of unconscious bias in modern society. Ms. Sedira creates an a couple of interesting variations to the standard narrative. First, she places the action in the countryside, far from the relatively enlightened cosmopolitan centres. Secondly, she creates a situation involving racial bias from one end and class bias from another side, then ponders the question of which one is the more powerful negative force. A wealthy mixed-race couple with 3 kids buys a property in a remote mountain village in France, and soon start mixing socially with the locals, inadvertently creating all sorts of cultural and societal upheavals. One thing leads to another, ending with a horrific crime committed by one of the residents, Constant Guillot. The novel is told in the first person by Constant’s wife Anna, starting off with Constant’s court trial, then flashing back to the events that led to this tragic conclusion. It’s a gripping read and sets up all sorts of questions about the definition of equality and ethics, reminding us that bad behaviour can also come from people of colour.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich (2020): Louise Erdrich is a winner of the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction. She is a part-descendant of Native Americans, a registered member of a Chippewa tribe in North Dakota and pretty much all her prolific works of fiction, poetry and children’s literature are set within Native America communities. The Night Watchman is inspired by events involving Ms. Erdrich’s grandfather in the 50’s and features the character of Thomas Wazhashk as the fictional version of her grandfather. Wazhashk is a night watchman at a local manufacturing plant and also a Chippewa council member, to fight an emancipation bill that is part of the larger Indian termination policy pursued by the US government during the 50’s and 60’s to “assimilate” Native Americans into modern white society. Against this backdrop, Ms. Erdrich weaves in other sub-plots involving various members of Thomas’ tribe, each quirky, colorful and relatable in their own way, and driven by their hopes, desires, fears and frailties.

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015): I was reminded of this Pulitzer prize winning novel when positive reviews for its follow-up The Committed started appearing in March this year, just as its celebrated author turned 50. And so, I decided to read the first novel, a first-person account of a South Vietnamese refugee/exile in the US who is actually a communist mole. The story takes us through many phases of the unnamed protagonist’s life, starting from his escape prior to the fall of South Vietnam, to his life in the US (which includes a stint as a consultant for a film on the Vietnam war), to his participation in a failed mission by an army of rebels to re-enter Vietnam. Although a communist mole, he is captured and tortured by the Vietnamese to ascertain whether his ideology has withstood the corrupting influence of life in America. In fact, the entire narrative of the novel is framed as his written confession. Viet Thanh Nguyen is perhaps the most accomplished wordsmith I have ever come across in popular literature. Every few pages, I came across a sentence or a passage that was a masterwork of metaphor, wry humour, self-deprecation and cynicism.

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris (2021): One of the most powerful stories I have read in recent years, this debut novel heralds the arrival of 29-year-old Nathan Harris as a major new voice in contemporary literature. Set in the fictional town of Old Oak in Georgia state in the aftermath of the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of the landowner George Walker, who pits himself against local sentiment when he provides employment and shelter to two brothers, former slaves who have been freed through the Emancipation Proclamation. The implications of George’s actions ripple across the Old Ox, resulting in broken lives and eventually, death and destruction. Although George takes the initial action, it’s his wife Isabelle who emerges at the end of the novel as the more resilient of the two. There is also a significant sub-plot involving their son Caleb, which actually sets in motion the second half of the novel. The Sweetness of Water was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and was Oprah’s book of the month for June 2021.

Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris (2021): This detailed and fascinating biography of the director of classics such as The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as well as crowd-pleasers like Working Girl and The Birdcage is a must-read for any fan of films. Mike Nichols truly lived an extraordinary life, starting off performing comedy skits with his partner Elaine May, then hitting the New York theatre scene like a whirlwind as a successful director of Broadway plays, before crashing into Hollywood as the ultimate outsider, with his first two films garnering a total of 20 Oscar nominations! Along the way, he worked with actors like Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, directing them in some of the most memorable roles of their careers. The book provides a fascinating inside view into the tortured soul of a genius and lays bare all the artistic chaos that lies behind the beautifully wrought works of art we enjoy on our screens. The end of the book was quite poignant, as Nichols in failing health and not having directed a film since Charlie Wilson’s War in 2007, still yearned for acknowledgement and recognition from an industry which had little interest in the kind of high-intensity character explorations that he was known for. It was quite a hefty read and took me several months to get through, but well worth the effort.

The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani (2016): This creepy novel begins with a horrific crime committed by Louise, a middle-aged nanny working for an upper middle class family, then flashes back to the history of her relationship with that family, attempting to explore the “why” of the crime. Inspired by a real life incident that took place in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2012, French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani has transposed the story to Paris’s 10th arrondissement and was originally published in French under the title Chanson Douce and then released in English in 2018. Essentially a character study, Ms. Slimani paints all the protagonists in shades of grey – Louise, the parents Paul and Myriam, even their two small children Mila and Adam. The sequence of events begins with Myriam being offered a job by an ex-colleague, after she spent a period of time raising the two children. Naturally, for Myriam to go back to work, the couple have to hire a nanny, and very soon they are thrilled to discover that Louise is perfect in every way. Over time, their trust in Louise grows to the point that she is treated like a member of the family. Louise develops a sense of entitlement in terms of her place in the family, but of course, there are invisible lines that exist between employer and employee. As Louise knowingly or unknowingly crosses those lines, a subtle friction sets into the perfect relationship. Louise harbors a sense of unfulfillment in relation to her own family life, and with the safe haven she has built with her new adopted family now under threat, a growing neurosis sets in, which ultimately culminates in the grisly act. The unsettling conclusion to the story seems to be that one can never really know what goes on in another person’s mind, and on rare occasions, trust can be betrayed.

September was a “dry” month as far as reading is concerned, and so the two novels I started off on, both broadly falling into the eco-fiction sub-genre – Matt Bell’s Appleseed and Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring – have not attained much reading momentum. I’m not even confident that I will finish either book. Meanwhile, Damon Galgut’s The Promise, which has just won the Booker Prize for 2021, indeed looks promising! And I’m looking forward to oceanographer Dr. Edith Wedder’s non-fiction book on deep sea marine life, titled Below the Edge of Darkness, which I bought last month.

2021 Reading: Q2 update

Back in April, I published an update (Part 1, Part 2) of the books I had read in the first quarter. Compared to the 13 books I finished in the first quarter, I only got through 7 during the past three months. Once again, I managed to incorporate a reasonable mix of non-fiction and fiction, although the genres of fiction were perhaps less varied than in previous months.

Fiction

I kicked off the 2nd quarter with a wonderful book that combined elements of magic realism with social drama, but thereafter returned with a vengeance to the scifi genre.

Red Island House by Andrea Lee (2021): I loved this novel for multiple reasons. As straight-up entertainment, it was a breezy read, detailing the lives of a wealthy western family that returns year after year to vacation at their palatial beach house in the fictional village of Naratrany in Madagascar. But the novel also works on many other levels. It describes the dynamic that exists between the western neo-colonials and their local employees who cook and clean and maintain the house for its few months of occupancy. The locals benefit from the employment and favourable work conditions, but equally they can’t help but be resentful of the entitled way of life exhibited by these foreigners, many of whom are on a steady downward moral spiral, tempted by the freely available delights of the island and loose interpretation of laws, especially as applied to those who are wealthy or white. Adding further complexity to the dynamic is the fact that the mistress of the house is Shay, an African-American who at the start of the novel, has just married the much older Senna, the Italian businessman who owns the house. On her arrival, Shay has to figure out exactly what position she occupies in the social hierarchy between her husband, the white manager of the estate and the African help. The book is an episodic chronicle of Shay’s relationship with the island, the house, with family, friends, employees and other locals, during her return visits every summer. Through Shay’s eyes, the reader gets a ring-side view of rich tapestry of local life – rivalries, love affairs, politics and crime.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer (2017): Jeff VanderMeer came to the widespread attention of scifi fans with his well-received Southern Reach trilogy of novels, all published in 2014. The first of these, Annihilation was adapted by Alex Garland into a critically acclaimed horror/scifi film in 2018 with a high quality ensemble cast including Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson. I tried reading Annihilation soon after it was published, but somehow the writing style didn’t click for me and I had to give it up after the first chapter (I did enjoy the film adaptation, though). When I read a positive review of his latest release Hummingbird Salamander, I decided to give the author another try…this time with his 2017 novel Borne. The novel is set in an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future, on the outskirts of a city destroyed by various examples of biotechnology run amok, particularly a giant flying bear named Mord. Rachel is a young woman living with her ex-scientist boyfriend in a ruined apartment block, who survives by scavenging food and bits of biotech, which her boyfriend studies or experiments on. They are constantly under threat from bands of ravaging bio-transformed children and from Mord which patrols the skies. One day, Rachel finds a tiny sea anemone like creature which she names Borne. She brings Borne back home and cares for it. She soon discovers that it (he) is sentient, with a voracious appetite for knowledge and well…pretty much, everything. The primary focus of the novel is the evolving relationship between Rachel and Borne, which mirrors that of a parent and a precocious child. In due course, the protective roles are reversed, and it is Borne who decides to take on the tyranny of Mord, leading to the mother of all kaiju-type battles. This novel really appealed to me, as much for the worldbuilding as for the entertaining and insightful relationship between Rachel and Borne.

Phase Six by Jim Shepard (2021): Last April, journalist-turned-writer Lawrence Wright published The End of October and earned praise for how closely his portrayal of a global pandemic mirrored what was emerging around the world at that time. It was the first pandemic novel to be released in the Covid era, and a year later we have another one. In fact, Jim Shepard’s novel incorporates Covid-19 into the storyline, taking place “five years after Covid”. A mystery outbreak wipes out a small mining community in Greenland and then spreads globally. A couple of CDC doctors are the heroines of this particular tale as they work against time to understand the cause of the pandemic and find a cure. The only hope is a 11-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of the original outbreak. The story is well-written and fast-paced, but predictable – a cure is eventually found (involving medical science that I didn’t have the energy to understand), but not before many of the characters in the novel succumb to the illness. No doubt there will be more such pandemic thrillers published and in due course once Covid becomes a distant and safe memory, some of these will be adapted into movies or TV shows.

Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville (2015): British author Miéville’s Bas-Lag Trilogy (Perdido Street Station, The Scar and The Iron Council) published during 2000-04 are among the most imaginative works of speculative fiction I have ever read. His 2011 whodunnit novel Kraken presented the concept of katachronophlogiston, a fire that burns through time (from which I created the name of this blog). Suffice to say, Mr. Miéville’s stories have had a huge impact on me. In spite of that, I have found some of his other novels to be somewhat abstruse, and so I knew when I picked up this short story collection that it could be a hit-or-miss experience. Indeed, it was mostly “miss”, and of the 28 stories, there were just a handful that appealed to me. But those few “hits” really pack a punch, all recounting strange events that occur in the midst of everyday life — oil rigs that walk onto land, corpses whose feet always point towards the observer, a plague which causes moats to appear around people, icebergs floating through the sky above London, a ‘mystery patient’ who starts presenting symptoms of non-existent diseases, a picture frame that corrupts anything placed within it, a woman terrorized by the spirit of Poena cullei (a bizarre medieval punishment…look it up!) and so on. It took me several weeks to work my way through the collection, and as mentioned, for every worthwhile story, I had to suffer through two or three that were just too weird to even understand.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021): After the relative disappointment of his sophomore effort Artemis (at least for me), Andy Weir comes storming back with his latest novel, which like his breakout hit The Martian, is another science textbook masquerading as fiction…a feat he pulls off with elegance and wit. Having said that, I must admit there were a few occasions when I wished the story would just state that the protagonist had taken a certain action, without walking the reader through the entire logic or scientific basis of how he had decided to do so. But one soon gets used to this recurring cadence of theory followed by application. The primary narrative takes place with just two characters and in spite of the ubiquitous science, Mr. Weir imbues these characters with plenty of personality, leading the reader to invest heavily in their fates. The end especially, is superbly crafted and left me with a lump in the throat. Highly recommended if you enjoyed The Martian.

Non-fiction

The two non-fiction books I picked made for heavy reading, and I had to work my way through them in fits and starts:

Island on Fire by Tom Zoellner (2020): This meticulously researched chronicle of the Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831-32 makes for difficult reading. It’s not easy to come to terms with the shocking conditions that slaves were subjected to for decades and the moral turpitude prevalent among the British landowners on the island. The descriptions of the brutal manner in which slaves were punished for even minor infractions (or the mere suspicion of one) over the years, let alone the casual and summary executions conducted after the revolt was put down, make for difficult reading. Besides that, the book is also difficult to get through because Mr. Zoellner regularly incorporates quotations from news reports and other memoirs into his accounts, thereby sacrificing the flow of his own prose. Nevertheless, I would say that this is an essential book for all of us to read, to remind ourselves of humanity’s collective capacity for cruelty and the ability of societies to justify this behaviour in the name of commerce or the preservation of a “way of life”.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes (2020): In addition to the wealth of information that this book provides about Neanderthal life, what I found equally extraordinary was the insight into modern methods of paleolithic study. The patience and exactitude with which researchers comb through Neanderthal sites for the tiniest of artifacts to piece together lifestyles hundreds of centuries ago, is difficult to comprehend. In chapter after chapter, Dr. Sykes reveals to us the different aspects of life of this branch of humanity that lived as hunter-gatherers across most of Europe. She paints a vivid picture of their social units, tool making and hunting methods as well as their attitudes towards concepts such as art and death, which were relatively abstract to the evolving human intellect. I was particularly fascinated by the various systems that emerged among Neanderthal communities to knap stones into tools of varying sizes and functions (and discovered a thriving sub-culture of modern knapping specialists – just google “Neanderthal flint knapping”) and the sheer size of the big game they hunted, using spears to take down deer, elk, horses, wooly rhinos and mammoths. There’s a huge amount of scientific information to get through, so it’s certainly not a book one can read in one or two sittings. The wealth of information presented here paints a picture of a relatively sophisticated branch of humanity, very different to earlier depictions of Neanderthals as dim-witted cavemen.

That brings me to the end of my Q2 update. At the moment, I am reading Mark Harris’ biography of celebrated Hollywood filmmaker Mike Nichols and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer. I attempted to read Arkady Martine’s Hugo Award winning political scifi novel A Memory Called Empire, but after getting a quarter of the way through the book, I just decided it wasn’t worth the effort and it went the same way as C.J. Cherryh’s similarly themed Foreigner that I had failed to get through a few months earlier. Also on my reading list are Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness and Samira Sedira’s People Like Them, as well as Matt Bell’s just released climate-fiction novel Appleseed.

2021 Reading: Q1 update, Part 2

Following on from the first part of my update on books read so far in 2021, let’s move on to the heavy stuff. I am grateful to the blog Reading Under the Olive Tree for the first 2 books in the next group, which I loosely describe as dramas or “people stories”:

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy (2020): When a novel is picked up for a movie adaptation, produced by and starring Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch, you know it’s a big deal. This book certainly lived up to the hype and I raced through it in just a couple of days. Set in the indeterminate near future in which several species having become extinct, the novel’s protagonist Franny Stone, a young researcher with a troubled past, is determined to track what may be the last group of Arctic terns on their annual migration flight from the North Pole to the South. Having placed tracking devices on three of the birds, she convinces the captain of a small fishing trawler to allow her on board as a passenger, so that she can follow the birds down the length of the Atlantic Ocean. Although the captain initially agrees to her proposal only because of her reasoning that the terns will lead the trawler to schools of fish, he and his crew are eventually won over by her determination and passion. The epic and tumultuous ocean voyage mirrors Franny Stone’s own emotional journey, one in which she ultimately has to come to a reckoning with the demons of her past.
A Door Between Us by Ehsaneh Sadr (2020): This is a highly enjoyable, fast-paced novel that starts off as a family drama but quickly weaves in the Green Movement protests of 2009 into the narrative and becomes an engrossing thriller.
Savushun, a.k.a. A Persian Requiem by Simin Daneshvar (1969): I enjoyed A Door Between Us so much, that I quickly started looking for other Iranian novels to read. All the reading lists thrown up by my internet searches included Savushun, one of the most acclaimed modern Persian works, and that’s saying a lot for a culture that has long been famed for the richness and depth of its literature. The book is additionally notable because it is the first ever Persian novel to be written by a woman; Simin Daneshvar was also an accomplished academic – she was chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Tehran during the 70s. Savushun is an engrossing story of a landowning family in Fars Province during the early years of World War II. Seen through the eyes of Zari, a loving mother and wife, the novel charts the fortunes of her family members, while providing commentary about the socio-political dynamics of the region during this tumultuous period. I found Zari to be such a relatable character – she is constantly stressed about the well-being of her family, frequently self-critical of her own ability to protect them from various real and imagined threats, particularly the political and social machinations of relatives, acquaintances and friends. I can’t recommend this novel highly enough, and combined with my reading of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy last year, has created in me a deep appreciation of Middle Eastern/Islamic literature.
Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979): A January 2021 article in the New York Times, titled The Essential Octavia Butler, kindled my interest in reading a novel by this award-winning author, who I have known of for years, but somehow never got around to reading. I picked the first book recommended by the article and what a good decision that turned out to be. This novel is nearly as searing in its description of slavery as Solomon Northup’s real-life chronicle. Ms. Butler does an outstanding job of exploring the mindset of an African-American woman from the modern day who is mysteriously transported back in time to the Antebellum South, instantaneously losing her liberty and treated as property because of her color.
Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018): This novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018, but it came onto my radar only because of the well-received 2020 TV adaptation by BBC/Hulu. Ms. Rooney’s prose is very easy to read, but the relationships and situations she writes about are frequently painful to process. How sad that falling in love and maintaining a relationship in modern times has to be so entangled with emotional cruelty to your loved one and yourself…there is so much posturing (should I blame social media?) and perhaps, fear of being manipulated or taken advantage of, that people just don’t have the confidence to reveal their true selves including their fears and weaknesses to others. It’s an amazing book, but so heart-wrenching in its own quiet way, that it has put me off wanting to watch the acclaimed TV series.

It shouldn’t be surprising that after reading all the books listed above, I was very much in the mood for some pure entertainment. And I found it in this crime novel:

Death Around the Bend by T.E. Kinsey (2017): A couple of years ago, I read the first of T.E. Kinsey’s Edwardian-era Lady Hardcastle Mysteries, titled A Quiet Life in the Country, which was published in 2014. The lead characters – Lady Emily Hardcastle and her plucky servant/companion Florence Armstrong – are extremely likeable protagonists, with a relationship based on the trust and mutual affection borne out of their past adventures together. The plot was easy to follow and the entire experience enjoyable enough that I found myself with the next book in the series last year when on a break from “heavy” reading. This third entry is equally breezy; set in 1909, Lady Hardcastle is invited to an old friend’s country estate for the weekend and soon enough there’s a car crash and a death, which initially appears accidental but quickly emerges to be the result of sabotage. Like an Agatha Christie “locked room” mystery, the culprit can only be someone from within the group on the estate. Naturally, Lady Hardcastle and Flo are more effective than the local police in solving the murder. Besides the usual wit and light banter that characterize this series, we also get to know a bit more of the backstory and family of Lady Hardcastle. With five more books written so far, I know I can rely on this series as a guilty pleasure whenever I don’t want to tax my brain too much!

That brings me to the end of my Q1 2021 reading update. As I mentioned in the introduction to Part 1, I followed up this blazing start to the year with a frustrating month and a half during which I started and abandoned a few books. One of them was C.J. Cherryh’s 1994 novel Foreigner, the first book in her highly popular series of 21 books, of which the last two were published last year. I’m sorry to say that I had to abandon it about a fifth of the way in, just unable to deal with the neurotic lead character, whose thoughts and paranoia and doubts filled up a significant proportion of the prose. After the amazing experience of reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred, I tried to get started on her Lilith’s Brood collection by downloading a sample of the first book, Dawn; this too could not hold my attention. I then thought that I surely couldn’t go wrong with John Birmingham, having immensely enjoyed his Axis of Time series (my 2012 review of the trilogy continues to get views to this day), so I started off on Without Warning, the first book in his Disappearance trilogy; I soldiered my way to the one-third point and then just had to admit that I couldn’t get past the cardboard cutout characters and the boring action scenes. I’ve finally settled on 3-4 really good books, so it looks like I will actually have something to write about in three months when I post my Q2 reading update!

2021 Reading: Q1 update, Part 1

I’ve made a good start to 2021, finishing 13 books in two months (…and then I went through the past 7 weeks without completing another one!). The first dozen represent a healthy mix of genres – 4 sci-fi (including a trilogy), 3 non-fiction (including a famous biography), 1 crime novel (part of a series that’s become a guilty pleasure) and 5 dramas. In the first part of this update, I’ll cover off the sci-fi and non-fiction books.

Historically, the sci-fi genre has been dominated by male authors, with R.M. Meluch perhaps the only female sci-fi writer whose work I have read and enjoyed previously. However, in the past few years, there have been many more works published by female sci-fi authors and I’ve read books of Becky Chambers, Jennifer Wells, Cherie Priest, Emma Newman, Sue Burke and Kameron Hurley. I can now add Nancy Kress and Mary Robinette Kowal to that ever-growing list:-

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal (2018): In my year-end book update, I mentioned reading the first novel in the Lady Astronaut series, titled The Calculating Stars, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards for best sci-fi novel. The sequel, The Fated Sky, starts off in 1961, with Dr. Elma York now a seasoned astronaut, regularly ferrying cargo and passengers to the Lunar base. Meanwhile, there are new challenges to the rapidly accelerating global space program managed by The International Aerospace Coalition; racial politics raises its ugly head (specifically South Africa’s objection to an Asian leading the first mission to Mars) and there are attacks on IAC assets by an extremist organization which believes that governments should be focused on improving conditions on Earth rather than reaching for the stars. Not surprisingly, Dr. York as the popular public face of the space program is in the spotlight, having to chose between her conscience and the realities of work politics…and she doesn’t always make the right decisions. Nevertheless, she now finds herself commanding the inaugural mission to Mars, on board one of three ships that set off in October 1962 on a 320-day voyage to the red planet. The second half of the book deals with the events of this journey, ranging from the mundane (a blocked toilet) to the life threatening (a crew-wide infection resulting from contaminated food). The end of the book sets up the exploration and colonization of Mars. With the novelty of the alternate history of space travel having worn off in this second book, I found it less enjoyable and Dr. York’s character flaws a tad irritating. That probably explains why I haven’t rushed out to read the third book in the series, The Relentless Moon, which was published last year. But I’m sure I’ll get around to it soon.
Tomorrow’s Kin (2017), If Tomorrow Comes (2018) and Terran Tomorrow (2018) by Nancy Kress: Collectively referred to as the Yesterday’s Kin trilogy and based off veteran author Kress’ Nebula-award-winning 2014 novella, the first book kicks off as a first-contact novel with a twist – the ‘aliens’ are biologically human (mostly), whose ancestors were taken from Earth centuries ago and settled on another planet. They have now arrived on Earth seeking help from our scientists to avert a catastrophe on their home planet. The three novels chronicle the experiences of biologist Dr. Marianne Jenner over a period of decades, with the plot including family politics, xenophobia, terrorism, interstellar travel, a pandemic, a megalomaniac billionaire and socio-cultural conflict! Collectively, the three books present an epic multi-generational story that I devoured in just 6 days. Highly recommended and currently available on Amazon at an amazing bundled offer of $2.54 for Kindle.

The 3 non-fiction books covered very different topics:

First Women by Kate Andersen Brower (2017): The author is a journalist who has created a niche for herself as an expert on the private lives of White House denizens. I had read Ms. Brower’s first publication, The Residence (2015) and found it reasonably interesting, feeding my curiosity about the goings-on in that famous building. This second book, as the title indicates, describes the personalities and experiences of Presidential spouses, starting with Jackie Kennedy through to Michelle Obama. While the book does cover interesting historical ground and provides insightful glimpses into the stressful lives of First Ladies living in the public eye, its narrative structure was not particularly intuitive for me and I struggled to read more than half a chapter at one sitting.
Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup (1853): It was not an easy decision to start reading this book, considering I had already watched the award-winning 2013 film and knew that the subject matter would not be pleasant. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did, because it’s important to keep reminding oneself of this scourge of humanity, one that almost every culture in the world has practiced or condoned at some point of time or the other. One can only marvel at the bravery and fortitude of Mr. Northup in surviving his ordeal and shudder at the thought of the millions of other slaves who weren’t fortunate enough to be liberated.
Dirt: Adventures with the Family, in the Kitchens of Lyon, Looking for the Origins of French Cooking by Bill Buford (2020): It took a couple of chapters for me to settle into the author’s somewhat disorganized (to my mind) approach to life, specifically his initial attempts to set up a high-end cooking assignment for himself in France. But what a fascinating journey Bill Buford takes us on in his five years in Lyon…observing, learning and experiencing its gastronomical sub-culture at close quarters. No doubt, Mr. Buford’s time as an editor at The New Yorker and his close association with the leading French chefs of New York opened the doors for him to connect with famed Lyonnaise restaurateurs like Paul Bocuse, Mathieu Viannay and Jean-Paul Lacombe. But ultimately, it is his talent and dedication (and the commitment and support of his wife Jessica Green) that led him to securing kitchen stints at some of the most famous restaurants (and a bakery) in the city. I already had some insight into the brutal and uncompromising world of American kitchens from my reading of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, but French restaurants appear to be much harsher. Frankly, it’s impossible to condone the snobbishness, xenophobia, racism and bullying in the kitchens of high-end restaurants, and to justify these in the name of gastronomic excellence. This book has been an eye-opener, and while the descriptions of the food preparation are mouth-watering, it has robbed me of any desire to actually dine at these types of Michelin-star restaurants.

In part 2 of my April reading update, I’ll cover off the 5 really intense social dramas and 1 enjoyable crime novel.

Best Reading of 2020

I have read 28 books in 2020, a mix of non-fiction, graphic novels, science fiction, crime and social drama. Five of these were published this year, while most were published within the past few years and a few are classics several decades old that I’ve only got around to reading now.

The five books from 2020 were all quite good and worth mentioning:

The Last Emperox by John Scalzi: This is the third and highly satisfying conclusion to the action-packed “The Interdependency” space opera trilogy which I’ve briefly referred to in a post a year ago. In the far future, the human race has built a galaxy-spanning empire called The Interdependency, with faster-than-light travel made possible through a mysterious network of wormholes called The Flow. The various human colonies are sustained by intergalactic trade which is controlled by a number of Houses (not dissimilar to those in Frank Herbert’s Dune series), all under the rule of a benevolent Emperor. When the Flow pathways start collapsing one by one for reasons unknown, it sets off a series of political machinations, as one of the Houses (House Nohamapetan) tries to overthrow the Emperor and monopolize whatever resources it can. Through the first two books, I became highly invested in the lead characters – the recently crowned Emperox Grayland II, Lord Marce Claremont, the son of the scientist who predicted the collapse of the Flow, and Lady Kiva Lagos, the foul-mouthed but brilliant member of House Lagos, which is loyal to the throne. Together, these three must foil House Nohamapetan and save the empire!
The End of October by Lawrence Wright: Widely reviewed when it came out in April, due to the uncanny similarities with the ongoing global Covid pandemic, Pulitzer-winning author Lawrence Wright’s fast-paced global thriller contains many plot points that will seem all too familiar to us today, although Wright started work on the novel well before the pandemic hit. The factual, journalistic writing style is very accessible, and will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed books by Frederick Forsyth, Michael Crichton, Dan Brown or Tom Clancy. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Netflix or a major studio picked up the rights to the book, although I suspect no one will be in the mood to see something so close to reality for some time yet.
Afterland by Lauren Beukes: This is South African writer Lauren Beukes’ fifth novel, and continues her run of speculative fiction, which has previously covered the sub-genres of time-travel, cyberpunk and contemporary magic. Afterland depicts a world three years into a pandemic which has wiped out virtually all men (a very similar premise to the graphic novel series Y: The Last Man). The few remaining human males are kept in government facilities as a precious resource, for experimentation and of course, procreation. The novel focuses on a 12-year-old boy Miles and the desperate efforts of his mother Cole to keep him out of the hands of the US government and gain safe passage to the mother’s native South Africa. The story is primarily written as a road trip/thriller, but Ms. Beukes uses the narrative to shine a light on gender dynamics, specifically the psyche of this preteen boy forced to disguise and behave as a girl, having to get away with the subterfuge while constantly surrounded by women.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook: This is Ms. Cook’s debut novel (she had previously published a collection of short stories) and was long-listed for the Booker Prize this year. In the near future, nearly all available land has been urbanized and people live in polluted cities. One small community is given permission by the government to participate in an experimental project, living a nomadic life in the last available stretch of wilderness, with strict rules in place to minimize the impact of human habitation on the pristine land. The story chronicles the evolving social dynamics within this community, as experienced by one of the families, comprising a woman Bea, her partner Glen (one of the originators of the project) and her young daughter Agnes. It is a depressingly realistic depiction of how social niceties progressively disintegrate when people are faced with the harsh realities of survival and scarcity. If ever we needed encouragement to preserve our current way of living through sustainable practices, this story should do the trick!
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: I am a big fan of Ms. Clarke’s debut novel from 2004, the dark and extraordinarily inventive, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This year she released her second novel, Piranesi, another work of astonishing creativity and world-building. The novel is named for its title character, and is presented as a series of Piranesi’s diary entries over a period of years, while living in a place called The House. There is only one other person in the House, who Piranesi refers to as the Other. Like peeling the layers off an onion, the narrative slowly reveals who Piranesi is, and how he came to be in the House. I couldn’t say more without giving away it’s extraordinary plot. Unlike Ms. Clarke’s first novel which was a brick at 782 pages, this is a brisk read of only 272 pages. I cannot recommend this novel enough, especially for fans of fantasy/speculative fiction.

Piranesi (2020), a novel by Susanna Clarke

Among the other books I read, the four non-fiction books were all outstanding:

The Body by Bill Bryson (2019): I have long been a fan of Bill Bryson’s travelogues and memoirs since I first read A Walk In The Woods in 1998, but hadn’t read anything of his since 2007. The Body is a remarkable guided tour of the human body that is equally informative and entertaining.
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (2015): Originally published in German, this is an insightful book based on Mr. Wohlleben’s observations of trees and forest ecologies, accumulated during his career as a forest ranger/manager. This is a fascinating read for any lover of nature who wants to know more about the synergy that exists among different types of trees and between trees and other living beings in the forest. There’s a strong link between this book and a novel I read this year, Richard Powers’ Pulitzer-prize winning The Overstory (which is an amazing work of fiction, but I haven’t included in this list of my favourite books of the year as it was just a little too abstruse for me).
The Seine: The River That Made Paris by Elaine Sciolino (2019): Journalist and author, Elaine Sciolino’s loving ode to the river Seine is a true delight, deftly weaving together information about the history, geography, food and commerce of Paris and other parts of France through which the Seine flows. This fascinating book describes how the Seine has played a role in the evolution of the French people and during the same time, how the people living on its banks have literally changed the course and nature of the river.
Chocolate: A Bittersweet Saga of Dark and Light by Mort Rosenblum (2006): In Ms. Sciolino’s book about the Seine, she makes a reference to Parisian chocolatiers and in that context, to Mort Rosenblum’s book on chocolate. Naturally, that became the very next book I read! Although less structured and more subjective than the book on the Seine, it was no less informative and entertaining. Rosenblum takes us back to the history of chocolate as a highly valued ceremonial drink among the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec cultures of Mesoamerica, to its “discovery” by Europeans in the 16th century and subsequent transformation over the next three centuries to the globally popular confectionery product it is today. He also throws light on the sad plight of many cacao growers in Latin America and West Africa, who earn a pittance in comparison with the prices commanded by the finished product around the world.

And that brings me finally to the notable books of fiction I read this year, but not published in 2020:

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (1956/57): Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 and this multi-generational story of an upper middle class Cairene family during the period between the two World Wars is perhaps his best-known work. The first book in particular, Palace Walk, is virtually unputdownable, so fascinating is the story of respected merchant Al-Sayyid Ahmad ‘Abd al-Jawad and his family who live in central Cairo. Al-Sayyid Ahmad lives two lives; a pious but tyrannical patriarch at home, a beloved companion and voracious lover when out in the evenings with his clique of friends and courtesans. So imposing is Al-Sayyid Ahmad’s character in Palace Walk that the lives of his sons and grandsons pale in comparison in the subsequent books. In particular, I found the long conversational passages involving religion and politics among the youngsters of the al-Jawad family to be quite tedious. Nevertheless, taken together, the books are full of melodrama, humour, irony, pathos and tragedy, providing an unvarnished insight into the cultural, political and religious topography of Cairene society in the early 20th century. An interesting bit of trivia – the books were translated into English only in 1990, and the editor assigned by the publisher Doubleday for the translation was none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (2013): I’ve written a full review of this book soon after I read it in April this year. There’s no doubt this will remain one of the best works of fiction I have ever read.
In The Market for Murder by T.E.Kinsey (2016): This is the second of the Lady Hardcastle Mysteries that I’m reading and I’m certain it won’t be the last. British author Tim Kinsey has so far written seven of these ‘light-hearted’ murder mysteries featuring Lady Emily Hardcastle and her intrepid maid/assistant Florence Armstrong, set in the early 1900’s. Having served the British government in some secretive capacity abroad, Lady Hardcastle rents a cottage in the country and settles down for a quiet life. But her natural intelligence and sense of adventure draw her into helping the local police when a serious crime is committed. I love these “countryside” crime stories, like James Runcie’s Grantchester Mysteries and Louise Penny’s series of 16 novels involving Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Enjoying these stories does require some suspension of disbelief as it’s quite difficult to imagine such a high murder rate in these small villages!
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (2018): This novel is the second work of fiction I’ve encountered in the past year which presents an alternate history of the US space program in which women play a much more significant role – the other is the web series For All Mankind on Apple TV+. The premise of Ms. Kowal’s novel is much more extreme – in 1952, a meteorite smashes into the coast off Washington DC resulting in calamitous loss of life, but also triggering an extinction event predicted to take place over the next 50 years, due to the greenhouse effect caused by the vaporization of millions of tons of water. This threat results in a global effort to accelerate the colonization of outer space. After initial resistance, women are grudgingly accepted into the astronaut corps and the novel chronicles the experiences of mathematician and pilot Dr. Elma York as she becomes a “Lady Astronaut”. Dr. York is a very human protagonist, determined, capable and intelligent, but not heroic in the conventional sense. Eventually, circumstances and her own sense of obligation to humanity, cause her to take on increasingly significant roles in the International Aerospace Coalition. Ms. Kowal has written one short story and three novels in the Lady Astronaut series and I’ve already started on the sequel, The Fated Sky.

That concludes a rundown of the best books I’ve read in the past year; there’s something for every interest – space opera, murder mystery, dystopian, alternative history, fantasy, family drama and non-fiction.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘The Signature of All Things’ chronicles a remarkable life filled with tragedy and discovery

In the past couple of years, I started making attempts to break away from my regular diet of sci-fi novels and biographies, take a few more ‘risks’ with my leisure reading options, specifically towards material with a bit more literary heft. I was trying to recreate the joy I experienced at the end of 2017 when I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End back to back. Another reason was that I just wasn’t coming across that many enjoyable scifi books any more. To help me broaden my intake, I started reading through the New York Times weekly recommendations, which has the additional benefit of having the reviews written by other writers, thereby giving me exposure to the reviewer’s body of work as well.

This concerted effort has yielded some success, but I haven’t felt like I’ve taken any big risks with my reading choices. For example, many of the books I’ve read in the past six months have been from tried and trusted sources – established classics such as Jack London’s The Call of the Wild & White Fang duology or Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, new releases from old favourites like Bill Bryson (The Body) or Philip Pullman (The Secret Commonwealth) and installments from established crime fiction series like Jack Reacher or Lady Hardcastle Mysteries.

And so, I’m very fortunate to have taken the plunge last week and read Elizabeth Gilbert’s extraordinary 2013 novel The Signature of All Things. Ms. Gilbert is best known for her 2003 memoir Eat, Pray, Love which was adapted into a commercially successful Julia Roberts vehicle in 2010 (which I hadn’t watched due to poor critic reviews). She released her latest novel City of Girls in June 2019 and it’s while reading this review that I became aware of her past work, including the memoir and the 2013 novel. Somehow the synopsis of The Signature of all Things intrigued me sufficiently enough that I put it into my reading list at that time. Ten months later, I finally got around to reading it and couldn’t put it down.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Signature of All Things (2013)

The novel begins in the year 1800 with the birth of Alma Whittaker at her father’s White Acre estate on the west bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, backtracks a couple of decades to recount the travels and exploits of her British father Henry Whittaker eventually leading back to the time of Alma’s birth, and then follows her life from childhood to old age. Traversing most of the 19th century, it is simultaneously a history lesson, a treatise on botany, a travelogue, a multi-generational saga and an intimate chronicle of a woman’s journey of self-discovery. We are with Alma as she experiences the biggest inflection points of her life, plumbing the depths of anguish and scaling the sparkling peaks of elation and unadulterated joy. And in doing so, I think the story mirrors the random sine waves of each of our lives.

What I found most inspiring and uplifting was Alma’s fighting spirit; no matter how low she was laid by circumstances or how long she fell into a monotonous rut, she would eventually take stock and take action – big or small – to alter the course of her life. But it’s not just Alma Whittaker; the book is peppered with extraordinary characters – some deeply flawed and some impossibly noble – who together saturate this novel with color and texture.

This is not a fairy tale with a happy ending. It is also not a conventional family saga of empire building and mismatched siblings (although both of these elements do exist in the story). Instead, Elizabeth Gilbert presents us with a singular, non-formulaic narrative, full of twists and turns and rabbit holes. Although it is a ‘big’ novel in terms of the physical, commercial and emotional impact of actions taken by its protagonists, the key characters can be counted on the fingers of two hands; indeed, it could perhaps even be adapted into a stage play. But as much as this is a story of people, it is also a story of humankind’s relationship with nature and in that sense, reading it is akin to going on a deeply spiritual journey.

My top Sci-fi book series of the 2010s: Part 3

Concluding my rundown of favourite sci-fi series published this decade, both the trilogies listed in this post are still on-going with their respective third books yet to be published. For good measure, I’m finishing off this review with an “honorable mentions” list of great standalone sci-fi novels published in the 2010s.

The Book of Dust trilogy by Philip Pullman: La Belle Sauvage (2017) and The Secret Commonwealth (2019). These books are a continuation of the story from Pullman’s seminal His Dark Materials trilogy, with Lyra Belacqua at its narrative centre. The first book is set 12 years before the first novel of His Dark Materials when Lyra was a baby and the second book is set a few years after the conclusion of the first trilogy with Lyra a young woman. There is no confirmed publishing date for the final book. One naturally doesn’t experience the same thrill as when one first encounters the concepts of Dust and the Authority in the original trilogy. Nevertheless, these books continue to explore the physics of this world, specifically the properties of Dust and deliver well-paced adventure stories with strong characterizations. For those who have read the original trilogy, the new His Dark Materials series from BBC and HBO which just concluded its first season is highly recommended viewing.

English author Philip Pullman, with a copy of La Belle Sauvage, the first book in the Book of Dust trilogy

The Interdependency series by John Scalzi: The Collapsing Empire (2017) and The Consuming Fire (2018). This is a full blown space opera, with all the usual tropes one would expect from the genre – wormhole technology, a galactic empire that is spread across dozens of star systems and interstellar trade controlled by megacorporations. Typically, the key aspect of a space opera is figuring out the science for interplanetary travel…is it faster-than-light travel, is it through wormholes or through human-built technology, etc. John Scalzi is a seasoned writer who ensures that his science is properly thought through and this makes for a strong foundation upon which to build the plot. The two books are filled with highly entertaining (somewhat larger-than-life characters) doing quite extra-ordinary things…in the true sense of the term “space opera” it’s a soap opera taking place in space! The final book in the trilogy The Last Emperox will be released in April 2020.

I thought it also worth mentioning a few standalone sci-fi novels that really stood out for me in the last decade, some of which are good enough for me to wish that there would be a sequel.

Terminal World by Alastair Reynolds (2010): I wrote a detailed review of this novel in 2012, when my blogs were on the Weebly platform, so I don’t really need to add to what’s on the link. I have read four of Mr. Reynolds’ books but this remains my favourite.

The Martian by Andy Weir (2011): I wrote extensively about this book after I read it in 2014. I completely missed it when it came out in 2011 but heard about it when Ridley Scott’s film adaptation starring Matt Damon went into pre-production and of course, the movie was as big a hit as the book. This book ranks in the same “unputdownable page turner” category as Dan Brown’s Da Vince Code.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (2015): This is an epic multi-generational story grounded in hard science. It is one of the most intelligent books I have read and one that if I had the time, I would read again (difficult to do when one is constantly catching up with new stuff). This is a story of humanity and courage, as much as a story of science and ingenuity. A significant (and very harrowing) part of the story takes place in earth’s orbit while the latter part, several generations later, takes place back on the surface of a changed world.

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland (2017): This is a fun novel that brings together some big ideas (enough for two or more novels) into a riotous time-travel story. Unlike the grounded science of Mr. Stephenson’s previous book Seveneves, what we have here is ‘pop science’, the technology sounds plausible enough (if you don’t think too much about it) and serves adequately as the foundation for a high-stakes adventure story. The intent here is to have fun, as evidenced by the ridiculous acronym given to the Department of Diachronic Operations, the secret government department that manages time-travel operations. This is the sort of story that would be perfect for a big studio blockbuster; the big set-piece events and fast-moving action are designed for adequate suspension of disbelief.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson (2015): I have great respect for KSR’s Mars trilogy books for their verisimilitude (although this same quality also caused the narrative pace to drag at various points of the story). Perhaps his most ambitious and greatest literary achievement is The Years of Rice and Salt (2002). In Aurora, KSR tackles the very real challenges faced by a generation starship, namely that of a closed artificial bio-system of relatively small size with no natural thermal sources (sun or internal planetary heat) and finite raw materials will face challenges in maintaining integrity and viability after a few generations. The sheer scale of what the occupants of Aurora endure and achieve over the story is astounding, almost impossible to believe, but narrated with a degree of plausibility that makes the reader feel like this all really happened.

So there you have it – eight sci-fi series from 7 authors and five standalone novels from 4 authors which together constitute my favourite sci-fi reads published in the past decade.

My top Sci-fi book series of the 2010s: Part 2

Continuing the listing of my favourite Sci-fi book series published in the 2010s, this post will cover two very different trilogies from the same author and one military sci-fi series.

The Milkweed Triptych by Ian Tregillis: I’ve written about this series once in 2015 soon after I read it and once again a few days ago in reference to a similarly themed novel I’d just read, Lavie Tidhar’s The Violent Century. So, there’s not really much more to be said about this brilliant, gripping alternate history series. I can only hope that some TV network or streaming platform somewhere is putting a plan together to adapt this into a mini-series. The German superhuman Gretel who has the ability to see alternate futures is one of the most unhinged, purely evil characters I’ve ever read about and I would love to see on screen how British warlock Lord William Beauclerk and secret agent Raybould Marsh eventually turn the tables on her (at great personal cost). Surely, Tregillis’ mentor George R.R. Martin should be able to help him swing a deal at HBO!

Ian Tregillis, the brilliant physicist turned author of the Milkweed Triptych and The Alchemy Wars

The Alchemy Wars by Ian Tregillis: If any further proof were needed that Mr. Tregillis is one of the smartest, most creative minds in speculative fiction today, this equally entertaining follow-up to the The Milkweed Triptych would be it. The Alchemy Wars is a steampunk story set in an alternative timeline in which celebrated Dutch clockmaker and inventor Christiaan Huygens develops a mysterious ‘alchemical’ technology in the 17th century that acts as a power source for humanoid clockwork automatons (colloquially called Clakkers). Jump ahead to the early 20th century and the Dutch have leveraged this technology to build and sustain a dominant global empire. Their only potential rivals are the French government-in-exile, operating out of northern America who are at a political and military stalemate with the Dutch. The one point of Dutch vulnerability is the fact that Clakkers sometimes ‘go rogue’, somehow achieving sentience and ‘free will’ (the few who do are ruthlessly hunted down and eliminated). New France would love to get its hands on a rogue Clakker and/or the secrets of clockwork alchemy as a means to neutralize Dutch technology and claim back their homeland. These elements form the ingredients for a supremely entertaining, intricately plotted spy and adventure story filled with deadly assassins, scheming politicians and one heroic Clakker named Jax, who must make an epic journey to the New World to help overthrow the evil empire and obtain freedom for his kind.

Frontlines series by Marko Kloos: Terms of Enlistment (2013), Lines of Departure (2014), Angles of Attack (2015), Chains of Command (2016), Fields of Fire (2017) and Points of Impact (2018) plus a couple of short stories set between books 2 and 3. I resisted military sci-fi for years, as I felt that the stories would be repetitive and one-dimensional. Then I picked up and fell in love with R.M. Meluch’s brilliant (and pulpy) Tour of the Merrimack series. Thereafter, I’ve been more open-minded about the sub-genre and a couple of years ago, I discovered Marko Kloos’ Frontlines series. I referred to it in my June 2018 post about the scariest aliens in sci-fi, specifically, the nearly indestrucible ‘Lankies’ who are taking over Earth’s colonies one by one and terraforming them. In the books, we follow the fortunes of Andrew Grayson, a soldier with the Commonwealth Defense Corps, who along with his fellow troopers, is sent out on one dangerous interplanetary mission after another in an attempt to push back the alien threat. What makes the books interesting is the humanization of the characters…besides the large scale action, we also experience Andrew’s anxieties related to his girlfriend who is a pilot in the Defense Corps and his mother who has to contend with widespread poverty and civil unrest in the city-ghettos on Earth. I haven’t read the 6th book yet and I understand that there are three more books planned to close out the series, so there’s still quite a lot more of the story arc to get through. For those interested, both Mr. Tregillis and Mr. Kloos are contributors to the Wild Card universe, an ‘open-source’ universe of comic books, role playing games and novels concerning people who acquire super-powers via an alien virus, all of which are edited and managed by George R.R. Martin and his collaborator Melinda Snodgrass. Yes, that man has connections everywhere!

In a couple of days, I’ll publish the third and final part of my list of top sci-fi book series of the 2010s.

My top Sci-fi book series of the 2010s: Part 1

I’ve read 308 books this decade (2010-19), although 2010 was actually quite a fallow year for me, as I was busy moving base from Vietnam to Malaysia that year. Getting an iPad in 2011 and subsequently a Kindle at the end of 2014 really turbocharged my reading and took me back to the levels I maintained in India where we had easy access to high quality lending libraries.

Of those 308 books that I read in the 2010s, 167 were actually published within the decade. And not surprisingly for me, 97 of those were Sci-fi (although in some cases, I would be better off using the broader term “speculative fiction”). I spent an enjoyable hour yesterday scanning through my database and came up with this list of my favourite speculative fiction series of the decade.

The Passage series by Justin Cronin: The Passage (2010), The Twelve (2012) and The City of Mirrors (2016). This series combines one of my favourite sub-genres – post-apocalyptic fiction – with one of my least favourite – vampire fiction. I usually know within the first few pages if I like a particular writing style and if the characters are appealing. That was definitely the case with The Passage. Using different narrative devices, including emails and a research paper from the far future, we are introduced to the top-secret Project Noah and the main protagonist, six-year-old orphan Amy Bellafonte. I think what works about the series is that it is epic in scope but intimate in the way it explores the relationships and motivations of its large cast of characters. The first half of the first book was adapted into a series on Fox (produced by Ridley Scott) which was cancelled at the end of the first season. Somehow it didn’t capture the gravitas of the book and seemed to have more style than substance.

The Passage post-apocalyptic series by Justin Cronin

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), Abaddon’s Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon’s Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) plus 7 short stories. I picked up the first book soon after it was published in 2011 and struggled to keep track of all the characters, spaceships and locations in the story! After a gap of several months, I restarted it and this time created notes and charts to make sure I could see all the moving parts of the narrative. It turned out to be a very rewarding read. But it then took me another 5 years before I picked up book 2 (for which I had to speed read through book 1 and refer to those notes again) and then read 5 of the sequels in reasonably quick succession. Even though the narrative is set a few centuries in the future, with humanity having expanded through the solar system, the science is still remarkably ‘grounded’ and realistic. What starts off as a conspiracy involving interplanetary politics and the quest for economic and scientific power eventually grows in scope, scale and personal stakes in the subsequent books. The central characters are a closely knit foursome who are inadvertently drawn into this power play. Driven by a sense of justice, they play a major role in the events that unfold across (and beyond) the solar system. They are frequently assisted by a ruthless but highly pragmatic old lady of South Asian descent named Chrisjen Avasarala, who holds a senior position in the United Nations and is not squeamish about using her power and connections to ‘do the right thing’. Of particular note is that the author is actually two people – Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck – who are part of a New Mexico speculative fiction collective which is closely associated with George R.R. Martin.

Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck – collectively known as James S.A. Corey, the author of the Expanse series

Silo series by Hugh Howey: This is actually a story arc that consists of three sub-series – Wool (5 books), Shift (3 books) and Dust (1 book). The first book in the series was self-published by Howey via Amazon’s Kindle direct publishing platform and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon. The silos in which people live in the post-apocalyptic future are an amazing example of world building, with an entire society surviving for years in a subterranean dwelling which extends to over a hundred levels connected only by a spiral staircase. The Shift is a prequel series to explain the events that led to the apocalypse and the entire story is closed out in Dust. Frankly, I feel the 5-book Wool series is the best in terms of narrative tension, with the subsequent books really just filling in the back story. Put together, the books make for a chilling and depressing read, so not really something that I feel compelled to re-read. I briefly referenced this series back in 2013 soon after reading the Wool and Shift books.

There are 5 more series in my list of top scifi series of the 2010s, including two trilogies which will only be completed in 2020 or later. I’ll cover these in Parts 2 and 3.

Lavie Tidhar’s The Violent Century: A grim story of super-powered anti-heroes

The New York Times posted an article in late November titled “33 Ways to Remember the 2010s“. It starts with Item #33, “Spandex ruled everything around us” and refers to the superhero phenomenon which pervades pop culture today in the movies and on TV. The sub-genre is now sufficiently commonplace that there is public appetite for the development of edgier content featuring graphic violence, adult themes and non-conformist genre deconstructions like The Umbrella Academy on Netflix, Watchmen on HBO and The Boys on Amazon. Naturally, the source material for all these movies and shows are comics and graphic novels – not just the Marvel and DC powerhouses, but other niche publishers like Dark Horse, Valiant and Image. However, in the past decade, the genre has attracted the attention of the occasional novelist – writers with an aptitude for sci-fi, who no longer need to go into outer space or into the future, but can explore concepts, characters and plots in a contemporary world where people with superpowers exist.

A few years ago, I fell in love with just such a story – a trilogy called The Milkweed Triptych, published between 2010 and 2013 by nuclear physicist turned novelist Ian Tregillis. Incidentally, Mr. Tregillis is part of a community of speculative fiction writers living in or around New Mexico, which includes George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) and Diana Gabaldon (Outlander); must be something in the water there! The Milkweed trilogy kicks off in the 1930’s with a German ‘mad’ scientist named Dr. von Westarp who has created a team of eight super-solders (the result of many years of illegal experimentation with orphan children). After ‘field testing’ them in the Spanish Civil War, they are unleashed by the German Reich into the European theater during World War II. The British respond by calling upon a small group of people who have found a way to tap into a trans-dimensional force which manifests itself as ‘magic’ (such as the ability to control weather on a massive scale). The consequences of the actions taken by both sides reverberate through the subsequent Cold War years before the ultimate bittersweet resolution.

And now, I’ve just finished reading another such novel with a similar timeline and story beats – The Violent Century, published in 2013 by Israeli-born and British-based author Lavie Tidhar. Both these stories are heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and so, not surprisingly, both have their roots in Germany. Here too, it’s a German scientist Dr. Vomacht, who creates a device in the 1930’s that unlocks a variety of latent powers in a handful of people around the world. As a result of the “Vomacht wave”, every nation ends up with super-powered people, many of whom are co-opted by their governments during World War II. Thereafter, the fates of these super-soldiers and super-spies are inextricably intertwined. With the agelessness that the Vomacht wave has conferred on these special few, they remain active through the violent years of the 20th century, across the major theaters of global conflict – Europe during the Cold War, Indochina and Afghanistan.

Lavie Tidhar’s The Violent Century, published 2013

The main protagonists of this spy story are two British operatives, Fogg and Oblivion (probably easy to guess what their powers are) and their boss, who is only referred to as the Old Man. The story of these three and the other men and women they fought and loved, is told through a series of flashback that zigs and zags across the seven decades from the 1930’s to the end of the twentieth century.

Mr. Tidhar has a staccato, stream-of-consciousness style of writing (at least in this book) that reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It takes some getting used to, but soon enough feels natural and makes for a brisk and engrossing read. Mr. Tidhar creates a grim and atmospheric world; the European post-war scenes evoked for me the imagery of Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Like The Milkweed Triptych books, an underlying sense of doom and tragedy laces the narrative. Over the course of the story, one realizes that there are no purely good or evil characters, only shades of grey, all anti-heroes. They do not age, but that does not mean that they cannot be killed. Either way, whether they live or die, there are no happy endings for anyone. Even though the story ends with Fogg seemingly reunited with the love of his life, the reader still feels a sense of loss…for all the suffering and loneliness experienced by these Übermensch through the years, as they are manipulated by those in power to achieve their own political ends.

In the final reckoning, it feels like there were never any heroes, only victims.