With that said, I had a pretty terrific reading year in 2017. I encountered some new instant favorites, books I loved so much I shoved them at everyone I knew and immediately requested them for birthday or Christmas. I love books and I love reading and I love y’all, so thanks all the way around for being great.

Monstress, by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Never shall I give up my fondness for monster girls. Monstress is a weird and wonderful comic about a girl with special powers who finds herself at war with the whole world. The art is unfathomably lovely.

Iron Cast, Destiny Soria

Two best friends create magical illusions at an illegal night club in Boston, just before Prohibition begins. Iron Cast features found family to the max, including a best-friendship that’s more central to the characters than their romances (which is rare as hell), and some genuinely cool magic. If you’re a reader on the hunt for more one-and-dones in YA, Iron Cast is for you.

Borderline and Phantom Pains, Mishell Baker

I haven’t read much urban fantasy, but Borderline made me want to change that. Mishell Baker’s borderline protagonist is a double amputee and survivor of a suicide attempt, recruited to work for a mysterious organization called the Arcadia Project. Creepy fairies abound (my fave), plus lots of details about the nitty-gritty of cognitive therapy for BPD.

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso

Contrary to popular belief, I do not like books solely based on their having French flaps. But French flaps help. The Woman Next Door is a lovely, quiet exploration of the aftermath of apartheid in South Africa: the story of two women whose enmity softens into something that is not quite friendship but no longer exactly hostility. It’s also a story about complicity in oppression that doesn’t insist upon redemption. I loved it.

Testosterone Rex, Cordelia Fine

I mean, obviously. Cordelia Fine remains brilliant, and she is so good at making complicated science accessible to a layperson. My big complaint with Testosterone Rex is that it doesn’t talk about non-cis people hardly at all. However, it makes many brilliant arguments about the role hormones like testosterone play in gender and gendered behavior. Read it, and read Delusions of Gender.

White Tears, Hari Kunzru

I said it when I read it, and I’ll say it again now: What the entire fuck. White Tears is a story about white appropriation of black culture, but it’s also a terrifying ghost story and a wild wild ride. It has one of the scariest endings I’ve ever encountered in a book. It’s brilliant and bananas. Get on it.

Amberlough, Lara Elena Donnolly

Amberlough is a secondary world fantasy (without any magic) about the performers in a cabaret confronting the rise of fascism in their country. If you can’t face that sort of a thing during the Trump presidency, it’s absolutely fair play. But if you are up to it, Amberlough is a strange and lovely book, a fantasy novel for lovers of the darkest bits of Cabaret.

Thorn, Intisar Khanani

One of the truly lovely things that happened this year was Intisar Khanani’s book deal with HarperTeen. Soon you’ll be able to get Thorn in a shiny new edition, and you should. It’s a retelling of the fairy tale “The Goose Girl,” a story that’s sad but hopeful, a story about good people trying their best. Intisar Khanani remains one of my favorite fantasy writers currently working.

Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee

I admit that I was fearful of reading Ninefox Gambit, which I’d heard was a particularly dense bit of science fiction. But I’m so glad I pressed onward with it. Ninefox Gambit might be my actual favorite book of the year; I liked it so much that I ran straight out to the library to get Raven Stratagem. It’s about an imperfectly loyal soldier who has to share a brain with a famously brilliant, famously murderous general from the past. I loved it so much. I want you to love it, too.

Song of the Current, Sarah Tolcser

Such an excellent YA adventure novel. Caro takes to the river with a crateful of mystery cargo in the hopes that she can save her father from prison. But when the cargo turns out to be a boy — a snooty-as-hell boy, but good in a fight — she finds herself enmeshed in more plotting and violence than she’d bargained for. And look at that cover!

Starfish, Akemi Dawn Bowman

In YA as in adult fiction, I tend to gravitate more towards SFF stories. But Starfish won me over. It deals with sexual and emotional abuse in families in a way that I’ve encountered virtually never, and it’s exceptionally honest about the impact of growing up with an abusive parent. I loved Starfish, even more so because the author was able to take critique of some of the language in her book, and make a change for future editions.

Jane, Unlimited, Kristin Cashore

If you’d asked me what I expected as a follow-up to Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series, the last thing I’d have said would have been “Rebecca as a choose-your-own adventure, by way of Diana Wynne Jones.” But that’s what I got: Five separate stories in five separate genres, each most wonderfully stranger than the last.

I wish you strength in the New Year, and all the glorious books you can gobble up. What were some of your 2017 faves?

The post 2017 Reading in Review appeared first on Reading the End.

Episode 79

Here’s the time signatures for each segment, if you want to skip around!

1:05 – What We’re Reading
4:01 – Sea or Space Update
5:42 – Serial Box Book Club
14:32 – Book Awards!
31:58 – The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso
44:41 – What We’re Reading Next Time

And here are the books we discussed this ep!

What We’re Reading

Mama Day, Gloria Naylor
The Abyss Surrounds Us, Emily Skrutskie
The Fortunes, Peter Ho Davies

Sea or Space

Here’s an article about the supergroups of humpback whales.

Serial Box Book Club

We’re reading episodes one and two of The Witch Who Came in from the Cold. Thanks again to Serial Box for letting us have these episodes to review!

Book Prizes

National Book Critics Circle Awards

LaRose, Louise Erdrich
Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
Commonwealth, Ann Patchett
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram Kendi
Lab Girl, Hope Jahren

Los Angeles Times Book Awards

Darktown, Thomas Mullen
A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS, Robert F. Worth
Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, Heather Ann Thompson
They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement, Wesley Lowery
Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson

Suki Kim on journalism and memoir

His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes within Us and a Grander View of Life, Ed Yong
Patient H. M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, Luke Dittrich
Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, Masha Gessen

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso
Barkskins, Annie Proulx
The Lesser Bohemians, Eimear McBride
Stay with Me, Ayobami Adebayo
The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry

Tournament of Books

We did not love this match-up.

The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders
The Mothers, Brit Bennett
Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
We Love You Charlie Freeman, Kaitlyn Greenidge
Version Control, Dexter Palmer
The Vegetarian, Han Kang
Sudden Death, Álvaro Enrigue
High Dive, Jonathan Lee
The Nix, Nathan Hill
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter

For This Time

The Woman Next Door, Yewande Omotoso

For Next Time

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian

Credits
Producer: Captain Hammer
Photo credit: The Illustrious Annalee
Theme song by: Jessie Barbour

The post Reading the End Bookcast, Ep.79: 2017 Book Awards and The Woman Next Door appeared first on Reading the End.