Books I read in 2020
This was originally posted on my own site.
I only read twenty books this year. Considering the ample amount of free time I had, that’s not great. But I’m not going to beat myself up about it. Yes, I may have spent more time watching television than reading, but I’m cutting myself some slack. It was 2020, for crying out loud.
Anyway, here’s my annual round-up with reviews. Anything with three stars is good. Four stars is really good. Five stars is practically unheard of. As usual, I tried to get an equal balance of fiction and non-fiction.
Raven Stratagem by Yoon Ha Lee
★★★☆☆
An enjoyable sequal to Ninefox Gambit. There are some convoluted politics but that all seems positively straightforward after the brain-bending calendrical warfare introduced in the first book.
The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society by Norbert Wiener
★★★☆☆
The ur-text on systems and feedback. Reading it now is like reading a historical artifact but many of the ideas are timeless. It’s a bit dense in parts and it tries to cover life, the universe and everything, but when you remember that it was written in 1950, it’s clearly visionary.
The Word For World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★☆☆
Simultaneously a ripping yarn and a spiritual meditation. It’s Vietnam and the environmental movement rolled into one (like what Avatar attempted, but this actually works).
Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu
★★★★☆
Here’s my full review.
A Short History Of Irish Traditional Music by Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin
★★☆☆☆
A perfectly fine and accurate history of the music, but it’s a bit like reading Wikipedia. Still, it was quite the ego boost to see The Session listed in the appendix.
Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
★★★☆☆
McEwan’s first foray into science fiction is a good tale but a little clumsily told. It’s like he really wants to show how much research he put into his alternative history. There are moments when characters practically turn to the camera to say, “Imagine how the world would’ve turned out if…” It’s far from McEwan’s best but even when he’s not on top form, his writing is damn good.
The Fabric Of Reality by David Deutsch
★★★☆☆
I’ve attempted to read this before. I may have even read it all before and had everything just leak out of my head. The problem is with me, not David Deutsch who does a fine job of making complex ideas approachable. This is like a unified theory of everything.
Helliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss
★★★☆☆
The third and final part of Aldiss’s epic is just as enjoyable as the previous two. The characters aren’t the main attraction here. It’s all about the planetary ballet.
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
★★★★☆
A terrific memoir. It’s open and honest, and just snarky enough when it needs to be.
A Wizard Of Earthsea, The Tombs Of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★☆
There’s a real pleasure in finally reading books that you should’ve read years ago. I can only imagine how wonderful it would’ve been to read these as a teenager. It’s an immersive world but there’s something melancholy about the writing that makes the experience of reading less escapist and more haunting.
Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini
★★★★★
Absolutely superb! I liked Angela Saini’s previous book, Inferior, but I loved this. It’s a harrowing read at times, but written with incredible clarity and empathy. I can’t recommend this highly enough.
Purple People by Kate Bulpitt
★★★★☆
Full disclosure: Kate is a friend of mine, so I probably can’t evaluate her book in a disinterested way. That said, I enjoyed the heck out of this and I think you will too. It’s very hard to classify and I think that’s what makes it so enjoyable. Technically, it’s sci-fi I suppose — an alternative history tale, probably — but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s all about the characters, and they’re all vividly realised. Honestly, I’m not sure how best to describe it — other then it being like the inside of Kate’s head — but the description of it being “a jolly dystopia” comes close. Take a chance and give it a go.
How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality by Adam Rutherford
★★★☆☆
Good stuff from Adam Rutherford, though not his best. If I hadn’t already read Angela Saini’s Superior I might’ve rated this higher, but it pales somewhat by comparison. Still, it was interesting to see the same subject matter tackled in two different ways.
Agency by William Gibson
★★☆☆☆
There’s nothing particularly wrong with Agency, but there’s nothing particularly great about it either. It’s just there. Maybe I’m being overly harsh because the first book, The Peripheral, was absolutely brilliant. This reminded me of reading Gibson’s Spook Country, which left me equally unimpressed. That book was sandwiched between the brilliant Pattern Recognition and the equally brilliant Zero History. That bodes well for the forthcoming third book in this series. This second book just feels like filler.
Last Night’s Fun: In And Out Of Time With Irish Music by Ciaran Carson
★★★☆☆
It’s hard to describe this book. Memoir? Meditation? Blog? I kind of like that about it, but I can see how it divides opinion. Some people love it. Some people hate it. I thought it was enjoyable enough. But it doesn’t matter what I think. This book is doing its own thing.
Revenant Gun by Yoon Ha Lee
★★★☆☆
The third book in the Machineries of Empire series has much less befuddlement. It’s even downright humourous in places. If you liked Ninefox Gambit and Raven Strategem, you’ll enjoy this too.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit
★★★☆☆
The central thesis of this book is refuting the Hobbesian view of humanity as being one crisis away from breakdown. I feel like that argument was made more strongly in Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another by Philip Ball. But where this book shines is in its vivid description of past catastrophes and their aftermaths: the San Francisco fire; the Halifax explosion; the Mexico City earthquake; and the culmination with Katrina hitting New Orleans. I was less keen on the more blog-like personal musings but overall, this is well worth reading.
Blindsight by Peter Watts
★★☆☆☆
I like a good tale of first contact, and I had heard that this one had a good twist on the Fermi paradox. But it felt a bit like a short story stretched to the length of a novel. It would make for a good Twilight Zone episode but it didn’t sustain my interest.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I’m still reading this Hugo-winning novella and enjoying it so far.
Alright, time to wrap up this look back at the books I read in 2020 and pick my favourites: one fiction and one non-fiction.
My favourite non-fiction book of the year was easily Superior by Angela Saini. Read it. It’s superb.
What about fiction? Hmm …this is tricky.
You know what? I’m going to go for Purple People by Kate Bulpitt. Yes, she’s a friend (“it’s a fix!”) but it genuinely made an impression on me: it was an enjoyable romp while I was reading it, and it stayed with me afterwards too.
Head on over to Bookshop and pick up a copy.
This was originally posted on my own site.
