Beyond Reality discussion

Let's hear your best reads of the year! Here are some of my favorites (not necessarily BEST, but favorites), in no particular order:

SF/F:
Feed by Mira Grant
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
Beyond by Mercedes Lackey
Gallant by V.E. Schwab
Under the Whispering Door by T.J. Klune
Fevered Star by Rebecca Roanhorse
Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield
The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu
The Fall of Babel by Josiah Bancroft

Other fiction:
Greenglass House by Kate Milford
The Last Time We Say Goodbye by Cynthia Hand
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Nonfiction:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by Deborah Blum
A Face for Picasso: Coming of Age with Crouzon Syndrome by Ariel Henley
The Woman They Could Not Silence: One Woman, Her Incredible Fight for Freedom, and the Men Who Tried to Make Her Disappear by Kate Moore

SF/F:

The Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer
The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin
The Teixcalaan duology by Arkady Martine
Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Broken God by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan
Autonomous by Annalee Newitz
84K by Claire North
The Left Hand of Darkness and The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang
Matter by Iain M. Banks


Other fiction:

Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield

(although both of these could go under fantasy)

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
The Overstory by Richard Powers
A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson - possibly my book of the year


Non-fiction:

Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes
An Immense World by Ed Yong
The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us by Brian Klaas
Men Who Hate Women - From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
Findings by Kathleen Jamie
Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back by Oliver Bullough
The Book of Humans: The Story of How We Became Us by Adam Rutherford
The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

I rated most of the books I read in 2022 as 4 stars, and not much stands out from the pack.

One I will mention is
Upgrade
It was a good story, but it doesn't shine as much as Recursion. A case where it suffers from comparison.

I'll also mention one out of genre
The Last Days of Jack Sparks
The premise sounded interesting. The title pov character was such an annoying ass that I almost stopped reading by the second chapter.
And then I kept reading, and reading, and reading because the story just grabbed me so much. And, in the end, I rather enjoyed it.

Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 9 and 10
Perseus Corbett and the Forbidden Valley
Chance Encounters: Temporary Street Art

My 2022 reading goal was to read 75 books and I surpassed that, reading either 87 or 92 books, depending whether my spreadsheet or Goodreads is more accurate. The discrepancy comes in how short stories and novellas are counted. My average rating on a 10 point scale was 7.86, slightly lower than last year.

11 books earned a rating of 10, one fewer than last year: all 3 books in the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin (The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Gate, & The Stone Sky),Song of the Beast byCarol Berg,The Tyrant's Law &The Spider's War byDaniel Abraham,The Untold Story byGenevieve Cogman, The Long Cosmos by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter, The Devil's Teardrop by Jeffery Deaver, The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Matter by Iain M. Banks.

Another 11 books earned a rating of 9.

My lowest ranking this year was a 4, “earned” by The Letter by Richard Paul Evans, part of his Christmas Box trilogy. The other 2 books in the trilogy were rated 4.5 and 5.0.

Fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries/thrillers are my favorite genres and comprised most of my reading last year, as they do most every year.

My goal for 2023 is 75 books is 80 books and I’ve joined 2 challenges that provided prompts to encourage me to read a wider variety of genres and authors.

Hmmmm
Just looking at the books I read. I was a bit slower on reading the last few years, no commute to work sort of killed my reading time
I would say the best book I have read this year was
The Runes of the Earth

It was really really enjoyable
For whatever reason book two was not.

I did read a bunch of good books but great? Not so much

I made my goal of 52 books. Sone of my favorites were SA Cosby “Razorblade Tears” and the first two John Birmingham books in the Cruel Stars trilogy and the first book in Brian Staveley’a new epic fantasy series “The Empire’s Ruin”

The list of books I read is here: https://buckmire.blogspot.com/p/book-...