As usual, Goodreads did its “Here’s what you read in 2014!” email and I went, “Not done yet!” and read another couple of books. But now 2014 is definitely, really, seriously done with (and an interesting year it was too – I’ll reflect on writing in 2014 in another post, I think) and here’s some things I really enjoyed reading this year:
Continuing series
- Queen’s Thief series: book 3, King of Attolia – I love this series and its easy writing and serrated characters and storylines. Love it so much that I’m doling the books out to myself like rare and prized treats.
- Dagger and the Coin: book 3, The Tyrant’s Law – What everyone who likes Game of Thrones should be reading, because it’s amazing fantasy, and actually businesslike about delivering the story.
- The Raven Cycle: books 2 and 3, Dream Thieves and Blue Lily, Lily Blue – I don’t read these books, I wallow in them wreathed all over with outrageous delight.
- The Craft Sequence: book 2, Two Serpents Rise – Max Gladstone is a genius and I love his brain and all the post-industrial magic-based philosophically bent fantasy it produces.
- The Wave Trilogy: book 2, Warring States – This alterni-history fantasy series continues to be sharp and full of the unexpected and very rich in interesting ideas.
Firsts or lone books
- The Girls at the Kingfisher Club – Genevieve Valentine retells the Twelve Dancing Princesses as flappers in jazz-age New York and I fall over in delight at the wonderful ladies and their sparse but beautifully depicted relationships. The needlepoint of this book sews itself into your skin.
- Vicious – Sociopaths and superheroes; all the ways in which being human is hard and being super human is too hard.
- The Dreamhunter Duet – A lavish and mysterious fantasy of a turn-of-the-century alterni-colony, where dreams can be harvested, if you can ignore some dark secrets. A beautiful look at consumerism, privilege, the opiates of the masses.
- London Falling – It’s the Bill with vicious hooks and magic. It is serious copper business. It is really quite great, if you’re up for a bit of grit.
