I've been wondering if I should make a yearly Best Books list the same way I do Games of the Year. Books and Games, the two things I'm willing to throw hundreds of hours and dollars on. I keep less track of my books, though, and often have no idea if I read a book this year or last year or if I haven't even finished it at all. Sometimes I feel scared to make a list because if it's a short list, and it will probably end up being a short list, I'll be disappointed in myself.
But, eh! Maybe I should start anyway!
Here are the best books I'm pretty sure I read in 2018.
Stories of Your Life and Others, by Ted Chiang
Best SF short stories I've ever lay my eyes, ears, thoughts on. Ted Chiang's stories are clever and thoughtful and reveal a rich understanding of the universe. After every read, I have to sit down for a bit and think about the workings of our world, how everything fits together, a cosmic clockwork, to make the world as we see it now. It made me appreciate the universe. It made me appreciate being alive.
Ted Chiang's stories are speculative fiction at its finest, the kind of stories that asks What If, that sees how the world will be with a couple of its inner workings changed. His stories analyse the changes with a scientific perspective but with humane basis. How would a being who can remember the future understand the world?, What will a society used to constant heavenly destruction be like?, What would the ramification be if humans can only reproduce for a set number of generations?
I want to say that sometimes Chiang's stories get too worked up in answering these sorts of questions than, say, making an interesting plot or reaching a satisfying conclusion, but that would be unfair. His entire stories are shaped with these questions, meant for answering these questions, and they do so in thoughtful ways. They know what they want to do, and they did it, and that's enough.
Welcome to Night Vale, by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor
Welcome to Night Vale, both the book and the podcast this is based on, is about a friendly desert community where Weird Things happen on a daily basis. Lemme just open a random page from the book and read it for you,
Diane had a cast when she was twelve. She had fallen out of a tree and broken her leg. This is a common injury for children, as trees dislike young humans and are notorious for picking them up and dropping them if they get too close.
And another random one,
This took several minutes because, by law, police are required to describe the nature of sunlight at the time of the infraction in verse, although meter and rhyme are optional.
I am literally opening random pages. There's always something,
It was part of Moonlite All-Nite's charm. They used mugs gathered from a number of sources. Sometimes those sources left strange stains or humming sounds on the mugs. This was also part of the charm.
Sometimes, those Weirdness segue into something profound,
There were few places in town where one could quietly have breakfast in the company of so many other people also quietly having breakfast. There is nothing more lonely than an action taken quietly on your own, and nothing more comforting than doing that same quiet action in parallel with fellow humans doing the same action, everyone alone next to each other.
Not a favourite---I don't think I can pinpoint a favourite with the sheer number of them---but I like this one,
Jackie woke up confused, as is usual. Sleep is confusing. Dreams are baffling. The concept of transitioning from one perceived reality to another is a tolerated madness.
It often feels like the writers just pop in whatever nonsense they feel is related, either linguistically or any other way, and it does get a bit tedious in quite a lot of places, but eventually, it feels like there's a rhyme to it. These Weirdness are already normalized by the citizens of Night Vale, and the narration, I think, is slowly normalizing them for the readers.
Underneath all the Weird though, even with their Weird life, you can see how the characters are also humans, with human emotion and feelings, even though their memories and their understanding of such concepts as Time and Space are warped. And the plot, beneath the Weirdness, is just a simple story about a family. I think that's part of the larger message, that every human are human, no matter what kind of life they're having.
It is pretty tedious though. It's better narrated with voices (either in your head or outside) than just being zoomed through.
The Last American Vampire by Seth Grahame-Smith
As a history nerd, this book is fun. It's the kind of fun that's almost embarrassing to talk about, the sort of low-brow, wish-fulfilment, childlike kind of fun. It's basically a fanfic of history. It's fuelled by the power that surfaces when you read a biography of some historical figures and you think, hey it'll be cool if my character meet them.
It's a well-made story with good characters but the best thing about it is always when the main character meets someone new or takes part in a large event and my brain just lit up in recognition. Oh! It's Doyle! Oh! It's Mark Twain! Oh! It's Tesla! Oh! It's that thing that happen in World War II! OH DAMN IT'S ABRAHAM LINCOLN AS A VAMPIRE! Thank you, Seth Grahame-Smith, for this gift.
Norwegian Wood & After Dark & Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman & Hear the Wind Sing & Pinball, 1970 by Haruki Murakami
That's five books. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a short story collection. The others are novels. Wind/Pinball are two novels combined into one book. I'm not actually sure if I read Norwegian Wood in 2018 or 2017? And I haven't actually finished all of Willow or Pinball, but whatever.
Haruki Murakami makes me mad! His writing all feels so effortless! Like he'd just write about mundane everyday events---there's this guy who likes to pet a dog in the station, there's this girl who decides to spent all her night in a diner, there's this kid who's visiting a relative at a hospital, there's this guy whose seeing a lady who lives by the ocean---and make them all so surreal and profound, with just a touch of Weird to put you off your guard. In the opening to Wind/Pinball he mentioned how he didn't really set out to be a novelist; the idea that he could write novels just came into his head one day and he followed through with it and what the hell Murakami what the hell.
While his writing is damn phenomenal, the structures of his stories can be pretty hit-or-miss. Norwegian Woods is probably the most grounded, relying more on the voice of its not weird main character than the surreal. The plot, while not told entirely linearly, is easy to follow. It's my favourite of the lot.
Wind and Pinball, on the other hand, are off the rockers, structure-wise; I have no idea when any of the scene takes place relative to all the others, the characters intersect in seemingly random occasions, there are random musings or quotations from other works, and it ends the same way it begins, without any indication that either is an ending or a beginning. If you ask me, I have no idea what the hell either of these novels are about, but I think I understand it, in an inexplicable way. I don't know if Murakami has any idea what he's written either, but my subconscious might have picked up things.
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is just as weird and random-like and inexplicable and strangely profound as Wind/Pinball. But at least it's a short story collection with no interest in telling a larger story. Some of the stories are good. Some feels like utter Whatever that's more about the atmosphere than a coherent story. All of them look effortless, utterly confident even when they're nonsense. Dammit, Murakami, how did you do this.
After Dark, I think, tries to reconcile the Weird/Surreal with the Actual Plot structure, but it just falls extremely flat to me. The characters are interesting, but the plot feels like nonsense and the Weird/Surreal just don't catch on.
Earthsea series, by Ursula K. Le Guin
I read A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tomb of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore, the first three books, in 2018. Some of the wisest book I've read and I wish I had read them when I was younger. I've written about this before so I'm just going to repeat what I wrote.
[Its wisdom] is never tropey but wisdom that feels hard-earned; even when the older characters in the book say it outright, it never feels preachy. [...] It handles its heavy topic extremely well. It’s beautiful and hopeful and it never gets too dark even though it acknowledges the darkness surrounding us.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I love Sherlock Holmes. Return features some of his best stories, both regarding the mysteries and the character drama. One day I'll write a proper post about how I think Doyle is more interested in character drama than proper mystery, and that his stories are made greater because of it.
I love Sherlock Holmes.
