2016 Booklist

I have developed a workflow with library e-books which frees me from having to renew them. This means that I have a lot of books to get through.
  1. Swords Against Wizardry - Fritz Leiber. Start your year out right! Old-school sausage-fest swords-and-sorcery.
  2. The Awakened Kingdom - N.K. Jemisin. Short novella following the amazing trilogy that began with The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.
  3. How Jesus Became God - Bart Ehrman. Behold, the pre-Nicene history of Christology, in its contextual zeitgeist of transitions between the human and the divine.
  4. Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood.
  5. Decoding the Heavens - Jo Marchant. An up-to-date (2008) book on the amazing Antikythera mechanism.
  6. Sabriel - Garth Nix. Did you know young women could be novel protagonists? I had no idea.  (Just kidding. Check out Dan Wells's Partials trilogy for another great example.)
  7. The Year of the Flood - Margaret Atwood. ...ponderous. As a friend says, "She's only so-so on a sentence level."
  8. Lirael
  9. Ahbhorsen - Garth Nix. Fun ride.
  10. Matter - Iain M. Banks. Re-read. 
  11. The Killing Moon - N.K. Jemisin. 
  12. Ancillary Justice - Ann Leckie. 
  13. The Swords of Lankhmar - Fritz Leiber. 
  14. The Sorceror of the Wildeeps - Kai Ashante Wilson. 
  15. Big Sur - Jack Kerouac. Second half is a serious slog. 
  16. Survival 
  17. Migration 
  18. Regeneration - Julie Czerneda. So amazingly good.
  19. The Player of Games - Iain M. Banks. Re-read of what may be the best Culture novel. 
  20. Old Man's War - John Scalzi. 
  21. Ancillary Sword 
  22. Ancillary Mercy - Ann Leckie.  Not sure how I feel about this trilogy.
  23. Three Men In A Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - Jerome K. Jerome. 
  24. Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson. The White Male Nerd Gaze is painful, but it's still a fun re-read.
  25. Elric, the Stealer of Souls - Michael Moorcock. One of the creators of non-Tolkien modern fantasy.
  26. Swords In The Mist - Fritz Leiber. 
  27. The Magicians 
  28. The Magician King
  29. The Magician's Land - Lev Grossman. I have never, ever before re-read books within a year of reading them. These are that good.
  30. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann.
  31. Anathem - Neal Stephenson. Really, really good. 
  32. Seveneves - Neal Stephenson. Good, if not as good as Anathem.
  33. Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men - Mara Hvistendahl. Not convinced it added much value over the long-form article that spawned it.
  34. The Reality Dysfunction - Peter F. Hamilton.
  35. Swords and Ice Magic - Fritz Leiber.
  36. The Drama of the Gifted Child - Alice Miller. Dear heavens. My brain hurts with the resonance.
  37. 10-Minute Obedience - Amy Dahl.
  38. Tehanu 
  39. A Wizard of Earthsea
  40. The Tombs of Atuan
  41. The Farthest Shore 
  42. The Other Wind - Ursula K. Le Guin. Tehanu is #4, but I had to re-read the first three because I'd forgotten everything. It's all a good, unified story.
  43. City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett.
  44. Hyperion - Dan Simmons. 
  45. The Fast and the Furriest - Andy Behrens. My first audiobook!
  46. The Fall of Hyperion
  47. Endymion - Dan Simmons.
  48. Dog Sense - John Bradshaw.
  49. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood.
  50. The Rise of Endymion - Dan Simmons. That is an epic sequence of four books, which succeeds far more often than not.
  51. City of Blades - Robert Jackson Bennett. He nailed the sequel. Bleak.
  52. The Ghost Map - Steven Johnson. Surely the best book about cholera epidemics you'll read this year.
  53. The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin.  Oh. My. God.
  54. Uprooted - Naomi Novik. A fabulous, feminist novel, grown from the soil of Polish folklore.
  55. The Shadowed Sun - N.K. Jemisin.
  56. Clariel - Garth Nix.
  57. Thief's Magic - Trudi Canavan.
  58. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language - David W. Anthony. The riveting story of how the pre-history around the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex supports theories of cultural transfer leading to the Indo-European language family.
  59. His Majesty's Dragon 
  60. Throne Of Jade 
  61. Black Powder War 
  62. Empire of Ivory - Naomi Novik. Ohhh yes. The Napoleonic Wars, but everyone has air forces made of dragons.
  63. For All the Tea In China - Sarah Rose. Opium! Espionage! Colonialism! Horticulture!
  64. Victory of Eagles
  65. Tongues of Serpents 
  66. Crucible of Gold - Naomi Novik.
  67. Clean Sweep - Ilona Andrews.
  68. Blood of Tyrants - Naomi Novik. Almost done!
  69. Sweep In Peace - Ilona Andrews. Her two books were much better than I would have ever guessed from the covers.
  70. League of Dragons - Naomi Novik. Phew!
  71. The Obelisk Gate - N.K. Jemisin. HOLY SHIT.
  72. The Inheritance of Rome - Christopher Wickham. I think I only didn't finish this last time because I ran out of book renewals and the paper book was really heavy.
  73. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett. lol.
  74. Barsk - Lawrence P. Schoen. The allegory is as subtle as a brick through a windshield, but it's a perfectly enjoyable sci-fi book with some cool original (that I know of) ideas.
  75. The Last Wish - Andrzej Sapkowski. Not bad. Structured like Fritz Leiber's stories, but very...Slavic.
  76. The Rook - Daniel O'Malley. 
  77. Blindsight
  78. Echopraxia - Peter Watts. Well. Then.
  79. Stiletto - Daniel O'Malley. A worthy sequel!
  80. Starfish 
  81. Maelstrom 
  82. Behemoth - Peter Watts. His first books. They are...odd. Compelling, yet not entirely satisfying.
  83. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville. That was a project.
  84. Heir of Fire
  85. Queen of Shadows -  Sarah J. Maas. Had to re-read book 3, I forgot what had happened. I love this series.
  86. The Nightmare Stacks - Charles Stross. Another solid entry in the Laundry Files.
  87. The Star Fraction - Ken MacLeod. The most 90s sci-fi novel I've ever read? It's not very good. 
  88. Updraft - Fran Wilde. This fictional universe lies in that uncanny valley of offending physics too much to be plausible, but not enough to be interesting.
  89. Sword of Destiny - Andrzej Sapkowski. "Slavic" no longer does this series justice. Pushing into "bleakly nihilist" territory.
  90. Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke.
  91. Dark Lord of Derkholm - Diana Wynne Jones. There should be a club for writers who think, "I'm gonna write some really fucked-up stories and make them look like books for kids!". Jones can join the authors of The Neverending Story and the Hollow Kingdom trilogy, the latter especially being harder to explain to your kids than the original Grimm fairytales.
  92. The Vorrh - Brian Catling. Holy shit, this was terrible. I want those hours back, and I say that as someone who just finished Moby-Dick and thought it was worth the effort. 
  93. A Thousand Words for Stranger 
  94. Ties of Power
  95. To Trade the Stars
  96. Reap the Wild Wind - Julie Czerneda. Might need a break from the Trade Pact universe.
  97. Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe From the First Venturers to the Vikings - Jean Manco.
  98. Riders of the Storm
  99. A Rift In the Sky 
  100. This Gulf of Time and Stars - Julie Czerneda. Phew, ran out of Trade Pact Universe books.
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