Best of the rest
Jan 1st, 2008 by Ashok
I love ‘best’ lists, even the woefully short-sighted ‘year’s best’ ones that throng cyberspace at this time of year. Despite their tendency to spotlight the over-hyped few instead of illuminating the lesser-known many, they still provide great recos to build my own buy list and help me whittle down my typically 1000+ must-read books a year to a more manageable 300-odd. (I allow myself a book a day, although I rarely actually read that many a year, unless you count graphic novels too and reference/research texts too, in which case, I read at least two a day.)
So it was only inevitable that I should have a favourite ‘Best’ even among the many dozen ‘best of the year’ lists I read through in the past day or two.
And I have to say that this collection of lists on the Aqueduct Press group blog really was a wonderful find. Most definitely my definitive best of the rest of the year’s reading lists.
For one thing, virtually all the books–barring a few obvious SFFH ones–are not on most of the typical media lists of the year’s most-hyped books/movies/albums.
For another thing, a lot of the selections–again, barring some of the SFFH ones–are excellent, something I can vouch for personally, having read at least a few and finding several more in common with my own personal must-read-soon list.
(And by the way, I don’t mean that I don’t like SFFH books; on the contrary, I love the speculative genre and read a fair number of books in the genre. It’s just that the SF, Fantasy and Horror choices in the lists tended to be books written by the blogger-in-question’s friends, which to my viewpoint at least, seems to lead to questionably mediocre choices–but that’s just my view.)
And a third reason (if you still need one) was that several of the choices are either overtly feminist, or entirely composed of women writers. Not only that, but more than one of them are among my personal favourites as authors–especially Nicola Griffith whose science fiction novels Slow River and Ammonite are among my all-time best SF novels, and whose Aud novels are not just excellent crime novels but also excellent novels featuring a same-sex-inclined protagonist (in less p.c. terms, a lesbian) that disproves the usually tired American noir rehash of cliche sexual stereotypes. Griffith’s work is, to me, a girlshapedlovedrug, like the lovely pop song from Gomez she mentions in her entry!
Browse through the lists, look up the books, and read at least a few of them. I plan to!
Link courtesy Boing Boing
