Every year I try to come up with interesting ways to cover the year that was. I have graphed categories and review scores and a bunch of other things. But I think this year i just want to hit up all the books I read. So here are some one sentence reviews of all the book I read this year. Presented in the order that I’ve read them. (I should also mention that I’ve read a bunch of comics and manga that aren’t represented here. At some point I think those things need to get there own blog write up.)

• The Adventure Zone: Here there be Gerblins - A comic version of a D&D podcast. Probably not for you unless your a fan of the show. It’s great though and you should be a fan of the show. What’s wrong with you. 4/5

• The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi - Part 2 of the Interdependency. One of my favorite current scifi series. A very odd structure but intensely character driven. Like the Expanse it prioritizes character reactions over actually having a POV in the moment of big plot events. 4/5

• Wrath of Empire by Brian McClellan - The Powdermage series continues, and continues to be great. This is a middle book and has a lot of the same flavor as the first part of this trilogy but with a massive shift in the strength of the different POVs it continues to feel fresh. 4/5

• Foundyside by Robert Jackson Bennett - A new series from Bennett after the excellent Divine Cities series. This one just didn’t catch me as much as that series. Totally fine until the last ten percent or so which was excellent. Didn’t turn the book around for me but I’ll probably pick up part 2. 3/5

• Tiamat’s Wrath by James SA Corey - The 8th book in the Expanse. So incredible that this series is still in my favorites and probably going to be my top books of all time. The TV series is pretty great to. It’s going to be so weird if it makes it into this part of the series. 5/5

• The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis - I don’t read a lot of non-fiction, but when i do it’s probably going to be Michael Lewis. A look into the Trump administrations first few days and what happens when you give control of the government to a bunch of people that don’t seem to know what the government is for, and also are probably criminals. 5/5

• Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse - A bit of a disappointment. A perfectly fine fantasy hero story with a great setting in the post-America America with a focus on Dinetah culture and lore. A great main character. It was just the plot itself that felt disconnected from all those great things and made it kind of a tough read for me. 3/5

• Uncanny Collateral by Brian McClellan - A fun little novella. Another offering from McClellan in this list. A nice tight story. I kickstarted this for the hardcover, and I should probably mention that I support McClellan on Patreon. Any way this was pretty good. 4/5.

• Change Agent by Daniel Suarez - I love Suarez’s previous books Daemon and Freedom(TM). I made an intentional effort this year to read some of his stuff that I had missed. This is a great political thriller about identity and power and it was great. Suarez does have a type of MC that I think probably could rub some people the wrong way, but this was a great book. 4/5

• Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin - I had to read Native Son by Richard Wright in high school and i don’t think I was really capable of understanding it at the time. I read this hoping to get clarity on a story that still flicks the back of my head now and then. I also got a great memoir of an incredible philosopher and a voice that still needed today. 5/5

• One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence - I have a on again off again relationship with Mark Lawrence’s books. Unfortunately this is a bad time travel story so we are off again. 2/5

• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by JK Rowling - I decided to reread the series back in 2018 mostly as an excuse to buy all the audio books. Glad I managed to finish before the author of this series confirmed that she sucks in 2019. 5/5

• 1776 by David McCullough - A recounting of a single year of the revolutionary war. This was a great read. I love history books that create a narrative and focus on the people and not facts and dates. This really gave me a new perspective on the common lives of the people involved. 4/5

• Skyward by Brandon Sanderson - What a great surprise! I had kind of soured on Sanderson’s scifi attempts before, but this one was really excellent. Hints of Last Starfighter and even Knightrider make for a fresh YA take on scifi. The research on jet fighters comes through and like most of Sanderson’s most recent work, the hardcopy is filled with great artwork and other “extras” that make picking up the physical book worth the extra price. 5/5

• Shrouded Loyalties by Reese Hogan - Written by a friend of mine, this was probably the second best thing that I read all year. A spy thriller mixed with cosmic horror, somehow it was the romance angle of the story that really grabbed me. Pick this up if you want an exciting read from a great new voice in the market. 5/5

• We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor - The Bobiverse series was a bit of a rollercoaster. I liked this one. It introduced a lot of cool ideas with an exciting pace and a great voice from it’s MC. My only complaint is that it just kind of ends. I really think that these three books should have a been a single volume. It’s an audible exclusive and I think the nature of the narrative of this story works really well as an audio book specifically. 4/5

• Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson - What a weird book. Very similar to the weirdness of Stephenson’s last book this one meanders from the dangers of social media to the fate of America in a post Trump world, and ending up in a post human virtual human history. Ultimately I think this novel works, unlike his last one. It’s got a great plot once it gets into its final sort of plot. But so so weird. 4/5

• For We Are Many by Dennis E. Taylor - So the second Bobiverse book. It feels like it starts in the middle and ends in the same place. It’s mostly an exploration of a great premise, but there are some story beats that give us great characters. Ultimately I held this book responsible for my complaints that it’s not all one big book. 3/5

• The Outsider by Stephen King - What a great story. You would think by now that King would have run out of good ideas, but a lot of his most recent stuff, and some collaborations with his son, have been really inventive and excellent. I love how late in the book it is before the supernatural element is revealed. I’m also excited to see the HBO series. Check out the October episode of Fantasy Book of the Month to hear me talk a lot more about it and King’s later work. 4/5

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by JK Rowling - This one is so controversial. I don’t know why. I feel like it’s the worst one. I don’t know why some people think its their favorite. Seems inaccurate. 5/5

• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling - It’s the last one. Still made me feel something after all this time. Even after all the time that I’ve spent picking it apart. I took my wife to see the Harry Potter and the Curse Child on Broadway a year ago and it was super fun. I still think that there are cool things that can happen with HP. I hope JK will just stop preventing them. 5/5

• All These Worlds by Dennis E. Taylor - The last of the Bobbiverse books. A great conclusion to the series. Should of been one book. Ok I’m done complaining. 5/5

• NPCs by Drew Hayes - The first book recommended by one of my co-hosts on the Fantasy Book of the Month podcast. It’s a great adventure tale, and even though i thought I would hate the framing device of an RPG world that’s also real, but it really went somewhere by the end. Another audible exclusive I believe. 4/5

• Ironskin by Tina Connolly - A book I decided to read specifically to fulfill a theme for the Fantasy Book of the Month podcast. The steampunk episode. It’s not my favorite genre but I really enjoyed this book and it reminded me that I need to keep my view broad and read more and outside my comfort zone. 4/5

• Lethal White by Robert Galbraith - I love these books. I wish JK Rowling would stop being problematic so I could love them without reservation. Or at least recommend them without reservation. These are great detective stories. I love the voice of Strike. I love the earnest realness of Robin and the crumbling edifice of her marriage. I recommend this to anyone that just loves a good bit of hard boiled. 5/5

• The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson - Oh man what a miss. This is the only 2 out of all the books I read this year. I really loved the first one, and I’m afraid it was the expectations that I came away with from that first book that ruined me a bit for this one. The MC becomes so directionless and despondent that I just couldn’t enjoy the story. It also added extra layers of complexity to an already complex story and a plot that just felt like it started disconnected from the first novel and didn’t set me up well for the next one. Probably will read the third one but more out of my obsessive nature then any love for the series. 2/5

• Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger - This one is growing on me more the longer I get some space from it. It’s got an odd division of it’s plot between it’s POV characters. It isolates them some and leaves some of the characters stuck in certain roles that seems to be limiting to their development. But! The ending is very well crafted and does a great job of bringing the disparate parts together for a strong conclusion that sets up a world that I want to revisit. 4/5

• Married to Murder by Jennifer Oberth - Jenny is in my writing group, so i’ve actually read this a while ago. I think I was a beta reader. But I was beta reading another entry in this series for Jenny right now, so i wanted to go back and remember what this series was about, and put that voice back in my ears. This is a great little cozy mystery. The whole series is something you can read and just feel good reading it. It’s funny and touching with great characters and a cool mystery. Jenny is good people also. Follow her on Twitter to see her live tweet Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea when it’s on local TV :) 5/5

And that’s it. This was a small year for me reading. I think I spent a big chunk of the early part of the year drowning in the first campaign of Critical Role, which was a lot of YouTube videos to listen to, so it slowed down my usual audio book consumption. A hole I’m still trying to dig out of. I mean I have unspent audible credits. How can I live like this? But on the up side it made this post at least kind of manageable and not super long. I should really keep track of like movies and TV that I’m watching and do something similar.