2022: Year in Review

It was an interesting year for reading. It started one way and morphed into something else. I read a lot of short stories early on, and moved on to more novels. And there were things from the past that came back, some of which weren't listed in the blog last year, but will get a mention here.



Novels, Novellas, and Short Story Collections/Anthologies

Of the 25 books listed below, all but 1 was read to completion. And one was utter garbage. A few were anthologies and a couple were novellas in book form. I think every single one of them was an e-book, except for The Dream Peddler which was partly read in paperback and mostly listened to as an audiobook. Surprisingly, only 8 of them are Book club selections, and one was the runner up for a book from the previous year. I don't know why it's only 8. The Expanse series mucked up my schedule a little bit.

  • Miracle of Deck 34 and Other Yuletide Tales (Olsen/Ashby)
  • The Witch of the North Pole (Snow)
  • Beyond the Waterfall Door (Cooper)
  • Steampunk!
  • My Best Friend's Exorcism (Hendrix)
  • John Dies at the End (Paragin)
  • The Dream Peddler
  • Abaddon's Gate (Corey)
  • Caliban's Way (Corey)
  • Leviathan Wakes (Corey)
  • The Graveyard Book (Gaiman)
  • The School for Good Mothers (Chan)
  • The Deep (Solomon)
  • The Easy Life in Kamusari (Miura)
  • The Guest List (Foley)
  • Envy of Angels
  • Me & the Monkey
  • The Book of Koli (Carey)
  • An Ignorant Witch (Graham)
  • Armored Saint (Cole)
  • Southern Spirits (Fox)
  • Reincarnation Blues (Poore)
  • Super City Cops #1: Avenging Amethyst (DeCandido)
  • Foe (Reid)
  • Greegs and Ladders (Mitchell and Mendlow)


Middle Grade and Children's books

These three came from mailing lists or from Amazon's World Book Day:

  • Puzzled (Nichols)
  • Jerry the Squirrel, Volume 1 (Robinson)
  • The Caiman (Manrique/Paris)


Old Magazine

I really wanted to keep the magazine thing going.That is, I liked the idea of reading 50-year-old sci-fi magazines. I even thought I could expand it by alternately Galaxy and If. It was too much. What finally did it in, besides the fact that I was never going to be principled enough to convert this into a column for Tor or someone else, were the Expanse books, which took a lot of time, and that silly counter in Kindle showing that I've read for nearly 500 days in a row. The problem is that the counter doesn't seem to count PDF files as reading books, so any day I read Analog, I had to read something else, too. I never actually finished July's issue, and I didn't go back and read the serials for this year. Maybe I'll try again in 2023, but I'm not pendiling them in just yet.

I thought I actually read one issue of "IF", but if I had, I didn't make an entry in the blog for it.

  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact July 1972
  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact June 1972
  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact May 1972
  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact April 1972
  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact March 1972
  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact February 1972
  • ANALOG PLUS 50: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact January 1972
  • Galaxy PLUS 50: Galaxy Magazine, January-February 1972


Other Short Stories

In January, I tried collecting all the stories that were published by Daily Science Fiction and Flash Fiction Magazine, using the links that they email me daily or weekly (respectively). I think I even managed to make an ebook out of DSF. Two problems with this were that it was time-consuming to collect them all in book form, and I tried to coment on each individual story, which wasn't practical. I have since tried to get published in Flash Fiction, but reading one month of their stories, I could tell that I wasn't writing what they were looking for. (And I wasn't writing specifically for them because if I didn't sell the story, what would I do with it?).

Daily Science Fiction will soon cease publication. They stopped accepting manuscripts a while ago. I may go back through my email to read the old stories. All of them are on the website, but they aren't categorized in a way that makes it easy to access them. This is likely by design.

The stories from The Arcanist are the winners, runners-up and also-rans of themed contest for the past five or six years. So about 40 stories total.

Finally, there was a second collection of stories from eSpec Books' Kickstarter campaigns. As I've read them from shortest to longest, most of the short stories are done with and I'm at the short novel level. That's not to say more short stories won't pop up as new campaigns come along.

  • "The Arcanist" story collections (multiple)
  • A Bushel and a Peck of eSpec Stories
  • Daily Science Fiction, February 2022
  • Flash Fiction Magazine, January 2022
  • Daily Science Fiction, January 2022


Manga


There were two entries covering My Hero Academia Volumes 22 Through 31 and Volume 32 became available at the end of the year. It got very dark.

Not listed on the blog was One-Piece, which took me some time to find the last book that I read. I remembered some things but not others. I finally got to the shipbuilders at Water Seven, which seemed familar but I couldn't remember the ending. I read two volumes of One Piece, after skimming the three before them.

Non-fiction

Fewer than usual, I think. I carried Eating to Extinction back in forth on the subway in hardcover for a month before giving up on it. Then I borrowed the ebook from the library. Interesting reading, probably my favorite book of the year.

The rest include a very old humor book, writing tips, selling tips, a cookbook (with "Geometry" and "Pasta" in the title), random legends, and information on whiskey.

  • Eating to Extinction
  • The Geometry of Pasta (Hilderbrand, Kenedy, Vandy)
  • The Literary Handyman: More Tips from the Handyman (Ackley-McPhail)
  • Famous Legends From Portugal (Abrantes)
  • At Wit's End (Bombeck)
  • Exactly How I Promote and Sell Books (Dee)
  • Whiskey (Diller)


Gaming Books

There were a few gaming books, but not enough to merit a blog entry yet. Most of those were from Philip J. Reed. There were a couple others, which will go in a different post when it gets to enough pages.



Summary

So there were about 50 blog entries dedicated to reading. They include 25 books (plus 1 more), 7 (or 8?) magazines, 5 bundles of flash fiction or short stories, about 14 volumes of manga, and 6 (plus 1) nonfiction books. Not a bad year.

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