2018 Year in Review - SciFi/Fantasy Reading, Part 3: My Least Favorite Books and Books I Just Could Not Finish

Now it's time for the flipside of the last post in this series: time to talk about the books that I did NOT enjoy, as well as the books that I started and could not finish, and some common themes among these books that led to these feelings.  As should be evident, these are my personal opinions - it's certainly possible others will disagree - One of these books earned a Hugo Nomination, so obviously people liked it!  Also, my comments are solely about the works involved, not the authors themselves.  But if you want to know which books I would suggest avoiding going forward, read on:





Least Favorite Completed Books Read in 2018:

Books I Absolutely Hated:

1. New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson: (Review)

New York 2140 was the second book by Kim Stanley Robinson I've attempted to read, after his 2015 novel Aurora, which I couldn't get through and DNF (it wasn't bad, just I was bored after 100 pages).  But when New York 2140 earned a Hugo Nomination, it was inevitable that I was going to give KSR another shot, and for completeness sake for my Hugo Review series, DNFing was not an option.

All of which is to say that if NY2140 was not nominated for a Hugo, I totally would have put the book down in under 100 pages.  See, this isn't really a book - it's the author's attempt to write a tract on economic ideas based upon modern economic crises and happenings awfully dressed up as a Science Fiction novel.  Science Fiction is a genre that is meant to put forth ideas and messages for readers to absorb and to take into their daily lives, but the best SF does this in ways that get the reader interested and draw parallels to the ordinary lives of the readers.  This book doesn't even try to do that and it is absurdly noticeable - for example, the characters are constantly talking about 20th/21st century real life economic happenings as being of key importance despite taking place 120 years in the future in a post-flood caused by global warming world which obviously has seen a lot of major events happen in the interim.  It is absurdly distracting, and the characters Robinson uses to try and put forth these ideas range from "okay" to "incredibly annoying" and the plot is held together by major coincidences to make sure everyone comes together in the end.

So yeah, I gave NY 2140 a 2 out of 10 and would not have finished it had it not been for the Hugo nod.  The book does get better in the back half, as the more annoying characters seem to moderate their extreme personalities as they interact with the rest of the cast, but there's just no forgiving that beginning.  Obviously there's enough people who like this type of book to give this book a Hugo Nomination, but I am absolutely not one of them.

2.  Spectacle by Rachel Vincent (Review)

Spectacle is the worst type of book in my opinion:  a sequel that repeats the plot of its predecessor (Menagerie) and adds nothing interesting whatsoever.  To compound this error, what the book does add is more brutal torture of its characters, as if the author thought people enjoyed the prior book when that book's characters suffered and the sequel therefore should see them suffer more.  And to be frank about it, by suffering, I'm talking about villains physically and sexually abusing the main characters, committing rape and forcibly terminating pregnancies.

The first book in this series, Menagerie, featured its heroine forced into captivity where she and her friends were abused until she led them into breaking free, but avoided going all the way out there with rape and whatnot on-page.  Spectacle doesn't show any restraint and just goes full out, and fails to justify the choice of doing so in any way.

Rape and abuse can be a plot element of a good worthwhile book, but the book cannot just throw it out there willy-nilly and needs to justify its inclusion as a plot element, because these things come with severe implications that must be dealt with.  If a book doesn't want to deal with those implications, there are other choices they can make to show their characters suffering and the evil of the villains, and Spectacle's predecessor did just that.  But Spectacle doesn't justify its use of these elements at all, given that a reader could easily SKIP THIS BOOK ENTIRELY and go from book 1 to book 3 and practically not be lost at all.

Yuck.

Dishonorable Mentions (Books I disliked but had some merits)

1. Romancing the Null by Tina Gower (Review)
2. Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra (Review)
3. Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr by John Crowley (Review)
4. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente (Review)
5. The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman (Review)
6. Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson (Review)
7. Fire Dance by Ilana C. Myer (Review)

Books I DNF-ed (Did Not Finish):

When you read as many books as I do, to stay sane there are times you have to know when to quit a book that you're not enjoying and move on to another.  It helps when, like me, most of these books were obtained via the library and thus I don't have to justify a payment by completing the book, but even books that you buy can sometimes deserve a DNF.  It's just not worth wasting your time to read a book you're actively not enjoying....or even worse, are actively hating.

I DNFed six books this year, for a variety of reasons, which I'll go over briefly:

The Stone in the Skull by Elizabeth Bear

This the first in a new trilogy in a pre-existing world of Bear's and I got about a 100 pages in waiting to find characters or a plot that intrigued me.  And the book jumped back and forth between characters and settings enough that nothing really grabbed me, and I just kept getting bored and distracted by other things.  As such, I put it aside, and never came back to it.  Perhaps had I read the prior work in this world it would've grabbed my interest, but not so much without it.

Blackfish City by Sam J Miller

It's very possible this book gets nominated for some awards and I come back to it, and I did manage to get 60% of the way through it before putting it down.  Blackfish City is an example of a book that's hard to describe - the book had interesting plot elements and was definitely different from much of what I'd read before, with at least a few characters who were marginally interesting, so I wasn't really disliking it or finding myself bored.  And yet, I was never really that into it or that enthused to get back to the book whenever I put it down, and had to force myself to continue.  After a few attempts at doing that, I put the book down to try something else.

Kill The Farm Boy by Delilah S Dawson and Kevin Hearne

This is a comedy fantasy novel, meant from the start to crack jokes with the names of characters and the dialogue and plot situations that emerge, with common fantasy tropes (There's a pathetic dark lord trying to make a name for himself, a "chosen one" who is anything but, etc.) as the basis for the jokes.  And after about six chapters, I didn't find it funny.  Others may have a different sense of humor, but that was a good sign that this book wasn't for mine.

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

Another book I might come back to, The Fated Sky is the sequel to The Calculating Stars, which I enjoyed a good bit and features the same heroine in the next stage of her life, as she attempts to help this alternate space program get to Mars, all the while fighting racial and gender-based discrimination.  I liked the characters and Kowal's writing is very well done.  But this is a book that is very much more of the same material we just went through in The Calculating Stars, and having finished that book a few weeks beforehand, I found myself very un-enthused about reading the same exact type of plot.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

Yet another book I might come back to, I put this one down mainly due to where I was in my own life when I got to part of the plot.  The book tended to have short chapters (10-20 pages in my ereader) before getting to one loooong one (100 pages) in the middle, which made it harder to get through a part in which the main protagonist is currently being an ass to her girlfriend.  Given that I'd just had some relationship issues in my personal life, I really didn't feel like reading this book's plot at that point, especially without the promise of a quick short chapter to get through, so even though I'd found myself pleasantly amused by the book, I put it down.

The Bristling Wood by Katharine Kerr

Speaking of the issues I mentioned above in Spectacle, The Bristling Wood was a book I was looking forward to as an audiobook as the third book in the Deverry Cycle, which I was enjoying quite a bit.  And then for a significant segment of this book our series' heroine is mind controlled into being raped.  I was invested enough in the series at this point, as this occurred 2.5 books in, to very quickly skim the rest of this book and its sequel to see what happens, but damned if I was going to listen to an hour of audiobook of our heroine being forced to have sex with a guy against her own mental will.  (And the fourth book in the series attempts seemingly to excuse the rapist, which just.....hell no).

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So those are the books I did not enjoy or did not finish in 2018.  Hopefully I read less of these in 2019, but there's always going to be some stinkers.