2017 Year in Review - SF/Fantasy Reading, Part 3: Least Favorite Books and Unfinished Books

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 (I know at least one of my least favorite books shows up on a few Best-of lists).  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 2017:

1.  A Conjuring of Light by V.E. Schwab (Shades of Magic #3):

(Review on twitter here)

  A Conjuring of Light was a book that I was really looking forward to coming into this year.  It's the conclusion of Schwab's Shades of Magic trilogy, preceded by A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows.  I really liked the first book in the trilogy, and my mixed opinions on the second stemmed mainly from the book basically ending before any climax - but I greatly enjoyed the main characters Kell and Lila and was looking forward to seeing how things ended.

  But a Conjuring of Light decides to take half of the book away from those great characters to focus upon others, resulting in some incredibly lousy pacing.  The book goes from two points of view to seven, and most of the new points of view are just not interesting.  Add in a subplot of political intrigue featuring the lesser characters IN THE MIDDLE OF A PLOT IN WHICH THE MAIN CHARACTERS ARE TRYING TO SAVE THE WORLD, and it's just ugh.  Oh and the book teases events happening on our Earth that will have some impact, only for the whole thing to turn into some kind of joke about mad King George (no I'm not kidding).

  Basically, this book earns its spot on this list because, while it has some interesting characters, it forces us to spend a lot of time with ones I couldn't care less about, which is incredibly frustrating.  The book cried for an editor to tell the author: "No, why don't we stick to what worked in the prior two novels," but apparently one was not to be found.  Sigh.

2.   The Caledonian Gambit by Dan Moren

(Review on the blog here)

 The Caledonian Gambit gets on this list not because I was frustrated (like two of the other books on this list) or because it was preposterous or wrong, but for one simple reason:  it was just plain boring.  Our main characters (ex-pilot with PTSD Eli, Super Spy Kovalic) are generic archetypes and are barely flushed out, and the whole worldbuilding is even more generic than the two characters.  To give an example of this: the book features two superpowers in the Galaxy - the evil Empire and the Commonwealth.  But the book fails to give any explanation for why the Empire is evil (or the commonwealth good), and our one protagonist who switches sides never seems to have any feelings either way on the matter.  It's just bizarre, and makes it so that I had no reason to care about the conflict whatsoever.

  Add in some rather cringy dialogue and internal monologues that sound like nothing any real person would make, and well....you get a solidly built plot with nothing to stand out whatsoever.  I kept listening to the audiobook version of this book expecting for something interesting to happen but nope.  Nothing.

3.  Quantum Night by Robert Sawyer

(Review on the blog here)

  One frequent use of the SciFi/Fantasy genre is to take an idea from the real world and to explore it to its utter extreme ends.  Often these experiments result in fantastic works, which in turn present real ideas for readers to think about for the real world.  Sometimes it results in something that seems incredibly silly, even if the intent seems relatively good.  It helps to have a good idea though - if the idea is bad, well the result is also going to be bad.  And while setup may be necessary for exploring the idea, you kind of need to leave the bulk of the book for the exploration.

  Quantum Night fails both of these latter two points - nearly all of the book is setup for the implementation of the idea, the short exploration of which is just incredibly silly.  And since the idea is so silly (basically the idea is that everyone falls into three categories of personalities: sociopaths, people with a conscience, and follower-zombies and that a technology could possibly flip people between these categories), the setup required to explore the idea is incredibly preposterous as well (see this twitter thread here).  I tend to applaud books that try to show off ideas and fail trying (my 6.5 grade is full of these books), but Quantum Night is just so off the wall for its hilariously stupid idea that it has to go down as one of the worst/dumbest things I've read all year.

4.  Barbary Station by R.E. Stearns

(Review on the blog here)

  Barbary Station is a book with a lot of interesting ideas in concept (unlike Quantum Night): Lesbian Engineers - one a mechanical engineer and one a computer engineer - hijacking a colony ship to join a pirate crew only to have to face down a murderous artificial intelligence!  It then conducts the greatest sin imaginable - it made me not care about any of it.  The book starts out with our main protagonists already together as a stable couple, and then basically separates them for the entire plot, never showing the reader any reason to get why or how they wound up together - the only reason the reader would know they're a couple who care about each other is that each occasionally thinks about how they love the other...and that's it.  Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have a book start with characters already having gotten together, but this book does it in such a way that I kept disbelieving that these two made any sense together at all.

  Moreover that interesting plot in concept doesn't really work out in execution.  The hacking sections just seem like magic that didn't really grab my attention and felt really derivative, and the action segments with our other protagonist never really felt like they had serious tension.  A major reveal 2/3 the way through leads to nothing, and several ideas are brought up only to never come up again.  Just a total disappointment of a book - I should never thinking "that's it?" repeatedly throughout.

5.  Amberlough by Lara Elena Donnelly

  Amberlough is actually the next book I'm going to review (I didn't want to end 2017 on a bad note, so I had my final review be of the Tiger's Daughter), but I completed it this week, so it's counting for 2017.  Amberlough's sin is different from the four books above in one key way: it's not that I was not interested or bored by the primary character - I kind of hated him.  He's a gay spy for a republican government who gets made on a mission to investigate the rising fascist party and turns double agent to try and save himself and his lover.  But well it's hard to like or find relate-able a character who basically a character who chooses the help fantasy nazis in order to save his lover, especially when that lover (one of the two other main characters) is fully capable of saving himself.

  Add in to this the fact that the political intrigue of the book isn't spelled out well and the main character's espionage machinations are never particularly interesting - nor do they seem like the type of thing the fascist party would really need mind you - and you have a book where there really wasn't much that I was interested in.  The third main character is the only bright spot - indeed this book could be seen as an origin story for her adventures in the sequel - but it's not enough to save a book where I just wanted the main character to die as quickly as possible.

Dishonorable Mentions:

The following books were also failing books, but not ones that are worth expounding on:

1. Star's End by Cassandra Rose Clarke (Review)
2. The Mortal Tally by Sam Sykes (Review)
3. Provenance by Ann Leckie (Review)
4. Noumenon by Marina Lostetter (Review)
5. The Bloodprint by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Review)
6. Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand (Review)
7. Arabella of Mars by David Levine  (Review)

Books I Started and Failed to Complete in 2017:

The Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton

I started The Dreaming Void as an audiobook, after having seen a positive review.  2 Hours of listening later, I had no clue what was going on.  So yeah, I stopped there.  As I've said on twitter, if I'm not interested 100 pages in - or for audiobooks, 2 hours in - then I'm not wasting my time finishing the book absent other circumstances (I make an extra effort to finish award nominees for instance).  I'm usually very liberal about what "not interested" means - if I have an inkling of interest, I usually continue.  But well, if I have no clue what's going on after that point, then I don't have an inkling.  Pass.

Tremontaine (Season 1) by Various Authors (Serial Box Publishing)

Tremontaine is a prequel to Ellen Kushner's Riverside series (starting with Swordpoint, which I've never read), published one episode/serial at a time by Serial Box Publishing.  I've greatly enjoyed one other Serial Box product (Bookburners) and liked decently enough another (The Witch Who Came In From the Cold), but Tremontaine failed to grab my interest.  Four chapters in, we had a well described setting, several clearly distinct main characters, and....no overarching plot.  Again, if the characters were amazing, I could go along with that, but for the most part they fit into somewhat typical archetypes, and so I didn't feel like going any further.  Others may have more interest in this world, which was definitely more interesting than the characters, if only there was a clear plot to grab me.  Ah well.

Up Against It by M.J. Locke

It's hard to describe how exactly Up Against It bothered me - the book was recommended by a friend on twitter, but the writing style just bothered the hell out of me.  Check out the Amazon plot summary - does that wording feel weird and awkward to you?  The whole book about 100 pages in was like that.  And so, despite there being promise in the setting and plot, I just couldn't keep reading.  Again, doesn't mean the book is bad - if you don't mind that writing style, you might enjoy this book.  But it was not for me.

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And that's it for 2017 from me.  Hopefully 2018 is somehow an even better year in books, which will be tough because 2017 is gonna be a hard year to top.