2019 Year in Review - SciFi/Fantasy Reading, Part 3: My Least Favorite Books of the Year

It's time for Part 3 of my recap of my reading in 2019.  Part 1 was a basic summary of what I read, which you can find here.  Part 2 was where I talked about my favorite books of last year, which you can read here.

This Part is less fun, it's my recap of the books I either couldn't finish or just found to be downright bad and not worth your time.  Obviously some of this is subjective - for the 2nd year in a row, one of the book I have on this list actually earned a bunch of awards somehow.  And in a nice twist, the number of books on this list, which tend to be books I score a 5 out of 10 or below, is down to only 3 this year, from nine last year.  And I only DNFed four books overall as far as I can tell, although I might've missed one there.  So yeah, this year was definitely better than last year.


But enough musing around, let's get into the worst of this year's reads:

1.  Shadowblade by Anna Kashina (Full Review Here)

Shadowblade was the worst book I read last year, and unfortunately reading it in audiobook only mad it worse.  It combines an awful plot that involves plot developments that make no sense and revolve around characters making incredibly dumb decisions just for the sake of drama, awful characters who are hard to like (including a lead heroine who basically takes a back seat to the plot in the final act), with really really annoying writing that features no subtlety whatsoever.  The writing seems to suggest that the reader is too dumb to interpret any character actions and motivations without them being spilled out in their entirety, and the characters are too dumb and unlikable for anyone to even care about that.  Unlike the other books on this list, where I can see what the author is trying, there's like no redeeming ideas here - even the action/fight scenes are terrible.  Skip this one.  Skip it and forget you ever saw it.

2.  The Book of M by Pen Shepherd (Full Review Here)

Unlike Shadowblade, The Book of M is clearly trying to work on interesting themes - themes about the importance of memory to who we are, and to what the world is.  And it earned a bunch of award nominations and awards!

It's also really really bad and ridiculous.  The story revolves around ridiculous concepts - people around the world start losing their shadows and then all their memories, and when they misremember parts of reality, they warp reality around them in horrifying destructive ways, causing basically a global apocalypse in merely a few months - but hey, I can deal with that.  The problem is that the main character is horrible, first in his basic refusing to do anything other than control the life of his wife so that she doesn't lose her memory and then continuing to do so when she loses her shadow, then in how he acts throughout trying to find her when she leaves him to try and spare him the pain of losing her.  And while the book has 3 other sort of lead characters, they lose all independence and interest the moment they come into contact with the main character up through the ending, which ends in an absolutely ridiculous twist that just betrays the reader's expectations and which the book promptly fails to do anything with other than to just....end.

I laughed out loud repeatedly at the stupidity and ridiculousness of the situations brought up in this book, and the awful characters just make it worse.

Honorable Mentions of Bad:

3.  Dark Constellations by Pola Oloixarac (Review Here)


Books I Did Not Finish This Year (DNF):

1.  Prince of Dogs by Kate Elliott:

Kate Elliott is one of my favorite authors around today, so I was excited to finally try out the last series of hers I hadn't yet gotten to, her 7 book epic fantasy series, Crown of Stars.  And I liked the first book, King's Dragon.....except that one of our two major protagonists has as her background a horrible sexual abuse plot.  She finishes the book away from that antagonist, and I resolved to go forward now that we were past it.

Turns out we weren't past it, as the antagonist returns in Prince of Dogs, which is book 2.  And yeah, that was it for me, I just have no interest in reading that.  I can read books with rape and sexual abuse, even as backstory, but the amount here was a major no.

2.  Moon over Sojo by Ben Aaronovitch:

Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" series is a major ongoing urban fantasy series these days, which several authors I enjoy seem to love.  It even earned a Best Series nomination.  But book one Midnight Riot (aka Rivers of London) was a book I didn't love due to the main character being a bit of an ass, though I thought some of that might've just been the audio reader.  Tried to read this book, book 2, in ebook form from the library and....nope, still felt the same way.  Alas.

3.  The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai

This was a really weirdly voiced book, with a world that was incredibly confusing, a lead character who kept finding herself drugged unconscious, and a cast who I just didn't care about halfway through.  Honestly, I remember the least about this book of any of the books on this list, so yeah, not much to say here.

4.  The Spectral City by Leanna Renee Hieber:

The Spectral City, unlike the above books, is totally fine, and I got 60% of the way through the audiobook before giving up.  But it's just.....blah, with characters who are predictable tropes and going into an eventual predictable romance and antagonists in a place that the book takes a long long time to get to.  I just got bored, which is rough for an audiobook I have to listen to on my drives.

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Anyhow, that's it for my recap of this past year, and if this is all I have to complain about, it's a good year.  Hopefully next year will basically be as good!