The Sword and Laser discussion

What books did you read this year and give 5 stars to?

I had a good year mostly owing to a few of my favorite authors.
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson
Lock In by John Scalzi
Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward Lerner
Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
The Human Division by John Scalzi
Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore
Mindscan by Robert Sawyer
The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

I read 29 books: 11 5-star, 12 4-star, 6 3-star and no 2 or 1-star.
18 science fiction, 9 fantasy, 1 mystery, 1 non fiction.

Great thread! My SFF 5 star books this year:

Spear by Nicola Griffith
Lords of Uncreation by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Translation State by Ann Leckie
Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer by Garth Nix

That's it. A lot of 4 star reads for me, but not very generous with the 5 stars. (I did rate a number of history books 5 stars, FWIW)

Only one for me, Tress of the Emerald Sea. I mean technically I guess I also rated How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems 5 stars, but I read most of that last year and then forgot to go back to it.

Many 4 star books, but that's not for this thread :)

Mine are:

Saga, Volume 11 Brian K. Vaughan
System Collapse Martha Wells
The Chalice of the Gods Rick Riordan
Pairing Up
Broken Light Joanne Harris
Magic Claims Ilona Andrews
The Ferryman Justin Cronin
Superman: Son of Kal-El, Vol. 1: The Truth Tom Taylor
Superman: Son of Kal-El, Vol. 2: The Rising Tom Taylor
Superman: Son of Kal-El, Vol. 3: Battle for Gamorra Tom Taylor
Children of Time Adrian Tchaikovsky
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath Garth Nix
Low Chicago
Nettle & Bone T. Kingfisher

Sword - 35 books
Untethered Sky - my #1 Fantasy book of the year
Bookshops & Bonedust
Within the Sanctuary of Wings
Nettle & Bone
Posthumous Education
Age of War

Laser- 80 books
The Misfit Soldier - my #1 Sci-fi book of the year
Lost in Time
Light Chaser

Comics - 100 books
Nightwing, Vol. 2: Get Grayson - my #1 graphic novel of the year
Nightwing, Vol. 3: The Battle for Blüdhaven's Heart
Manifest Destiny, Vol. 8: Sacrificium & Reditus
The Variants
Junkyard Joe
Time Before Time Vol. 4
Minor Threats, Vol. 1: A Quick End to a Long Beginning

I only had 1 SF one

Nettle & Bone

3 non-SF, in which I think 2 of must be mistakes, but too lazy to go look again.

A quick review shows I did not rate any books five stars this year. Perhaps I'm a hard case. Didn't give it much thought.

Memorable four-star series' were:
* Lost Fleet
* Fred the Vampire Accountant

My 5 stars:

Turns out I'm a sucker for cozy(-ish) fiction:
- Bookshops & Bonedust
- A Prayer for the Crown-Shy
- The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy
- A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking
- Wyngraf Issue #1

And becoming a Brandon Sanderson fanboy:
- Oathbringer
- Rhythm of War
- Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

The following were unexpectedly good:
- Noir
- Razzmatazz

And this was the final book in what was by far the best trilogy I've read in a long time:
- Kings of Heaven

To round things off, I re-read this to confirm it was still huge fun:
- Kings of the Wyld

I had 7 five star reads

Laser:

Klara and the Sun
Witch King

Sword

Ring Shout
When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain
Into the Riverlands

Other

Ten Steps to Nanette
The Living Sea of Waking Dreams

Okay, I'll play.
I read about 90 books. (GR says 95, but that includes some short works.) About half were SF&F. I gave lots of four stars but was very parsimonious with five star ratings.

SF&F:
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

Not SF&F:
Hunter's Moon by Dana Stabenow
Five Decembers by James Kestrel
Gods of Howl Mountain by Taylor Brown
Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution by Mike Duncan

Trike wrote: "...
Laser- 80 books
The Misfit Soldier - my #1 Sci-fi book of the year..."

Oh yeah. I also really liked that one. Read it in 2022 and gave it four stars. Basically, I am now a Michael Mammay fanboy. In 2023 I read his Generation Ship, which is quite different from The Misfit Soldier but also very good. (Again 4 stars)

Tw novella series that continued their excellents
Across the Sorrow Sea
System Collapse
Book two in the series that continued the Excellent's of Book One
The Bitter Crown
Legacy of Brick & Bone
The Words of Kings and Prophets
House of Odysseus

Books that finished a series and nailed it.
Esrahaddon
Traitor By Anthony Ryan

New Series that started off with a bang :
The Wickwire Watch
Infinity Gate
The Will of the Many
Empire of the Vampire
The Book That Wouldn’t Burn

Clyde wrote: "Trike wrote: "...
Laser- 80 books
The Misfit Soldier - my #1 Sci-fi book of the year..."

Oh yeah. I also really liked that one. Read it in 2022 and gave it four stars. Basically, I am now a Michael Mammay fanboy. In 2023 I read his Generation Ship, which is quite different from The Misfit Soldier but also very good. (Again 4 stars)..."

I immediately put Generation Ship on my TBR after enjoying Misfit. I gave Planetside 3 stars but didn’t write a review, probably because I was laid low by Covid. I’ll have to finish off that series.

Y'all are reminding me that I've been wanting to reread Heinlein's generation-ship book Orphans of the Sky. I recall a pretty solid story followed by an atrociously bad ending. Probably on reread I will just roll eyes at the ending as Heinlein saying "gotta finish this bundle of ideas somehow."

It's not at LAPL but is a cheap buy on Kindle. Could work it in next.

EDIT: I'm high. It's available as a twofer at LAPL. Some older Kindle versions show "not available" but there's a fairly cheap revised version on Amazon. Anyhoo, LAPL it is.

John (Taloni) wrote: "Y'all are reminding me that I've been wanting to reread Heinlein's generation-ship book Orphans of the Sky. I recall a pretty solid story followed by an atrociously bad ending. Probably on reread I..."

It’s also called Universe, and there’s a version that was part of an Ace Double or something similar.

2023
8 Swords
The only 5 rating was The Library at Mount Char.
I think mostly because the plot kept surprising me and that seems to be a rare thing these days.

6 Lasers
The only 5 rating was Children of Time
Again, mostly because I didn't see the ending coming but also because the time jumps were handled really well.

I'm stingy with 5 star ratings... but good job S&L on picking books that surprised me. :)

7/30 graphic novels were 5stars. Mostly because I read a lot of Hellboy. My favourite last year was The Flintstones: Deluxe Edition. I must read more of Mark Russell's stuff this year.

John (Taloni) wrote: "Y'all are reminding me that I've been wanting to reread Heinlein's generation-ship book Orphans of the Sky. I recall a pretty solid story followed by an atrociously bad ending. Probably on reread I..."

Universe (a novelette) and Common Sense (a novella) were published separately in the magazines but then combined as a novel under the title Orphans of the Sky. You'll sometimes still see things referring to the shorter works as separate entities.

^ Yep, I clicked the link for Universe and saw it was 67 pages so made the connection. That's one reason to love the Goodreads format. They give you actual page counts. Those can be a little off but not much. For some reason book word counts are not easily available.

Mine this year were:

Nettle & Bone
The Mountain in the Sea
Princess Cora and the Crocodile
Saevus Corax Captures the Castle
...and a couple of re-reads.

Out of 24 books finished in 2023 I gave the following 5 stars

Tress of the Emerald Sea
Mistborn: The Final Empire
MISTBORN BOOK 2: THE WELL OF ASCENSION
The Hero of Ages
Nettle & Bone
Children of Time
The Kaiju Preservation Society
System Collapse

I used to worry that I gave too many books a 5 star rating, but then I realized that
1. I tend to give sci fi and fantasy et al books an extra point on average as "it is my wheelhouse"
2. this book club is very good at choosing excellent books to read, and the ratings I was giving were more of a reflection of the quality of the books being chosen.

After that moment of existential crisis I relaxed into the Goodreads system. After reading a book if I think "it was amazing" then it gets a 5 star review.

Three five-star SFF books for me:
Avatar, the Last Airbender: The Legacy of Yangchen
Yellowface
Saga, Volume 3

One book more from 2022 and 2021 when there were only two books for each.

Seven new five-star SFF reads in 2023 for me:

Proud Pink Sky
Salt Magic, Skin Magic
War with the Newts
Borders of Infinity
Red Planet
The Smoke Ring
Divergent

And some five-star SFF re-reads:

A Stitch in Time (I'm so happy Andrew Robinson finally recorded an audiobook version! Hearing the voice of Garak himself narrate the story really brought it to life - and made me want to watch DS9 again.)
Project Hail Mary
Whyborne and Griffin #1-3
Whyborne and Griffin, Books 4-6: Necropolis, Bloodline, and Hoarfrost

This year I rated 6 books with 5 stars:

A Civil Campaign
Diplomatic Immunity
The Hero of Ages
Moorings
The Sandman, Vol. 2: The Doll's House
Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other

In total I read 104 books, 29,110 pages. Average score was 3.4 which is seems to be right on point. According to Goodreads the average book length was 279 pages, but that's totally inaccurate due to the way Goodreads treats audio books as the number of CDs and not pages.

Hmmm. It seems I don't fill out the "Read" date on my goodreads. So scanning thru books I added in 2023 and manually determing whether I read them last year or just recorded them leads to the following 5* reads:

The House of Rust - I loved this coming-of-age-but-not-YA novel of a young girl rescuing her father and then finally breaking the expectations of society to follow her heart
Arboreality - a sf-lit book of connected stories of people living through the reality of climate change in the near future
The Ruthless Lady's Guide to Wizardry - a previous S&L pic that I was catching up on. Loved it.
The Passenger - what can I say, I love Cormac McCarthy and the way he puts words on a page.
Siren Queen - S&L introduced me to Nghi Vo and while I'm not sure if I read this at the end of 2022 or the beginning of 2023, her tale of magic in the silver age of Hollywood is captivating.

42 books read last of year of which I have 12 5 star books. Not sure if I'm an easy grader or just picked up awesome books. My 5 star reads were:

Fiction
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries
Sea of Tranquility
Silver Nitrate
In the Lives of Puppets
Ninth House
Hell Bent
Legends & Lattes
A Mirror Mended
Unlikely Animals
Cat's Cradle

Non Fiction
The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

None! I'm fairly miserly with 5 star reviews and nothing quite captured my imagination enough last year.

Several 4 star reviews, and quite a few of them were S&L picks. Glad to still be listening to the show, even if I largely fell off the forums this year.