Best Books Read in 2010

Last year, I set out to read more online fiction. I also wished to read more magazines, given I have several issues of Weird Tales and Realms of Fantasy lying around that I still haven't cracked. I may have failed with the magazines, but I did read nearly the entire back catalogues of Goblin Fruit and Scheherezade's Bequest in 2010, along with pieces of The Edge of Propinquity, Ideomancer, Clarkesworld, and a large chunk of the Locus Recommended Reading List.

Although I did better, I still feel like I need to increase my exploration of online venues. I didn't really get to Apex Magazine at all, or Ideomancer, or Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I want to see if the quality of Lightspeed Magazine has improved any since the first few short stories were published. I want to catch up with Stone Telling and read more at Strange Horizons. There are so many brilliant sites publishing excellent fiction these days, and I want to read more widely.

My final reading tallies for the year are as follows:
Books: 77
Magazines: 12
Individual short stories: 38

While trying to whittle my list of books down to a "Top 10 I Read in 2010," I had to give up and settle for a Top 20. I'm okay with that; I read some excellent books this year. (To be honest, though, I cheated a little: a couple of them are properly series, but I couldn't stand to put just one part of the series in question on the list.)

Keep in mind that not all of these books were published in 2010: I just read them in 2010. Also, I'm not putting these books into any particular order. (Also, to be fair, I left off the books that I read in draft because they haven't been published yet.)

Top 20 Books I Read in 2010:

1. Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties by Nicole Kornher-Stace with C.S.E. Cooney
2. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Version by Lewis Carroll and Martin Gardner
3. A Local Habitation & An Artificial Night by Seanan McGuire
4. Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
5. The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip
6. Chicks Dig Time Lords, ed. by Lynne Thomas and Tara O'Shea.
7. Freakangels: Volume 4, by Warren Ellis
8. Feed by Mira Grant
9. The Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O'Malley
10. The Demon's Lexicon & The Demon's Covenant by Sarah Rees Brennan
11. Flora Segunda, Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog by Ysabeau S. Wilce
12. Clementine by Cherie M. Priest
13. The Habitation of the Blessed by Catherynne M. Valente
14. Folktales of England, ed. by Katherine M. Briggs and Ruth L. Tongue
15. Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal
16. The Boys, Volume 1: The Name of the Game by Garth Ennis
17. Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs
18. Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
19. Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett
20. The Hunger Games (series) by Suzanne Collins

( And here's a bit of an expanded list, for those who like reasons with their Top Lists. )

If you'd like to see the complete list of books, magazines, and short stories I read in 2010, please visit this entry.

I'm currently on my fifth book of 2011, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald. You can keep up with my 2011 list here.

Originally posted on January 14th, 2011 at Livejournal.

Read 'Em & Cheer

Generally speaking, I set out to read 50 books in a year: this is my baseline, so to speak, inspired by 50bookchallenge back in 2004. Considering I feel naked without a text to hand and read every day - really, I can't go to sleep if I haven't read in bed - I haven't had any problems meeting this goal. I have generally resisted bumping up the baseline to 100, because I don't tend to read that fast and it is actually about quality rather than quantity.

However, Goodreads has started a handy widget on their site that enables you to set a Reading Goal and watch your progress over the course of the year. Faced with that, I decided to set my personal goal at 75.

I suppose it should surprise no one that I'm already five books in. (Okay, maybe it's a little surprising. To be fair, two of those were mostly read in 2010.)

Another goal that I set myself last year and intend to continue this year is making time to read more online fiction. Additionally, I intend to read more print magazines (mostly genre, such as Weird Tales and Fantasy & Science Fiction).

I also enjoy participating in some book clubs, such as the monthly reading challenges at calico_reaction and the Women of Science Fiction challenge that Dreams and Speculation is doing this year.

Beyond these, I'm engaging in the following projects:


THE PATRICIA A. MCKILLIP CHALLENGE

I'm actually trying this one again: I began it in 2009, tried again in 2010, and still never managed to fulfill the criteria. I've only read one McKillip novel each year for the past two, and both The Changeling Sea and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld were beautiful. This year, I'm going to read The Bards of Bone Plain, her newest work, along with Harrowing the Dragon and Solstice Wood. For real, this time.


THE SHERLOCK HOLMES CANON CHALLENGE

Last year, my husband and I decided to read the entirety of the Sherlock Holmes canon and also watch the complete Jeremy Brett collection of Sherlock Holmes television adventures. For those unfamiliar with the metrics, that includes: 4 novels, 58 short stories, and 41 television episodes.

As I wrote last year:

Another thing I've been meaning to do forever is read more Sherlock Holmes' stories! My husband idly suggested the other day that, if we really wanted to, we could watch the entire Jeremy Brett collection of Sherlock Holmes adventures. I had just been perusing an annotated edition of the Sherlock Holmes stories and that suggestion made me leap up, cackling and rubbing my hands together briskly as I conceived a grand plan! That plan being that we would read, together, each story and then watch the Jeremy Brett episode. It is evidence of my husband's stout heart (and keen literary interest) that he immediately proved game for such an endeavor. (Also, that he really enjoys Sherlock Holmes fiction.)

A couple of things prevented us from executing this grand plan within the twelvemonth. One was that the Jeremy Brett television series does not always follow the publication chronology of the stories. Consider also that the Brett series wasn't available fully on Netflix Instant until relatively recently, and you can see why we'd have difficulty organizing our episode-viewings in tandem with our readings.

While Andy mainlined ACD throughout the year, reading nothing else, I read a couple of Holmes novels and then wandered off to other fiction, and only made a concerted effort to pack away more of the anthologies once six months of 2010 was gone. Given how much else I read this year, I still felt that consuming half the canon was pretty exemplary. Andy should certainly be lauded for having completed the reading part of the challenge within 2010, though!

In retrospect, however, I feel this is a much better two-year challenge. I'm poised to read the remaining 21 short stories and two novels. I've added the Jeremy Brett episodes to our Netflix Instant queue, and so I'm ready to go there as well.

The challenge is afoot!



(Also, you can keep track of these formal reading challenges in my sidebar.)