Well, it’s nearly the end of the year and we are eager to hear about your favorite reads of 2013.
What is the best book you read in 2013 and why did you love it? It doesn’t have to be a book that was published in 2013 and it doesn’t have to be speculative fiction, either. We just want to share some great reading material.
Feel free to post a full review of the book here, or a link to the review on your blog, or just write a few sentences about why you thought it was awesome.
(And don’t forget that we always have plenty more reading recommendations on our Fanlit Faves page and our 5-Star SFF page.)
As always, one commenter will choose a book from our stacks. (We just added some new books).
We’ve got a few GIVEAWAYS still current.
NEXT WEEK: FanLit’s Best of the Year list! (And a really great giveaway from Tor.)
I’ll have my Best of 2013 post up tomorrow, but I can say Gideon Smith and the Mechanical Girl by David Barnett, The Marching Dead by Lee Battersby, and The Iron Wolves by Andy Remic are the books that provided me with the most sheer enjoyment. All three were fun, fantastic reads that I would recommend to any genre fans.
I absolutely loved Ace of Skulls, by Chris Wooding. It was a great adventure in itself, but also a worthy wrap-up to the Ketty Jay series. And amongst all the thrills and spills, I had a real tear in my eye when … oops! Sorry, can’t tell you. Spoilers, sweetie!
I also loved Blue Remembered Earth, by Alastair Reynolds, which was futuristic, but not so much as to be inaccessible. I was rapidly turning the pages to find out what happened, even as I was fascinated by everything that was going on in that particular moment.
There is no way I can come up with only one book. For goodness’ sake I have 31 five star reads for 2013! However, here are some standouts:
Miles Vorkosigan – the entire series I discovered and listened to on audio book this year. Fabulous.
Thief Errant, Hilari Bell – different and interesting and fun quirky fantasy.
The Finishing School series by Gail Carriger – highly recommended to listen to this on audio read by the fabulous Moira Quirk.
The Palace Job, Patrick Weeks – good, fun fantasy.
Dragonback series Timothy Zahn – wonderful middlegrade scifi with a thief and a dragon.
Katya’s World, Jonathan L. Howard – interesting and intense YA scifi without teen romantic angst.
Cry Baby Hollow by Aimee Love – very fun urban fantasy set in rural Tenessee.
My favorite book of 2013 was one that I had read several decades before. As I then wrote after this reread: Up until last week, I hadn’t read Robert Silverberg’s brilliant sci-fi novel “Downward to the Earth” in almost 27 years, but one scene remained as fresh in my memory as on my initial perusal: the one in which the book’s protagonist, Edmund Gundersen, comes across a man and a woman lying on the floor of a deserted Company station on a distant world, their still-living bodies covered in alien fluid that is being dripped upon them by a basket-shaped organism, whilst they themselves act as gestating hosts to some parasitic larvae. This scene, perhaps an inspiration for the similar happenings in the “Alien” film of a decade later, is simply unforgettable, but as a recent rereading of the book has served to demonstrate, it is just one of many superbly rendered sequences in this great piece of work. Originally appearing as a four-part serial starting in the November 1969 issue of “Galaxy” magazine–just one of six major sci-fi novels that Silverberg saw published that year–“Downward to the Earth” made its debut in book form in 1970. A perennial fan favorite ever since, and chosen for inclusion in David Pringle’s excellent overview volume “Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels,” it is a work that its author has expressed only a belated appreciation for himself, in the face of near universal praise.
The book takes place in the year 2248, when Gundersen, the former administrator of Holman’s World, returns to the planet eight years after Earth has relinquished all colonial claims. The planet is now called Belzagor by its two dominant life forms: the nildoror–which resemble elephants except for their green color, additional set of tusks, cranial ridges…and purple dung–and the sulidoror, 10-foot-tall, shaggy, bipedal entities with tapirlike snouts. Drawn back to Belzagor to both visit the few remaining Earthmen still on the planet and to investigate the mysterious nildoror ceremony of “rebirth,” which no Earthman has ever witnessed, Gundersen, as it turns out, has a third reason for his return: a sense of guilt arising from the manner in which he had formerly treated the nildoror, patronizing them and even interfering with a group in the midst of a rebirth pilgrimage. Thus, we follow Gundersen as he travels from the steaming jungles of Belzagor’s central region and up to the so-called Mist Country of its more northerly zone, encountering old friends and running across an amazing array of alien flora and fauna, and are ultimately vouchsafed a look at the truly mind-blowing, psychedelic ceremony of rebirth itself….
Like all truly superior sci-fi, “Downward to the Earth” is the sort of novel that just bursts with some imaginative idea or unexpected touch on every single page. It is a terrific feat of the imagination, wonderfully well written by Silverberg (who, at this point, had already seen around 40 novels published since his first, “Revolt on Alpha C,” in 1954), and with fascinating characters, both alien and human. It is also, typical of its author, a highly literate affair, with numerous allusions to the Bible, to Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” to English poet Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Dover Beach,” and to Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (one of Gundersen’s old friends on the planet, who undergoes a disastrous rebirth himself, is named Kurtz). Belzagor itself is wonderfully described by Silverberg; not only the jungles and the Mist Country, but also the mysterious Central Plateau region and the mirror-bright, crystalline wasteland known as the Sea of Dust. Perhaps best of all, however, are the descriptions of all the grotesque animals and plants to be found on Belzagor: the tiger moss, the razor shark, the monkeylike munziror, the jelly-crabs, the mobile fungoids and on and on…plus, of course, that bright-red, wall-hanging basket thing! Topography is also memorable in the novel, with the 1,600-meter-high, triple-tiered Shangri-La Falls–where Gundersen visits his old flame Seena and her body-hugging pet amoeba–and the mountain of rebirth in the Mist Country being both figurative and literal standouts. Silverberg, apparently, wrote this novel after a recent trip to East Africa, and his primary intention with his book is a laudable one: to show that the native races of a region (or, by extension, a planet) may have a LOT more on the ball, as far as intelligence and culture are concerned, than their imperialist occupiers are willing to admit. Here, the truth about the nildoror and sulidoror, as regards their cultures and how the two races are connected, comes as a real eye-opener to both Gundersen and the reader. “Gundy” is a likable protagonist, only seeking to atone for past instances of malfeasance, and he makes for a good companion as we explore this rather intimidating planet; a planet that Silverberg, through his great skill, makes us see, feel, smell, taste and hear. Pringle writes that it is sci-fi “done with feeling,” and that the book is “very well described, [with] several pieces of memorable grotesquerie.” I happen to love this novel, all the way to its wonderful, transcendent conclusion, in which our protagonist gets precisely what he deserves. A pity that Silverberg never chose to return to Belzagor, as he did to the world of Majipoor on so many occasions. It is a mysterious, exotic, dangerous and yet beautiful world, one that I’m sure all lovers of intelligent sci-fi will love to immerse themselves in. As you can tell, this is one of my favorite science fiction novels, and comes more than highly recommended. Just wondering, though, Mr. Silverberg…where can I purchase one of those monomolecular jungle blankets?
Sandy, that scene sticks with me, too! There are several other scenes from that book that have stayed with me. Several.
I know what you mean, Kat. Like I said, it had been almost three decades since my last reading of this terrific book, and I found myself recalling much of it even before I started in on it again. Credit Silverberg for being able to come up with some truly incisive images and scenarios for his readers….
I’ve only rated one book a full 5 stars on LibraryThing this year (plenty of 4.5 stars, but only one 5), and that was Replay by Ken Grimwood. I’m a sucker for time loop stories, and this is one of the best as the loop starts out spanning 25 years and gets shorter with each successive iteration.
Anything by Joe Abercrombie! I just discovered him this year, when his trilogy was translated in my country. It’s the best fantasy I’ve read in the last few years.
I also reread Bujold’s Vorkosigan and Chalion books this year. She’s one on my favorite authors.In my opinion, everything she’s ever written is perfect.
I think I’m going to go with River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay. (Which reminds me, I need to review it! I never did because Bill did it so well!)
Cry Baby Hollow by Aimee Love makes my list too.
Frank Tuttle’s Brown River Queen
Chosen by Benedict Jacka
and
Clean Sweep by Ilona Andrews.
April, if you live in the USA, you win a book of your choice from our stacks.
Please contact me (Marion) with your choice and a US address. Happy reading!
Woohoo! Merry Christmas to me!