It’s the first Thursday of the month. Time to report!
What’s the best book you read in November 2022 and why did you love it? It doesn’t have to be a newly published book, or even SFF, or even fiction. 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.
One commenter with a U.S. mailing address will choose one of these prizes:
- a FanLit T-shirt (we have sizes M, L, XL)
- a book from our stacks.
- a $5 Amazon gift card (this is the only option for non-USA addresses).
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Best in genre was a reread: Winter’s Orbit as a prep for Ocean’s Echo…which I still haven’t read yet. I did read a bunch of mysteries by C.S. Poe who has some genre stories.
Also a handful of books by Ada Maria Soto. I’d heard about her His Quiet Agent for a while. Realizing the sequel was out, Agents of Winter, I read the first one. A CIA analyst moves to a different floor and tries to make contacts in this new group which all go really poorly. His office neighbor talks to no one and is called The Alien. Somehow Arthur manages to make inroads with The Alien…A really wonderful slow burn of a relationship.
My favorite book was Wrapped Up In Christmas by Kristen Painter. It’s a paranormal mystery set in the fictional town of Nocturne Falls where every day is Halloween. Someone is unwrapping people’s Christmas presents and stealing the paper. It was a fun read featuring winter elves, werewolves and talking cats
Best new book was The World We Make by N. K. Jemisin. I didn’t think she could wrap up the story sufficiently in just two books, but she did and I was immensely impressed with the fantasy elements twinned with real issues we are facing today.
Best re-read, Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer because of the detailed world-building in spite of its unreliable narrator.
The Defector (Gabriel Allon, #9)- Daniel Silva
Somehow I didn’t read any fantasy/scifi in November – the two books that stood out were the 5th in the Peter Ash series by Nick Petri, “The Wild One,” a satisfying thriller with a PTSD-troubled Iraq/Afghanistan veteran, and “A Solitude of Wolverines” by Alice Henderson, Alex is a wildlife biologist who gets herself into all sorts of trouble in the mountains of Montana – the third in that series just came out.
Peter David’s Legions of Fire trilogy for Babylon 5 concluded with “Out of the Darkness”. Not only do Vir Cotto and the resistance need to disable the bombs placed throughout Centauri Prime by the Drakh to prevent their revolution becoming a pyrrhic victory, young David Sheridan’s life hangs in the balance.
I must continue to sing Isaac Asimov’s praises while I mention the best book for last month, “Second Foundation”, another cleverly plotted novel wherein the Mule (a great concept) is ultimately thwarted in his attempts to find and destroy the titular Second Foundation.
I’ve been reading General Alexander Lebed: My Life and My Country, by the great Russian general. I believe he would not have approved of the nonsense Putin has been up to.
I read “The Winner’s Crime” and “The Winner’s Kiss” by Marie Rutkowski on audiobook. They’re the 2nd and 3rd books of a trilogy, and I have not read the first book. I read these because I bought them to get an affordable copy of a Christopher Moore book and they came with it. So I wasn’t necessarily keen to read these–the cover art is all-het-up–but the stories were quite exciting. I don’t think there was any magic, but it’s a mediaeval-esque land with a wicked emperor and fighting and much conniving by a privileged elite.
The best book I read was And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Devlin. It was the best book I’ve read in a long time. It was short, but the symbolism was detailed and packed a punch. I love that it was a zombie book, but it wasn’t really about zombies.
Wow, sorry for the delay! I missed this one.
Galen,if you live in the USA, you win a book of your choice from our stacks. If your address is outside of the USA, you will get a $5 Amazon gift card.
Please contact me (Marion) with your choice and a US address. Happy reading!