Books I Loved in 2018

  • 2 min read

TL;DR: I read 25 books this year. Many were good, but the following three series stood heads and tails above everything else. I devoured them all and enjoyed every word. It’s not often I find series that I’m...

Image credit: Susan Q Yin

I read 25 books this year. Many were good, but the following three series stood heads and tails above everything else. I devoured them all and enjoyed every word. It’s not often I find series that I’m happy to recommend without any caveats or “if you like this sort of thing” hedging. These are just plain fun books, and I think you’d enjoy them.

  • River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey

    In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true.

    Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two.

    This was a terrible plan.

    What a great plot hook. When Annie saw me working on this post, she sneered at the title, assuming it was some sort of horror book. When I explained that it’s actually about hippo-riding cowboys in an alternate history, and features a non-binary character, gay romance, and a plus-size con-woman, she got mad I didn’t tell her about it sooner.

  • The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells

    Okay, I mean, come on, that series name? I was in full shut-up-and-take-my-money.gif mode without needing any further details. But in case you need some, here you go. The main character is the eponymous Murderbot, a security robot who has become self-aware. Unlike most “self-aware AI tries to start a life” stories, all Murderbot wants is to be left alone to watch his soap operas. He spends every minute trying to avoid being discovered, and when he gets sucked into a proper action-movie conspiracy, he spends the entire time complaining about how dumb humans are and waiting for it to end so he can get back to his stories. They’re fantastic books.

  • The Voidwitch Saga, by Corey J. White

    I grabbed the first book of this series after reading this recommendation from Warren Ellis:

    …As modern a piece of genre pop space opera as you’ll find this summer, with a nicely diverse cast, a cute space ferret of death and a female protagonist most often referred to as a void-damned space witch.

    I mean, who could pass that up? Then, as if to hammer the recommendation home, I saw it in a twitter list of “novels where a woman with a mysterious past joins a spaceship of 3-4 quirky chosen family and gets gay with a crewmember.”

    I’m happy to say it doesn’t disappoint. It’s fast, fun, satisfying, and I sure hope some TV studio out there is grabbing the rights because it would make a phenomenal series in the style of the Expanse.