What did you read in 2021?

I love both Marguerite Duras and Paul Celan! Joan Crawford Loves Chachi that's an impressive list with many writers I've been meaning to read, especially In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova.

calumerio, nice to see someone else read Rose. Glad you liked Jackie's book and the Jakarta Method, too.

The Mabinogion (tr. Sioned Davies)
Arthur Machen - The Great God Pan
Clark Ashton Smith - Zothique
Clark Ashton Smith - Poseidonis
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic
Kir Bulychev - Alice: The Girl From Earth
Kir Bulychev - Half a Life and Other Stories
Kir Bulychev - Gusliar Wonders
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
George Orwell - Nineteen Eighty-Four
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Kobo Abe - Inter Ice Age 4
Kate Wilhelm - Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
Ruth Park - Playing Beatie Bow
Ruth Park - The Harp in the South
Ruth Park - Poor Man's Orange
Bertrand Russell - What I Believe
Bertrand Russell - Why I Am Not a Christian
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Keys to the Kingdom
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Clockworks
Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodríguez - Locke & Key: Alpha & Omega
Benjamin Myers - Under the Rock (put down halfway through, will finish at some point)

I remember L&J being really solid and wishing there were more good, long, discrete contained stories like that (ignoring the rubbish spin offs)

Locke and key I mean.

I watched teh tv series last month, has been a while since I ead the comics which I enjoyed at teh time and was one reason I watched teh tv show. Think I continued cos I started. Don't think I enjoyed as much as the comic anyway. Might give tehm another look if I can find the fiels sinced i read it on cbr.

Love's Work was good, but demanded more of me than I was able to give, intellectually and emotionally. I will go back to it.

Shuggie Bain was super bad, a relentless honking airhorn of "we were poor... but dammit we were unhappy too", in sore need of two more drafts and an editor. I did do an actual lol at a very minor character being called "Kier Weir", though, a welcome absurdity.

I don't think I have ever actually *liked* a protagonist in a book as much as I liked Darryl.

Anyway, I will continue lurking here, pinching ideas from youse all, though this year's resolution is read the books that I bought in 2021, rather than buy any new ones.

this year's resolution is read the books that I bought in 2021, rather than buy any new ones.

I tried that a couple of years ago and, of course, failed. It was helpful, though. It did encourage me to cut back on purchases and clear some of the backlog of unread books, so on the whole I'm glad I made the resolution and consider it a success.

unregistered- how are the Kir Bulychev books?

unregistered- how are the Kir Bulychev books?

great! I'm not too well-versed in Soviet SFF, but I'd recommend all three of those Bulychev collections. the biggest highlight for me was the title story of Half a Life. at heart it's a narrative of a woman's acts of self-sacrifice as she comes to empathize with the weird sentient beings who are imprisoned with her on an alien research vessel. a little mawkish, maybe, but there's a compelling interplay between the sentimental and the cynical as a group of emotionally stunted astronauts struggle to make sense of the woman's story and the now abandoned vessel

I also really like the cycle of short stories that makes up the second half of Gusliar Wonders, in which a Russian village becomes an unlikely point of first contact with various aliens and wizards and time travelers. it's similar in premise to Simak's Way Station, only funnier and with less faith in human nature. overall Bulychev seems fixated on the way unimaginative egotists react when confronted with the alien or the supernatural, and he has an acute ear for irony

Alice's Travels (the first novel in that Alice collection) is a fun children's interplanetary mystery, concluding with a slightly hokey, Scooby Doo-ish confrontation with space pirates. the cartoon adaptation is apparently regarded as a classic, and Bulychev is best known in Russia for his Alice books/films. afaik few of his other works have been translated into English aside from the post-apocalyptic novel Those Who Survive and the novella "Another's Memory" (collected in Earth and Elsewhere. Half a Life and Gusliar Wonders are both available at the Open Library

I'm kinda tempted to start working my way through the non-Strugatsky entries in Ted Sturgeon's Best of Soviet Science Fiction series:

https://i.imgur.com/O5HLz7d.jpg

(full list here)