So I haven't been completely negligent. Just like last year, I've got a summary of all the books I read this year. I've been tweaking it over time, adding new parts as I finish each one of these books. Unsurprisingly, it's a bunch of fantasy and science fiction. It's kind of a nice way to take a look back at the year, though. Here's the books I read for 2021!
by J.R.R. Tolkien
That's right! I've read The Silmarillion! You see, I had become a big fan of a YouTube channel called Men of the West, which goes over various parts of Middle-Earth's lore and timeline, and I figured I wanted to read the source of a lot of things I was learning about. So I threw this on a list of books I'd like to get for Christmas for 2020, and Santa pulled through for me. I dug right in during the holidays, and ended up finishing it within a month!
It's definitely different kind of book than The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, as it isn't a narrative, but more like a history, or more appropriately, the Bible equivalent for the world of Middle-Earth. It discusses the world's creation and the divine beings that formed and managed it before even getting to the movements and kingdoms of the Elves, the first mortals of the legendarium. As a consequence, it can be pretty rough reading, as you're given several names and places, with peoples moving all over. While the book does contain a few maps, I mostly relied on another book called The Atlas of Middle-Earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad to help me keep some things straight.
However, once you get over these hurdles, you're eventually given several great, epic stories that could have easily been novels of their own (some of which Christopher Tolkien would later pull together many years after his father's death). I will say that it can be overwhelming at times, but it does set up everything that would eventually lead to the epics the author would be better known for. It's not exactly an easy book to recommend, as one does have to put in effort to wrap one's head around all that's happening, but it is certainly not the impenetrable brick wall that some claim. Definitely for the diehard fans, and those willing to dig through its dense narrative to find all the gems it contains (pun intended).
by Isaac Asimov
Asimov is one of those authors that I've heard about my whole life, but never really read much. I recall reading I, Robot in high school, but not much else. So, when the first three original books of the Foundation Trilogy were available at a library book sale last year, I grabbed them, and in 2021 I choose to make them a part of my reading list.
Starting off as a collection of short stories (like most sci-fi from the time period), Asimov presents a pretty fascinating idea: that the future of humanity can be predicted with the made-up math of psychohistory. Basically, if one pulls together enough variables and projects them into the future, one can anticipate major movements of people as a whole. This doesn't mean it can predict the acts of individuals, but instead focuses on the collective future of quintillions of people across thousands of years. Sort of like studying the migration patterns of animals over long periods of time.
The story begins with a psychohistorian named Hari Seldon who has figured out that the current Galactic Empire will eventually crumble, and that it is too late to prevent it. He also foresees that it will take tens of thousands of years for humanity to recover. Based on this, he concocts a plan to adjust the future by setting an organization in motion called The Foundation, the purpose of which will be to anticipate a second Galactic Empire, and help bring it about in only a thousand years. From there, the books then go through part of this thousand-year time-span, telling shorter stories of varying crises in the galaxy and how the Foundation and their agents provide the tweaks necessary for Seldon's plan to come to fruition.
The first book does a good job of setting up the premise and showing how it's interpreted by subsequent characters on the timeline, culminating in some pretty radical shifts of expectations while still maintaining focus on Seldon's Plan. The second book then starts off in the same mode before reeling off the wheels as the Plan falls apart at the advent of an unexpected twist in human evolution. However, Seldon had a back-up plan, and the third book focuses on this side of his far-flung equations. There is also a significant shift from a technological science to a more psychological science, though I don't know if it really fits the themes introduced in the beginning very well.
I have to say, going from the dense Silmarillion to this is quite the whiplash in flow. Asimov barely provides any details, going for a more focused and fast-paced tone that shows the ups and downs of this thousand year span. Characters may seem to come and go pretty quickly, but Asimov teases just enough detail to get the basics of how each character thinks and behaves, even if they're there for just a chapter. Even the plot may feel like it's skipping some scenes, but Asimov has the confidence to assume readers can fill in the gaps on their own. It's rather curious to have such an epic space drama feel so brisk and spry. Overall, it's a pretty fascinating set of ideas, even if they get kind of derailed towards the end.
(As it would turn out, a television series for Apple TV would come out at the end of 2021 based on these books. I haven't seen it yet, but I've heard a lot of good things. Maybe I'll get to it in 2022.)
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by William Gibson
It's kind of weird to consider Cyberpunk as a classic genre, now that it's nearly 40 years old, but having mostly grown up in the 90s, it certainly felt very real and relevant to me. Later, I would end up becoming a fan of franchises like Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and Deus Ex, and through them, I would become curious about their origins and inspirations, which led me to this novel by William Gibson. While there are older novels and stories that have cyberpunk elements in them (some by Gibson himself), most critics generally consider this novel to be where the genre really took off.
Set in a near future where governments have fallen and high technology has filtered to the masses, the story focuses entirely on a man named Case, a former hacker who gets picked up by an ex-military patron named Armitage, along with a mercenary girl named Molly. Together, they start doing jobs in acquiring gear and tech, but as Molly and Case start putting the pieces together, they learn that Armitage is just a front for something much bigger. From there, the story then freewheels into the dense web of conspiracies, rogue AIs, and even a low-orbit space colony that's basically Vegas on steroids. It also has quite a bit of variety in terms of locations and people, jumping from Japan to Turkey to space, and dealing with everyone from Russians to Rastafarians.
Gibson's writing does take some getting used to. He tends to be light on descriptions, and often has a sideways, noir attitude about them when he does write them. Conversation topics and even entire scenes shift jarringly and erratically, which can be rough at times and makes the story a little hard to follow. However, I wonder if this isn't on purpose, creating this atmosphere of paranoid urgency, and perhaps is a reflection of the main character himself. Even when there's downtime, they still feel like fleeting, half-remembered dreams before things start crashing together again.
Still, it's hard not to see this book as a Rosetta Stone for anything done in the name of cyberpunk. Between all the gear and the jargon, the intense action, and the noir, dystopian atmosphere, to say nothing of the descriptions of a visual interpretation of cyberspace, it's easy to see how much it influenced later works and established a genre. It's a bit of a rough read (and certainly not for the squeamish), but it's certainly a classic that set the tone for a lot of other things I've come to enjoy over the years.
by Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman
During all this time I was reading this heavy, thoughtful science fiction, I decided to balance it out with a trilogy of fun, light fantasy books that I had read before, but a very long time ago. I remember thinking these were some of the coolest books back in high school, and I easily got lost in its world. I admit I never did read more from the universe, but the memories lingered, and I thought I'd give them another go.
The story is a rather standard fantasy epic. Starting small with the reunion of a handful friends at a beloved hometown, they get caught up in the troubles of the world when they stumble across the miracle of true healing in the form of a magic staff in the hands of a young plainswoman. From there, a ragtag bunch of heroes first escape their hometown and fall into a grand adventure that takes them all over the world of Krynn to fight the draconian forces of the Dark Queen Takhisis and her evil dragons.
Reading these all these years later, the flaws do stand out now. First of all, it's not very deep storytelling, instead going for the high melodrama of pulp fantasy meant to excite the imaginations of teenagers. There are also parts of the story that get skipped, largely in an attempt to incentivize readers to go play the D&D modules to fill in the gaps, which can feel a little disappointing that you missed out on part of the story. And I do feel like the ending of the trilogy, while perhaps epic in it's own way, left a lot of threads lying around to be explored in later books and materials.
Still, I can't deny that I got lost in it all over again. Not only is Krynn a very well-realized world of high fantasy, with plenty of lore and history seeping in at the edges of the story, but the characters are still lively and memorable. From the hyperactive kender Tas to the grumpy dwarf Flint, and from the stoic gentlemanliness of Sturm to the unnerving sarcasm of Raistlin, and the self-doubting half-elven leader Tanis trying to keep them together, it really is a dynamic bunch of heroes, and more enter the story as it goes along. By the second book, it almost feels like it's going to be too much, as the characters get scattered in different directions, but it makes for some very enjoyable reading as you see the journeys unfold, and by the end, it mostly comes together. A fun ride, if nothing else.
I think it's been a good year for reading, with some decent variety. I do want to keep trying to go through my personal library, though it didn't help that my local library had some massive book sales. I think I picked up over 20 books from that! Well, maybe I'll get through it all eventually. Here's to more reading for 2022!!
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