When in doubt, steal from the best and Andrew Wheeler’s top 12 favourite books for 2010, one book for each month of the year, seemed like a neat device to copy, so here goes:
January saw me mostly recovering from surgery plus the added bonus of an opportunistic infection, so I read mainly not too challenging books. One book thta did challenge me, was Gwendolyn Leick’s Mesopotamia: the Invention of the City.
February wasn’t much better, with the standout book being Richard Morgan’s first published novel, Altered Carbon.
In March I read both Owen Heatherly’s Militant Modernism and Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, both in their own way attacking the unexamined assumptions at the heart of contemporary society. But it was Fields of Conflict, an anthology of papers on battlefield archaeology that made me think the most.
April: World War Z gave me nightmares, but it was The Night Sessions and The Raw Shark Texts that impressed the most, with the latter recieving a slight nudge.
In May I read a lot of science fiction, including China Miéville’s latest, Kraken, but it was Richard Fortey’s Life, the story of well, life on Earth, that impressed me the most.
June was a slow month again, no doubt because of the Worldcup, but I did read The Reconstruction of Nations by Timothy Snyder, which attempted to show how nationalism and ethnical identity grew in Poland, Belarussia, Lithuania and the Ukraine, countries once united in the early modern state of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, where ethnicity and nationality was much less important than class.
July was mostly about bubblegum reading, things like three Ian Fleming novels that you can read in a n hour and still have fifteen minutes left to kill. One positive exception was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. Back in Edwardian times, mashups between ghost and detective stories were quite popular and Carnacki was one of the better ghost detectives. Not at all scary, but despite their great age still quite enjoyable.
August saw more science fiction and more books on warfare. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire an indepth look at the economics of Nazi Germany and Europe, was the book of the month. The Battle of Kursk was good too.
In September, it was Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s All You Need Is KILL that made me sit up: a great short, mil-sf novel that was a cross between Groundhog Day and Starship Troopers (the novel, not the movie). Jo Walton’s Ha’Penny and Richard Morgan’s The Steel Remains were excellent too.
Moving on to October, the best book that month was a reread: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Komarr, where it turned out I had missed about eighty percent of the real action in the novel on my first read…
Then came November and I read some twenty books, largely due to a massive reread of all Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga novels. Diplomatic Immunity was a disappointment, Iain M. Banks’ latest Culture novel, Surface Detail was not.
And finally, December, in which N. K. Jeminisin’s first two books in her fantasy trilogy were the best books I read that month. These deserve proper, well thought through reviews, but suffice to say they’re essential reading for everybody interested in fantasy.