The Top Ten Books I’ve Reviewed On This Blog

I’ve been running this blog for – as of a few days ago – seven years now. Long time. Fair few books reviewed over that time (though nowhere near as many as I’d have liked). So, with the seven year mark gone by, and the weather being wet and cold and dreary, I thought it might be nice to draw up an updated countdown of the best books that I’ve reviewed over that time.

There is, however, a slight complication. In recent years, a lot of my reading has been two big re-read projects of the works of two of my favourite authors – Robin Hobb and Terry Pratchett. This means that any brief list would be overrun by their works – in particular, I’ve reviewed around 35 of Pratchett’s Discworld novels, and a lot of them are very, very good. A list of Discworld novels with a couple of other things thrown in just doesn’t seem that useful.

So, a compromise: this is a list of the ten best books I’ve read in the last 6-7 years, but with only one book per author. Just for fun, I’ve also thrown in the opening paragraph or two of each novel.

So, here we go….

A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham

“Everything is going to be fine.”
“It isn’t,” [he] said. His tone wasn’t despairing or angry, only matter-of-fact. “Everything is going to be broken, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

 

Sometimes, the popularity, or lack of popularity, of a book perplexes me. An example I’ve used a lot this year is James Branch Cabell – how has a writer of such fluency, pathos and humour, of novels so easily read, been so forgotten in an age in which pale imitators of his style continue to be sucessful? Only sheer bad luck seems to explain it.

Daniel Abraham is not James Branch Cabell, in almost any way. But his name’s trajectory through the consciousness of genre readers seems to show a similar pattern, albeit in miniature. Abraham attained considerable notability as a short story writer – nominated for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the WFA – before producing this debut novel, A Shadow in Summer, to great acclaim, if not to immediate blockbuster sales. My copy comes complete with blurbs from George RR Martin, Connie Willis, Jacqueline Carey, S.M. Stirling, and Walter Jon Williams. Jo Walton thought it worthwhile including reviews of all four books of this series in her collection of writings on “re-reading the classics” of the genre (though to be fair, it’s a big collection). In my poll back in 2010 of around 100 members of a fantasy fan forum, Abraham ended up in the top 20 living authors, and this quartet, The Long Price Quartet ended up in the list of 10 genre works to read from the 21^st century (alongside works by Abercrombie, Bakker, Chiang, Erikson, Lynch, Mièville, Morgan, Stover and Valente – books like Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, American Gods, The Road, and Cloud Atlas all got runner-up honourable-mention placings). Six years ago, people were excited by the name of Daniel Abraham, even if they hadn’t always gotten around to reading him.

Now, they aren’t. Well, I’m sure some are, but more don’t seem to have heard of him; his books rarely if ever feature these days in the endless merry-go-round of Goodreads group read nominations, and hardly anyone I know has read his works, at least under that name. The Quartet was followed by the Dagger and Coin series, which apparently is still ongoing, which I didn’t even know because his new works don’t seem to make any waves in the various circles of bloggers and reviewers I loosely keep an eye on. Now I should be clear: the guy’s not suffering. In fact his popularity is growing all the time: it’s just that that fandom is attached to a different name, that of James Corey, author of the (as seen on TV) Expanse novels, of whom Abraham forms one half. He’s also probably made a fair few pennies as the writer for the graphic novel adaptations of A Game of Thrones. So, well done Daniel Abraham, he’s doing pretty well for himself. But part of me has always wondered what happened to the original version – how come so many people recommended these books to me, and now how come so few people seem to have heard of them today?

Like I said, sometimes the fickleness of public interest is just inscrutable.

Other times it isn’t, and this is one of those times.