Year in review 2014

[liv]

I almost don't feel like looking back over 2014, it's been a bit of a blah year. Nothing bad, but little that really stands out. But I've been doing this for ten years now so I might as well carry on the tradition!

Significant events:

• Most of the year has been taken up with moving house; I think when I first made the plan I didn't realize it was going to eat nearly a year of my life. But anyway, in February I moved out of the house I'd lived in since 2010. We spent most of April and May househunting in Cambridge. In July I finally sold my previous house. Right at the end of August we finally completed on our new house []. And mid-September we finally, finally moved in and the year got a lot better after that.
• forestofglory, darcydodo and rysmiel conquered geography and came to visit
• I went to Worldcon, and met a bunch of DW folk, and completely forgot to write it up. But basically I really enjoyed the social side of it and was fairly meh on the progamming. I'm glad I went, and I enjoyed the panel I was on. If I do make it to cons in future (I have my eye on Eastercon in 2016 when it doesn't clash with Passover) I shall make sure to go to more talks and fewer panels, and to volunteer to be on programming in plenty of time, because I think I was pretty good as a panellist and I greatly enjoyed talking about science.
• I had a totally awesome trip to Sweden running events for the Progressive community there.
• At work, I acquired a new, funded PhD student and she started work in my lab. I ran a first year module on reproduction with a lot of genetics in it, and I had a really really strong tutorial group this term that's just finished. But that's about it for work, I still haven't published anything or received substantial funding.

Places:

• Stoke-on-Trent
• Cambridge
• Edinburgh
• Stockholm
• Worcester

Books:

2014 is basically the year I stopped reading. That's another reason why I'm sort of unsure about making this round-up post, I'm kind of embarrassed and sad that I'm not picking my top 5 books from my usual selection of 50 or so. I've read fewer than 20 books this year, most of them either before I moved in February, or around Worldcon when I was trying to get on top of the Hugo voting.

I think the major factor is that I no longer have a commute to work, which used to be about an hour plus a day I would spend reading fiction. Now I have either breaks of a few minutes when I just poke at my smartphone, or more rarely long stretches of time available which I seem to spend doing more "productive" things.

Even before I stopped reading, I very nearly stopped reviewing. I wasn't really keeping up even in 2013, I think. One thing that hasn't helped is that the site where I was logging all my books just suddenly vanished off the internet, as these things do. Does anyone have any recs for keeping lists of what I've read? I'll go with Goodreads if I have to, but I don't like the fact they're an Amazon property. Aside from that, I might move to the Wednesday reading thing instead of trying to write a detailed review of each book and not build up a backlog of unwritten reviews. Anyway, favourite books of 2014, from a small selection:

• Ann Leckie: Ancillary Justice. And yes, everybody in the world loved this one, I didn't adore it as much as some people, but I haven't read much that's obviously better either.
• Erin Morgenstern: The Night Circus. This is again not brilliant, but very readable, it feels like it wants to be The Anubis Gates and isn't quite at that level.
• Maureen McHugh: China Mountain Zhang I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and it's really original SF with excellent world-building and characterization. And a completely horrifying realistic rape scene, not at all like the standard grimdark vaguely titillating tropes, but really disturbing.
• Max Gladstone: Three parts dead
• The book I most loved in 2014 was a really unexpected one, Rumer Godden's In this house of Brede. It's about a successful career woman who enters a convent, and her life there. And I found it absolutely fantastically gripping, even though basically nothing happens. I mean, Godden's writing is essentially crack to me anyway, but this book just grabbed me and didn't let go. If it sounds like the sort of thing you might want to read, be aware that it's a somewhat pro-life sort of book.

Music:

• The Strangelings: Tanglewood tree
• Steeleye Span: The making of a man
• Sarah McLachlan: Possession
• VNV Nation: Nova
• The Imagined Village: Tam Lyn retold

Notable posts:

• jae: Forms of address in North American academia
• sovay: sive femina sive mas est [gender in the ancient world]
• siderea: Memento, Terrigena; Or, What a Culture Is
• kaberett made the best love meme ever, which I'm linking not so much for the post as for the wonderful, wonderful comments.
• My absolute stand-out favourite post of 2014 was shweta_narayan's Let's talk about category structure and oppression!

My posts:

• Godwin's Law [interfaith, issues]
• The other half of the internet [gender]
• Hypertext in the book of life [biology]
• All the lonely people [gender]
• Health at every size [issues]

Wonderful friends:

• rysmiel
• angelofthenorth
• kaberett
• doseybat
• jack

People I love and wish I'd seen more of:

• lethargic_man
• hatam_soferet
• withagreatlove
• shreena
• pseudomonas

People I'm really glad I got to know better:

• cjwatson
• merrythebard
• kht
• rmc28
• ghoti

New to the d-roll:

• swaldman
• davidgillon
• seekingferret
• sfred
• cosmolinguist

Previous versions: [2004] [2005] [2006] [2007] [2008] [2009] [2010] [2011] [2012] [2013]

Comments

[ceb]

Reviewing - when I was asking a similar question, people recommended LibraryThing and GoodReads. I haven't seriously tried either yet, but I don't amazingly like the commercial feel of GoodReads, LibraryThing feels much friendlier and less corporate.

[liv]

Yes, I think LibraryThing is probably the answer. I had the idea that it's for books you own, rather than for books you've read, but I'm sure it's flexible enough to work for what I want and definitely worthwhile staying away from Amazon and GoodReads' weird policies. Thank you!

[atreic]

I'm on librarything. You can have different 'collections' (think tags), so I have 'your library' for books I actually own, and 'read 2015' for books I read in 2015 (some of which are also 'your library' but some of which are books I borrowed). I like it.

[liv]

This is definitely sounding like it's the thing for me, thank you. Next to convince myself it's not actually compulsory to go back over a decade of book reviews and change all my links to the new site...

[rmc28]

I was about to recommend LibraryThing. I like that I can extend the category list for my catalogue to suit me: e.g. recent additions are DNR (do not reread) and DNF (did not finish), but mostly I use Books To Read and Ebooks To Read.

I am incredibly slowly working through the books we already own, the idea being if we needed to claim on the house insurance we'd have a list handy. Though recently I'm thinking I should just take a photo of each of the bookcases as an interim fix ...

[liv]

OK, I'm getting the feeling recs are pretty unanimous for LibraryThing. Thank you! I like the idea of being able to make custom categories, that'll help a lot.

I think you're right that having a decent quality digital photo of your bookcases would be a lot better than having no record at all. Especially since in the event of having to claim you could probably recognize your books from the photo even if the titles weren't completely readable.

[jae]

Thanks for linking to my post! That was a fun discussion to revisit. :)

-J

[liv]

YW! I keep saying I should keep better notes of posts I really like, because I am no longer remembering all the good stuff I've read by the end of the year.

[jack]

Yes, it was really interesting!

[antisoppist]

I love In This House of Brede but after I first had kids I had to miss out that bit in the middle because I couldn't cope with bad things happening to small children, just as another trigger warning.

Spoilery comment

[liv]

Ooh, I'm excited to find anyone else who reads Godden at all, she's not exactly fashionable as a writer. (I think papersky is a fan... yup, here's a thinky review.)

And good point about the scary child harm part in the middle, I suppose that didn't really stand out as making the book more grim than is typical of the genre, but I can well imagine parents finding it hard going! The pro-life thing I mentioned because you've got a character who terminates a pregnancy, in rather awful circumstances, and you've also got the narrative thinking badly of her for this, so I can imagine people who find the idea of abortion distressing and people who are pro-choice both being upset by it.

Re: Spoilery comment

[forestofglory]

I've read a couple of Goddens, because papersky mentioned them on tor.com and in the afterward of Lifelode, a book I really love. They are kind of hard to find.

She does some things I really like such as intersting domestic details, and odd non-chronological story structures, but sometime the gender dynamics aren't so good. Like I really loved China Court, expect for that last scene.

Spoilers for other Godden books, mentions homophobia, colonialism and rape

[liv]

The thing is that Godden's politics are awful, really. Weird on gender stuff. Super, super colonialist; her books set in the Raj and based on her own experiences there are the best of her writing but also the most problematic.

And, well, she has precisely one lesbian character, a horrible neurotic middle-aged woman who preys on young, innocent and impeccably straight girls / young adults. There's someone a bit like that in ITHoB, who is possibly, if you squint, sympathetic. But I've never really forgiven her for Pippa passes in which said stock lesbian character attempts to rape the protag, and comes to a horrible end, and the heroine's happy ending is that she realizes that she should resist her unnatural and perverted potential desires for women and choose a straight straight straight and did we mention definitely straight romance with a totally manly masculine MALE love interest.

I can't stop reading her in spite of this, though, just what she does with language and character gets me every time, even though she would have almost certainly despised me and my friends.

Re: Spoilers for other Godden books, mentions homophobia, colonialism and rape

[forestofglory]

Oh dear. I'm defiantly not going to read Pippa Passes! But yes she is wonderful with language and character.

Re: Spoilery comment

[oursin]

I find her very hit and miss: when she's good it's In This House of Brede or A Candle for St Jude, and I think I found The Peacock Spring enjoyable back when I read it, but at other times...

In far too many of her books she makes children/adolescents in particular suffer, though the suffering is usually emotional rather than physical abuse, in ways that seem to me problematic. There are books of hers I can't read because of what seems like gratuitous character torture (Battle of the Via Fiorita is horrible - I tried re-reading it of recent years to see if it was as bad as I remembered and I had to give it up).

Re: Spoilery comment

[oursin]

Oh, and I recently read Breakfast with the Nikolides, which has racial essentialism, a bad marriage with a back story involving a very problematically depicted instance of marital rape (if anything worse than the famed Rhett/Scarlett instance), a child suffering and lied to, and rabies. However, it does have a fairly positively presented homoromantic relationship between two men, although one gets the impression that she gives this a cultural pass because they are both Indian, and their ways are different (though one of the men is also in an arranged marriage: the development of that relationship is rather interesting too. The wife is by no means a stereotype).

Re: Spoilery comment

[liv]

I should've known you'd have informed opinions about Godden! I don't think I've read A candle for St Jude and if it's anything close to ITHoB I should definitely look for it.

That's a really good point her being really horrible to her young characters. I remember Villa Fiorita extremely vaguely; must be more than 20 years since I read it, and all I've really retained is that it was depressing.

Re: Spoilery comment

[antisoppist]

Ooh thank you for the link. I want to read the other book about nuns she reviews now. Yes, there's a "hate the sin but love the sinner" take on the abortion bit.

My comfort reading was always school stories. Convents are just an adult version! I like her Thursday's Children a lot too, years before Billy Elliot, and I think the first one I read was The Diddakoi/Kizzy, which was broadcast as a children's TV drama when I was little.

[liv]

That's a good point that convent stories are the grown-up version of school stories. Somehow I found the convent in ITHoB more believable than a lot of similar settings, but that's probably because I get so swept up in Godden's writing rather than because it's actually realistic, it's not like I have any experience of monastic communities, really. Though ITHoB reminds me of the one such community I have interacted with, because they used to run a retreat centre where I attended events.

I do like Thursday's children, and I liked The Diddakoi as a kid though now I'm not so convinced about a non-Gypsy author writing that story. And Kingfishers catch fire is just an amazing book, even if it's also scarily colonialist.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

Bother. I always assumed she was gypsy and that was why she got to write the story :( I didn't know agreed written adult books though

[liv]

Having read her autobiography, she mentions nothing at all about being in any way Gypsy.

I think her adult books are better than her children's books, though they're also dreadfuller. Not that adult books are inherently better, just that her writing for adults stands out more compared to other writing for adults than her children's writing compares to the best children's books.

I think you might like In this House of Brede, for a number of reasons. But then it is a romanticized version of your religion, and it's always chancy to recommend those.

[ghoti.livejournal.com]

:( I was young and naive. I had the audio book of The Dollhouse, and those two were the only ones I was familiar with. I'll look up In The House Of Brede... Eventually

[kaberett]

<3 :-)

[cosmolinguist]

It was lovely to virtually-meet you this year. :) I've greatly enjoyed so much of your writing.

[sfred]

I'm very pleased to be making your acquaintance.

[shreena]

This makes me realise that I'm not sure that I saw you at all this year. Admittedly, I haven't seen a whole lot of many people this year. We should rectify this!

[kerrypolka]

I use and quite like Booklikes, which I have set up to crosspost to Goodreads because that's where a lot of people seem to be.