To follow up on my post of books I read last summer and would recommend, here are just plain the best books I read last year:
The Traitor Baru Coromant / The Monster Baru Coromant / The Tyrant Baru Coromant (Seth Dickinson): This trilogy-and-growing of books is a fascinating rumination on the nature of power, the nature of colonialism, the nature of fascism and the nature of people who have convinced themselves they are smarter than anyone else. The first book is a self-contained story by itself; the second and third are one self-contained story taken together. Both stories feel in their way like an attempt to refute the trope of the Xanatos/Moriarty/Palpatine style genius chessmaster. But really, you're just here to see a flustered lesbian attempt to be suave and dashing and instead just get owned repeatedly and increasingly hard.
Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (R.F. Kuang): This book is so much. Kuang sketches a very mildly steampunk alternate-history Victorian Britain in which Britain has used magic to become the dominant world power; what you quickly realize is this alternate timeline looks exactly like the real one, so the silver-based magic should be read as a metaphor. And it is a powerful metaphor. This book overflows equally with love for the joy of language and white-hot righteous rage at empire and how it co-opts academics, nations and everything. Overall it's a rollercoaster: the history, character writing, magic system design and political theory are all best-in-class. And it is not interested in making white readers comfortable.
Eversion (Alastair Reynolds): This is officially my Favorite Book I Read In 2022, for whatever that's worth. Reynolds is a "hard sci fi" writer who I tend to run very hot or very cold on; I either find his books unreadable or I love them. He's just coming off the "Revenger" trilogy, which is a 1800s-flavored nautical adventure that happens to be set in space using solar sails, and I guess that was still where his head was at because for this outing he just decided to write a normal 1800s nautical adventure on a boat in the normal ocean. Which then kicks up a notch at the end of the third chapter, when the narrator/protagonist dies. And then things get wierd. I would recommend this book if you like Science Fiction.
