sawyl | Manic Reading Project: looking back at 2015 (Reply)

We're into the last week of January — not quite sure how that happened! — and I've realised I haven't got round to talking about last year's reading. So, better late than never, here are a few thoughts on 2015's manic reading project starting with a few stats:

Number of books: 167
Number of authors: 58
Male to female ratio: 78 to 88
Genre split: 28 SF, 88 fantasy, 36 crime, 11 horror

On the qualitative front, high points included:

Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven; every bit as good as everyone says
N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season; a superb start to what promises to be a really fascinating trilogy
Django Wexler's The Thousand Names and its sequels in the Shadow Campaigns series; one of my favourite discoveries of the year
Paul Cornell's The Witches of Lychford; note perfect and extremely enjoyable
Emma Newman's Planetfall; a wonderful combination of an unreliable narrator and an almost impossible to comprehend situation

Of the year's debuts, here are a few that really stood out and left me eager to see what their authors do next:

Genevieve Cogman's The Invisible Library; a fun, snarky steampunk fantasy that pushes all the right buttons
Peter Newman's The Vagrant; a intriguing world, an extremely accomplished narrative style, and a story in which only one member of the quartet of leading characters is able to speak — in part because one of them is a goat.
Fran Wilde's Updraft; a beautifully drawn world, a coming of age ritual, and the gradual discovery that the world isn't as simple and Manichaean as it seems

Dishonourable mentions? None! Because if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. And because I'm not really sure I read anything truly awful last year. There were a couple of things that didn't suit my temperament, a couple of things where the author didn't quite manage to deliver on their initial premise, and one case where I felt that the writer had lost interest in series resulting in a very minor entry, but otherwise the quality was consistently pretty high.