Best (& Worst) Books I Read This Year

Yet again, another book that I did not quite enjoy the ending the way I had wanted to, but the beginning of this book and the ideas in it were so mindblowing that I can forgive them all and put this on my number three for this year.

I think that for me, the problem with this book was the ending rather than the actual rest of the story. I thought he did a really good job and had a very unique take on generation ship story. But there's also quite a few decisions that he makes with his narration choice and with the ending that kind of ruins some of the fun of the story for me.

This one was particularly awesome because it was just like a cozy science fiction read about some robots who want to open up a noodle shop, and you got to appreciate yourself a cozy little read sometimes.

This one borders the line of so weird or unique that I'm not quite sure I liked it. This one follows a man who is descending into insanity and you really feel it in the story.

I read I think no more than 50 pages of this book before I wanted to quit. I wanted to never read again. I wanted to be done with book and YouTube and everything else.

If you look at my Goodreads review, I put it as a two-star read. I really didn't have a great time with it and it was the ending that made this story so low in my ratings. But after a couple of months, I really started thinking about how creative Banks was with this story and how unusual it was despite its ending.

I felt mind blown at the end of the story. I had to sit and just stare at the wall for like 20 minutes after finishing the story.

This book, I feel like Greg Bear got excited by way too many ideas, tried to stuff too many of them into the book. It ended up feeling quite superficial for me.

I really did not have a good time with this story. It just taught me to hate it. But there are worse books out there.

It just did a whole lot of nothing. I know a lot of people really enjoyed this story and they really liked the slow pacing and the descriptive language, but to me, this book is just boring.

And I really feel like once you finish Pandora's Star, you must go into the next story because oh my gosh, does it just pick up immediately where it left off. And I can't think of a better book that I have read this entire year.

This book was everything I wanted in a Mars exploration story, especially with this being so close to a possibility, as in it's something that could happen in my lifetime. And then it's mixed with just enough imagination to make it interesting to read.

I have just never read a book quite like this, and I suspect I probably never will again. This one was just so unique and interesting, full of so many different ideas that somehow he got away with.

I picked up the first one and it really was a phenomenal read. It ripped my heart out. I felt a lot of emotions, but there was a lot of suspense and fun and a really cleverly done story.

This one really begins with Pandora's Star and goes into Judas Unchained. And yes, I'm cheating. I'm counting both of these books as the best book I read this year.

This little novella was full of so much philosophy. It was Plato's allegory of the cave, but with science fiction. It was so much fun and it deserved so much more hype than it got.

I don't know why it took me so long to get through Raft by Steven Baxter, but the world is so imaginative. It definitely stands on its own two feet up against many of my favorite vintage science fiction worldbuilders.

I was surprised at how much I liked the story of an unlikable main character, one who is cured from Alzheimer's disease just in time to get himself in trouble with a hacker known as the rabbit. This book was ultimately a interesting future world that did get some things wrong, but also was ultimately about the struggle of trying to find meaning in a life and a world that is getting significantly more digitized and people are like slowly losing their place and their purpose in life.

I tried to be particularly patient with it. But even at the end, I was really just unimpressed with what this book had to offer. It just wasn't my vibe.

This book is another fantastic pleasure read that was put together so eloquently. It's all around a old western ballad and it is a space western story that was just so fun. It was so hopeful.

This book had a alien perspective combined with a human perspective in such a way that it kind of reminded me a little bit of Morning Light Mountain in Pandora's Star, which is saying something special.

This book was a little bit difficult to read, but it was worth the pain of reading unlike some other books we talked about because this story was put together in a very ingenious way.

It has a lot of controversy and I was kind of excited to either love or hate this story and I'm really sad to say that it was nothing but laughable. There's just so much self-insertion in this story.

I just remember the world and the tongue-in-cheek ending. And there's just like a lot of this story that I love. and it's one that I would continually recommend to other people if you're interested in just a one big sweeping space opera epic.

It's more literary and as we have figured out, I am not a literary fan. So, this is one that I just didn't get along with and I just couldn't finish.

It has the world building, but it also depends on all that juicy science that actually matters for the story. And because of that, it makes me feel a little bit smart to read it.

But just like the title, this book is ultimately forgettable. It seems to be a couple years too late. It's kind of trying to go with a lot of tropes and things like that have already been done many times before and don't really add anything new or interesting or different to any aspect of any genre.