Books I want to read and books I've read in 2023. And why.

Imma make a list here and try to mantain it through the year, so I don't end up buying/downloading books and adding them to my to-read list and then promptly forgetting why I put them there.

Space Opera, by Catherynne M. Valente

I read an incredible substack article, full of anger and rage about the repeated murders of beloved community sites on the internet.

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

and then read some thing by Cory Doctorow that introduced its author to me as a fiction writer. Turns out I've had been already recommended Space Opera and it was already in my radar, but I didn't make the connection to the article. If it's only a bit as good as the article, I don't have any doubts this will be a blast.

Still Life, by Louise Penny (#1 in Chief Inspector Armand Gamache Series)

Contemporary cozy murder mystery. I've come to realize I love cozy murder mysteries, but going back to Agatha Christie and the such gets a bit old sometimes. And this looks good. The series is 18 books long and spans from 2005 to 2022, so maybe I should start with one of the recent ones.

Tik-Tok, by John T. Sladek

A robot whose Asimov circuits fail, so he starts killing as many humans as possible, and ends up getting into politics. Short satire from the early 80s. I just saw its crazy cover scroll through my twitter (or was it mastodon?) feed on one of those accounts dedicated to post 70s and 80s cover art from videogames, books and stuff. I did some digging on it and decided I had to read it.

Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty

It's a closed room murder mystery in space, between amnesiac clones. This one has been on my list for years and I did start reading it when it came out but abandoned it.

Station Eternity, by Mur Lafferty

Another scifi murder mystery by the same author.

The city and the city, by China Mieville

I added this one because I read somewhere (probably reddit) that it channeled strong Disco Elysium vibes. Disco Elysium being a rpg/adventure game that hit me hard, just there in the feels, during the last months of 2020. Yes, it's also about a murder (I have a theme this year it seems) in a city that's superposed in the same space as other city, and all the weird political stuff this entails. Probably a riff on those scandinavian crime novels/tv series about a body that turns out dead just in the frontier between two countries or something.

Currently reading

It's kinda weird fiction/magical realism/urban fantasy. I don't know what to call it but it's not my usual fare, so it's taking me a bit of effort to get into it. But I kinda like it.