Fiction Reading List (July - December 2020)

As per my usual policy, I'm excluding the academic titles I've read -- just fiction here. For this latter six months, I've managed to get through 8,250 pages over 184 days, or 44.8 pages per day. (If you're interested, counts for 2019 can be found here and here; counts for 2018 here and here.)

So, how did I do for the year? (The first half-year found here.)

FINAL STATS FOR 2020: 16,550 pages (or 41 books) over 366 days, which averages out to about 45.2 pages per day.

July - December 2020

Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World, 700 pg.
Saladin Ahmed, The Throne of the Crescent Moon, 350 pg.
Steph Swainston, Our Year of the War, 300 pg.
Terry Goodkind, Stone of Tears, 1000 pg.
David Farland, The Runelords, 600 pg.
Brandon Sanderson, Elantris, 600 pg.

Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon, 350 pg
Piers Anthony, The Source of Magic, 350 pg
Piers Anthony, Castle Roogna, 350 pg.
Piers Anthony, How Precious Was that While, 300 pg.
Piers Anthony, Bio of an Ogre, 250 pg.
Piers Anthony, Macroscope, 500 pg.
Piers Anthony, Firefly, 450 pg
Piers Anthony, Tatham Mound, 500 pg.

Matt Ruff, Lovecraft Country, 400 pg.
Nnedi Okafor, Binti: The Complete Trilogy, 350 pg
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife, 400 pg
Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water, 250 pg

Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border, 250

Notes

Obviously, a lot of Piers Anthony, setting some personal curiosity of how well he's age, and a fair amount of epic fantasy -- an Eye of the World reread (first in 20+ years), plus Goodkind, Farland, and Sanderson. Farland's magic system was super skeezy, and Sanderson once again proved himself really good. (Goodkind, however, was a trainwreck.) Steph Swainston had an interesting, though not monumental, novel often linked to the New Weird, and Saladin Ahmed's novel -- despite the high praise of progressives who love his Arabian Nights atmosphere -- was also basically just writing straight sword and sorcery.

Cantú's book, an outlier on my list, I read as the freshman novel for incoming students to the U of A, although I ended up not teaching that honors module. The other books were mostly random pickups -- Ruff and Okafor I read because of buzz, although they were the first two new books I'd bought in ages, and the two water books were for a tangential academic project.

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