Some memorable fiction that I read or reread this year. (Caution: My tastes run to idea-rich speculative fiction, YMMV) ...🧵 1/
Reread Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude -- in Spanish this time, but the Gregory Rabassa translation is fine too. A good place to start exploring Latin American fiction and history. Both funny and transcendent. 2/ powells.com
Reread @AdaPalmer's Terra Ignota series. Science fiction by an actual historian! If you love big ideas about history, politics or philosophy you must read it. Endearing characters, grand vision, empathetic humor. Wrote about one of it many facets here: humantransit.org 3/
Reread Gene Wolfe's magnum opus, Book of the New Sun. Not for everyone, You must love intellectual puzzles to love this one, but I do and I do, up to a point. Fine new edition with a great @adapalmer intro. prodimage.images-bn.com 4/
Discovered Susanna Clarke's wonderful short novel Piranesi. Especially fine if you love architecture, sculpture, spatial thinking. "The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite." barnesandnoble.com 5/
The best thing I've read this year from a younger writer: Babel by R.F. Kuang (@kuangrf). You must love languages for this one, as I do: An alternative physics where translators rule the world! Set in 19th century Oxford as viewed by the colonized. barnesandnoble.com 6/
Finally, I can't rave enough about Kalpa Imperial, a very wise set of linked stories of an imaginary, infinite empire, by Argentina's Angélica Gorodischer, who left us this year. Gorgeous prose in Spanish, but @ursulakleguin did an OK translation. 7/7 barnesandnoble.com
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