93 books (an increase of 10 on 2016), 74 of them by women (and three writers account for more than half of the books by male authors - Ben Aaronovitch with 6, and Terry Pratchett and Patrick O'Brian with with 3 each).

( List )

I think my favourites were Hag-Seed, Dave Hutchinson's Fractured Europe series, Robin Stevens' Wells and Wong mysteries, Ninefox Gambit, Provenance and La Belle Sauvage. And Dunnett, of course. And I really enjoyed re-reading Earthsea. I've also been very much liking the Phryne Fisher and Aubrey/Maturin series, and am continuing to enjoy Bujold after taking rather a long time to get into her.

There were two books I didn't finish: A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (a combination of egregious proofreading fail and gratuitous sadistic violence) and The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope (Britpicking and 16th-century-picking fails). I've also been reading more short fiction; having realised that all the nominees for the Best Short Story Hugo were available online, I went and read them all, and have read more short fiction online since then. Uncanny Magazine has become a particular favourite of mine.

The fifth in Robin Stevens' Wells and Wong mystery series is set in Cambridge, where Daisy and Hazel are spending Christmas as guests of Daisy's great-aunt Eustacia (a mathematics don - surely I can't be imagining the Chalet School reference there?) and visiting Daisy's brother Bertie, a first-year undergraduate at Maudlin College. Also in Cambridge for Christmas are Alexander Arcady, who Daisy and Hazel met on the Orient Express, and his best friend George Mukherjee. Alexander and George also have a detective society, the Junior Pinkertons; the two societies begin by competing to see who can identify the perpetrator of a series of increasingly dangerous pranks played in Maudlin, and then find themselves working together when things take a more murderous turn.

Like the other books in the series, this is very much in dialogue with the Golden Age detective fiction it pastiches - in this case, Gaudy Night, which Daisy and Hazel are reading. The beauty and opulence of the men's colleges is contrasted with the modern buildings and general frugality of life in a women's college, and Daisy and Hazel discover that their gender, even more than their age, debars them from entry to many places in Cambridge, including the college where they are trying to carry out their investigation. The series' ongoing consideration of issues of race is also broadened with the introduction of George and Harold Mukherjee, British-born but with an Indian father, who are nonetheless seen as less "British" than the American Alexander, and of another Hong Kong Chinese character, Alfred Cheng. The series continues to go from strength to strength, and this was perfect Christmas-holiday reading, even if the images in the Kindle edition didn't work properly on my rather old basic Kindle, making reading a slightly frustrating experience (I got blank pages instead of whole-page images, and although I could see the images if I clicked to zoom in on them when there were several pages of images purporting to be Hazel's handwritten casenotes it was quite hard to tell where I was and on occasion I had to resort to reading those bits on my phone, which didn't have the same problem).

The Dark is Rising has been one of my favourite books ever since I first read it aged about seven. Given its midwinter setting, it's a book I often re-read at Christmas, though I hadn't done so for a few years; the last time I tried was in 2010, when it snowed heavily the weekend before Christmas and the snow didn't melt until almost New Year, and somehow having actual snow outside and bitter cold instead of the normal damp mild greyness of December made it seem far too bleak and real, and I had to put it aside and didn't go back to it for a few years.

This year, though, Robert Macfarlane is running a Twitter readalong (hashtag #theDarkisReading) and I was inspired to get out my copy and join in. Some people are reading strictly by day, but I tend not to read multiple books at the same time and decided I would read straight through (a decision I was quite pleased with when I remembered that it skips straight from Christmas Day to Twelfth Night, by which time I will be back at work and no longer in the mood for Christmas re-reads).

More that 35 years after I first read it, The Dark is Rising still holds up pretty well. There is a sense of real menace in the Dark's manipulation of the weather and the way they can entice ordinary people into working for them, and the depiction of Will's family Christmas is magical, and sets the standard which my own Christmases never live up to. I really like the way that, unlike so many protagonists of children's fantasy, Will isn't an isolated child who has always felt different, and isn't thrilled to find out that he's special; until his eleventh birthday, he's a very ordinary boy from a large, loving family and his struggle to reconcile his desire for normality with being an Old One is one of the recurrent themes of the series. It isn't perfect; like so many children's books of its era, it is set very firmly in a cosy rural Home Counties England with a very clear social hierarchy - Miss Greythorne at the Manor at the top, the middle-class Stantons below her, and the farmers and farmworkers below them again. On this readthrough, I also noticed that there are things Will can do, despite being newly awakened to his powers, that the older Old Ones of the village - Farmer Dawson, Old George and John the Smith - can't, and I think it's clearly implied that the Gift of Gramarye is only given to certain Old Ones, not to all of them; presumably a middle-class grammar-school boy is better suited to this than a farmer, even an immortal farmer with supernatural powers. And even though there are women among the Old Ones (the Lady, Miss Greythorne and John Smith's wife who never even gets given a name) they play a very limited role in the story, with most of the action being given to the men. Also, the more I read it the more I am struck by the ruthlessness of the Light; just as much as the Dark, they are convinced of their rightness and happy to use ordinary people to achieve their ends. (Having watched The Last Jedi this week as well, I can't help feeling that there are more than passing similarities between the Light and the Jedi Order.)

As always with a re-read, I notice new things each time. Among the things that particularly struck me this time was the description of the fear the Dark attack Will with the night before his birthday ('a dreadful darkness in his mind, a sense of looking into a great black pit'), because that's a feeling I'm increasingly familiar with myself and exactly how I describe it. I also noted a few mentions of how Time appears to the Old Ones that reminded me strongly of Four Quartets: 'For all times co-exist, and the future can sometimes affect the past, even though the past is a road that leads to the future...', and the chapter "The King of Fire and Water", set in a flooded, transfigured Thames Valley, feels like it must have been an inspiration for the second half of Philip Pullman's La Belle Sauvage.

As we approach the solstice and a time of year I generally find difficult*, I'm deliberately seeking out comfort reading and avoiding anything that might set off a negative thought spiral. I thought that Diana Wynne Jones might fit the bill, and went for The Dark Lord of Derkholm, which is one of the books of hers I missed when it was first published because I didn't think to check for new books by the authors I'd loved as a child.

The Dark Lord of Derkholm isn't exactly a sequel to The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, which was published two years earlier, but its deals with the consequences for a fantasy world of the kind of tours that the Tough Guide purports to be a guidebook for. After forty years, the inhabitants are desperate to break the contract for the tours, which are a huge drain on resources; between planning, guiding the parties of tourists and putting on battles, ambushes and other events typical of a clichéd fantasy journey, no-one has any time to do anything else, and much of the land is left devastated by the required battles and sieges. When the Oracles suggest that the mild-mannered wizard Derk, whose skills are mostly in agriculture and breeding magical creatures and who just wants to be left in peace with his family and his garden, should be appointed as Dark Lord for the year, things don't quite go according to plan.

On one level, this is a very funny parody of fantasy clichés and, like the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, points out the unrealistic nature of much epic fantasy (quite apart from the fantastic elements). But it's also a serious novel about Derk, his wife Mara and their two human and five griffin children working together to deal with adversity; it isn't just a romp and is really quite dark in a couple of places. On a third level, just because it's set in a fantasy world and not the real world doesn't stop in making an important point about the impact of tourism and the negative effects adapting to service a tourist industry focused on the "authentic" experience of a country can have on that country.

***

Shira Glassman's Knit One, Girl Two is a sweet, if rather slight, novella about a romance between an indie yarn dyer and an artist, both of whom are also fans of a fictional TV series called Captain Werewolf. I really liked the references to knitting and geek culture throughout the book; it was cute and fun and if the writing was sometimes a bit clunky I really didn't mind that much.

* I really dislike Christmas; it isn't my festival, but it's so all-pervasive I can't just ignore it the way I can ignore Easter, and while having a break from work is good, having a break from work just when the days are shortest and when it's hard to actually go out and do things because everywhere is either closed or mobbed is not entirely helpful, as it does mean I end up with a lot of time on my hands in which depression and/or anxiety can easily spiral out of control

Book series often improve as they go on. In this, the fifth of Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher books, the change feels more like a step-change than an incremental change. It's still an enjoyable murder mystery, but it felt less fluffy to me than the earlier books; Phryne's emotions have more depth to them, the characters she encounters have more depth, and the descriptions of the Australian Alps convey a sense of place that was completely lacking from Phryne's previous adventures. My favourite of the series so far.

The fourth of Robin Stevens' Wells and Wong mysteries returns to the school setting of the first, and sees our heroines Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong seeking the person responsible for the death of Deepdean School's bullying and unpopular Head Girl during the school's Bonfire Night fireworks display. As with the earlier books, despite being a fusion of two of the cosiest genres around - period murder mystery and school story - this isn't a cosy book at all and tackles serious issues including bullying, blackmail, Nazism and same-sex relationships in the 1930s along with the mystery. I also really loved seeing how Hazel has grown as a character since the first novel, when she was very much in Daisy's shadow; by this book, she's able to look at Daisy and their relationship much more objectively and stand up for herself and what she thinks is right. I really do think this series is getting better with each book.

Ada Palmer's debut novel, Too Like The Lightning, blew me away with its vividly-imagined future, shifting web of connections between characters, and philosophical digressions. With hindsight, its brilliance is perhaps more flawed than it appeared when I was still dazzled by my first reading (how can a world of billions of people have so few who actually seem to have a role in decision making, and all of them apparently having sex with each other? Also, it did feel rather as though Palmer was sometimes just adding complexity for the sake of complexity) and for the first half of the sequel, Seven Surrenders, the flaws seemed uppermost; it probably didn't help that I had a bug and wasn't really up to wrapping my head around the complicated philosophical aspects for a few days, but it's also true that the characters are all fairly unlikeable and their relationships are so tangled that six months after reading Too Like The Lightning it took me a long time to remember who was who and what they had done and had done to them in the first book. (The two books were originally written as one, and that may have been part of the problem; where most sequels are aware of the need to reintroduce characters and situations for the benefit of readers whose memory has faded, this one plunges you straight in and is quite frustrating to read. Reading the two back-to-back would have been better.)

Once I'd got past that, though, I did enjoy the book; after the setup of Too Like The Lightning, this is the denouement, as the various plot threads play out and we watch the world of the future change forever. I wasn't entirely convinced by the idea that in a post-gendered world gendered sex and the tools of seduction could be used to control everyone so completely, or indeed by the idea that after 250 years in a post-gendered world people would still be assuming that gender-neutral automatically equated to things which are coded masculine in contemporary society. I definitely wasn't convinced by the idea that the reason World War 1 was so terrible was because none of the major powers had been engaged in significant fighting on the main European stage for too long beforehand and there weren't any veterans to show people how wars worked (what price the Franco-Prussian war?) but that may just have been Palmer the historian making a joke about the dangers of historians trying to extrapolate grand theories from their study of the past*. It felt more like a parable than a science fiction novel about a world that could actually happen, but it was a compelling read and mostly lived up to the brilliance of the first book.

* This is, after all, a novel with a deeply unreliable narrator giving their own interpretation of the complex ideas and motivations of complicated and often deliberately deceptive people. I have seen a number of reviews online complaining that a hermaphrodite character is referred to as "it", and saying that Palmer should know better, but I feel that that rather ignores the fact that these are the words of a rather disturbed mass murderer with an unorthodox interpretation of the concept of gender in any case, and therefore cannot be taken as implying authorial approval.

The book I went to the launch party for on Friday was Love/War (original title Århundradets kärlekskrig) by the Swedish feminist and Professor of Nordic Literature at the University of Helsinki Ebba Witt-Brattström. It takes the form of a dialogue between an unnamed couple whose 30-year marriage is unravelling, messily and bitterly, fragments of conversations as they fight and attack one another with words, almost reconcile and then pull apart again. It's sharp and witty and vitriolic, peppered with literary and musical references, and written as fragments of free verse. The characters emerge clearly even though we only see them through their words; she is a feminist academic, made bitter by emotional neglect and physical abuse, he is both condescending and needy. Unnamed, their arguments have a universality that might be lost if they were given names; everywoman versus everyman*.

I really enjoyed this; it's beautifully written (and beautifully translated**), thoughtful and thought-provoking but also very funny in places. I'm very glad that Nordisk Books decided to produce an English translation and will be keeping an eye on their future output.

*Well, not exactly everywoman and everyman; happily I don't recognise my own marriage in their arguments, though I see resonances of many conversations about relationships I've had with many friends over the years.

**for which I am very grateful, given that I only know one phrase in Swedish, and that is the Swedish for "Has anyone seen my moose?". Oddly enough, that doesn't appear to have figured in this book.

There was a lot of buzz about Charlie Jane Anders's All the Birds in the Sky when it was first published, and I bought it after reading several positive reviews and seeing it had won a Nebula Award and was nominated for the Hugos. It sounded charming and fun and rather sweet; a story of two childhood friends, a witch and a scientist, reunited in adulthood and having to work together to save the world.

However, I really didn't enjoy it. I managed to get to the end rather than abandoning it, though at least part of me wishes I hadn't bothered. I didn't like the archly hipsterish narrative. I found the central characters, Patricia and Laurence, unlikeable and self-absorbed and couldn't bring myself to care about their relationship (especially at the point where they were both obsessing over that rather than the deaths of millions of people), while the supporting characters were all paper-thin and completely one-note, with the exception of the assassin from a secret fellowship of assassins, who appeared to have wandered in from a completely different novel, probably by Neil Gaiman, and whose story just tailed off halfway through the book without ever being properly resolved. In the first part of the book, dealing with Patricia and Laurence's childhoods, the supporting characters were also all appallingly abusive and neglectful, which didn't really sit comfortably with the novel's rather whimsical tone; I got the impression that the ghastliness of their childhoods was supposed to be funny in some hyperbolic way, instead of just utterly grim. Similarly, the main plot twist of the second half, when Patricia and Laurence are adults, is a catastrophic weather event caused by climate change, which seemed much too grim for the novel's general tone. (It may of course be that the whole point of the novel was supposed to be to show how awful humanity is, obsessing over small things and personal issues rather than trying to solve the problems we've created for the world. I'm not entirely sure I'd disagree with that assessment, but I have the news to tell me that; I don't need it in a novel that was described as being charming and magical.) I also didn't feel that the plotting was very coherent; the ending didn't really resolve the crisis that had been built up throughout the second half of the book, returning instead to a question from the very beginning. Really, it felt as though Anders had tried to shoehorn two novels into one, and it didn't quite work.

I wasn't originally planning to pre-order the first volume in Philip Pullman's new companion trilogy to His Dark Materials, The Book of Dust; I thought it could surely wait until the price of the ebook dropped when the paperback came out, but then about a week before publication I decided to pre-order it after all, and when I woke up last Thursday to find the email telling me it was available to download I realised that it was exactly the book I wanted to read.

La Belle Sauvage is set about ten years before the start of Northern Lights, when Lyra is a baby (I gather that the second and third volumes of the trilogy will be set ten years after the end of His Dark Materials). It's a book of two very distinct halves. The first part is a Le Carré-esque spy thriller set in a wintry Oxford in a world dominated by a darkly authoritarian theocracy; there are secret police who are feared and hated, schoolchildren are encouraged to spy on their parents and teachers and report any transgressions, and a secret network of agents works to counter the influence of the Magisterium. Eleven-year-old Malcolm Polstead, son of the landlords of the Trout Inn at Godstow, finds himself drawn into this world when he witnesses a man being arrested by the secret police one day while birdwatching on the Oxford canal in his canoe, La Belle Sauvage; at the same time, he is also fascinated by a baby girl who is being cared for at Godstow Abbey, where he often helps the nuns with odd jobs.

The second part of the novel is an almost dreamlike fantasy of a flooded Thames Valley, as Malcolm and Alice, who does the washing-up in the Trout, are swept towards London in La Belle Sauvage with the baby Lyra, encountering a range of characters both real and supernatural and fleeing a deadly and psychopathic enemy as well as the secret police, who are looking for Lyra.

It's an incredible read. I haven't re-read His Dark Materials since first reading it fifteen or more years ago, and had forgotten how much I loved it at the time; La Belle Sauvage broadens and deepens our knowledge of Lyra's world, giving readers a new perspective on some of the minor characters of the first series and concentrating more on the scientific and theological debates that provided a background to the first story but weren't explored in detail as they were of less interest to Lyra. I also know Oxford and the Thames Valley in general much better now than I did when I read His Dark Materials, and that certainly didn't hurt, as there's a very strong sense of place, both the Oxford of the first part, like and unlike ours (I'm not sure why Oxford in an alternate universe would stick so closely to the same plan as the real Oxford, with the same streets and houses and pubs, except where Pullman wants there to be a difference - Jordan College for Exeter College, and no locks on the Thames - but I'm willing to accept that that's just how this multiverse works) and the flooded landscape of the second (one of my favourite bits was the description of Malcolm and Alice being swept on the flood down St Giles and right through the centre of Oxford).

I'm glad I did decide to pre-order it in the end, though having finished the book a week after it was published I now have a frustratingly long wait for the next one to come out.