Fantasy Book Critic: More on 2011 Books Read and 2012 Releases Received (by Liviu Suciu)

As I have been way too tired to write a cogent review of the excellent anthology Solaris Rising about which you can find my scattered thoughts HERE and a full review most likely on Sunday, Nov 13, I updated my 2011 Releases Read post which now stands at 120 books, mostly novels and more generally fiction, though I included a very strong associational natural philosophy/speculative science book by David Deutsch too, though not the few other non-fiction 2011 books I read end to end so far.

I took a look at the distribution of these books as far as review copies versus copies bought/borrowed by me went and I was happy to note that the split was technically even 60-60, though it is true that in 5 cases I also got review copies after I bought and read the respective books. While in two cases (Home Fires and The Silent Land) the review copies were unexpected, in the other three I expected them but I still could not stop myself buying the books (The Sea Watch, Cold Fire, Heirs of the Blade) asap and of course these three all rank in my top 25 of the year - here as I do not like list repetitions, automatically a second series book that appears in the same year with another one like The Sea Watch gets #26, though technically it should be somewhere in the mid-teens.

I also was happy to note that of my top 10 books, 4 (#1, 3, 4, 6) were not review copies, while two more above (#5, #10) were also first bought by me. In the top 25, 10 were obtained by me, three are dual bought/review copies and thirteen are review copies. So all in all a good mix and I even looked at the number of reviews I did on Fantasy Book Critic versus only on Goodreads and while the numbers are skewed more towards review copies (some mid 40's against mid 30's), the ratio was not bad considering that almost all the review copies I got were sff which have priority in reviewing here, while a good chunk of the books I got myself are non-sff which get reviewed on an excellence/notable factor first and foremost.

As 2012 books go, two more review copies have been obtained by me, The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta (first published in 2011 in the UK, but the one I have is the US Feb 2012 e-arc) and Expeditions to the Mountains of the Moon by Mark Hodder (the third Burton/Swinburne adventure) in addition to the Michael Flynn one noted HERE.

As it happens I have not yet read any of them and I am curious which will be the first 2012 novel I will read - the odds favor heavily A Thunder Rising by David Weber for which an e-arc is imminent (as in check Baen Webscriptions 10 times a day to see if the earc got released and I can buy it) or The Great Game by Lavie Tidhar which I also expect soon, but otherwise the Vyleta novel may get there as I am currently in the mood for the darker kind of book.

10:31 AM |

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2 comments:

Bets Davies said...: Serious? I'm lucky I can find a book, much less remember how I got it.; November 10, 2011 at 1:34 PM
Liviu said...: I use Goodreads for all the books I read so it's easy for me to remember when i read it, etc; November 10, 2011 at 2:47 PM