In Short: December

Posted 31st December 2022 by Sia in State of the Sia / 0 Comments

Winter hit hard this month, with an avalanche of snow and ice appearing literally overnight – but icy outsides just mean more time spent indoors reading!

ARCs Received

Just three new ARCs this month, but three is plenty when they’re all books you’re excited for! I was especially touched when Redfern Jon Barrett reached out to ask if I’d like an early copy of their debut Proud Pink Sky, to which the answer was obviously yes!

Read

25 books read this month; I think we can safely say I’m over my reading slump! And there were some pretty amazing standouts, like Siren Queen (think Hollywood run by Fae monsters, where movie stars become literal stars), At the Feet of the Sun (the seriously but softly mythic sequel to Hands of the Emperor), the short but exquisite Lights of Ystrac’s Wood (in which two very different people meet their patron gods) and The Map and the Territory (wherein a magical apocalypse in a very queer world throws unlikely travelling companions together). I’m also a year late to Victoria Goddard’s wonderful (and game-changing) Plum Duff, but it proved to be perfect Yuletide reading, so it all worked out!

To the best of my knowledge, 31.82% of this month’s authors were BIPOC.

Reviewed

I really hoped to get more reviews written this month, but I’m very happy I finally finished my write-up of Everything For Everyone – I’ve been working on my review of it since August!

DNF-ed

Another month with no DNFs!!! I’m starting to wonder if something’s wrong with me – or maybe I’ve just been wonderfully lucky in what I’ve been reading!

ARCs Outstanding

11 outstanding ARCs, and every one of them I’m so excited to read! I’ve started several of them already, and I’ll be surprised if I don’t end up fervently loving most if not all of these!

Misc

I finalised and posted my Best SFF of 2022 list! It ended up being 24 books long – a fair bit shorter than my Best of 2021, which featured 31 books. Were there more great books released last year, or was I just stricter with my standards this year? Hard to say. I do think that this year’s Best were, on the whole, better than 2021’s Best – more imaginative, more powerful, more mindblowing.

So maybe it’s just a quality over quantity thing.

The rest of this month has been devoted to my Unmissable SFF of 2023 list, which will hopefully go live tomorrow!

Looking Forward

December was a slow month for new releases (which, fair!) but we’re diving right back into things in January! The newest Wayward Children installment has to be at the top of my list, but I’m also rabidly excited for Queer Fires, the sequel to Ember Boys (reviewed here) and Godkiller, which sounds like it ticks so many of my boxes!

Which brings us to the end of the month – and the year! May 2023 be a better year for all of us!

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