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Award winning books must be the best books that were written that year, right?
right?
as anyone who has ever taken part in a “Read the Hugo’s” challenge, this is not always true.
If you’re reading Hugo winners or nominees for Vintage month, or ever, I highly recommend tracking down a copy of An Informal History of The Hugos, by Jo Walton. It’s a chunkster of a book, and not one that’s meant to be read cover to cover in one (or ten sittings), the volume contains Walton’s “Revisiting the Hugos” series of articles she wrote for Tor.com, along with a selection of comments and additional commentary for each year’s nominees and winners. For a taste of what to expect, check out any of her original articles at Tor.com.
Like the Vandermeer edited Big Book of Science Fiction, I’ve been flipping through Informal History, stopping a pages that have book titles I recognize, to see what Walton thought of them. What did she think of Dune? What did she think of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or Way Station, or Lord of Light, or Philip K Dick or Andre Norton? It was super interesting for me to see where we completely disagreed on our opinions, books that I loved and she thought were just ok at best.
Her commentary isn’t formal reviews, she’s talking about mostly if she liked the book when she was a teenager reading it for the first time, if it has re-readability, if it is print and/or available at the library, if it’s a title people are still interested in talking about. Where applicable she gives a brief mention to the location of that year’s WorldCon, who was nominated for different awards, other notable works that were published that year, and an invitation for people to suggest works that should have been nominated, but weren’t. She starts at 1953, and goes all the way to the year 2000. Yes, ok, this non-fiction commentary doesn’t totally qualify for Vintage Month, but I swear, while I was writing this blog post, I only paid attention to the chapters that cover 1953 – 1979!
Among Others, by Jo Walton
Posted on: March 3, 2012
- In: Jo Walton
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Among Others, by Jo Walton
published in 2011
Where I got it: the library
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Morwenna (who goes by Mori) and her twin sister Morganna can do magic and speak with fairies. But they have to be careful because their mother is a horrible witch who wants to take over the world. One day, something goes horribly wrong, resulting in Morganna’s death and Morwenna’s leg being shattered. In a panic, Mori runs away from her mother, ends up in an orphanage, and eventually is sent to live with the father (and his three creepy sisters) she never met. In a new town, in a new school, and dependent on relatives she doesn’t know, Among Others is a diary style memoir of Mori’s life after the death of her twin sister.
It’s not that Mori is an odd child, it’s that she doesn’t care what other people think of her. She doesn’t care if people think that she’s weird, or if people make fun of her limp. It’s nice that she’s so confident and comfortable in her own skin, but it makes it tough for her to make friends at her new school, especially when she goes around looking for fairies to speak to. The fairies in England must be different from the fairies in her native Wales, because she has a tough time talking with them.
Mori escapes into the books that she loves – science fiction. Overjoyed to see her favorite authors on her father’s bookshelves, they immediately bond over their shared love for sci fi. She searches out every bookstore, reads every science fiction novel in the school library and is eventually invited to join the science fiction book club at the town library. Finally, she can speak with people who are passionate about the same things she is, finally she has found a group that won’t think she’s weird! Even better, some of the members of the book group are around her age as well. If only she could share all this joy with her sister, and if only the fairies would help her destroy her evil witch of a mother.
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