Would you believe I enjoy reading fiction even more than watching films? In honour of International Women’s Day, I thought I would highlight the fact that 80{81a086e50adc416cb06a533df9c9a0c5cefc9698f6906c0f4cbe2e77960b337a} of the ‘four-star’ novels I read during the past few years were written by women.
Most surprising is that this number also applies to my favourite genre, science fiction, which until recently has been overwhelmingly dominated by men (though one of my all-time favourite novels, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – 1818 – may be the first true sci-fi novel ever written, and in 2020 I read Shelley’s lesser-known, but also excellent, The Last Man – 1826, a post-apocalyptic novel about a global pandemic – as if).
Other favourite sci-fi novels I read in the past few years include:
Ada Palmer’s magnificent Terra Ignota series:
Too Like the Lightning
Seven Surrenders
The Will to Battle
Perhaps the Stars
N.K. Jemisin’s marvellous Broken Earth trilogy (note that Jemisin’s Emergency Skin is the best short story I read in the last ten years):
The Fifth Season
The Obelisk Gate
The Stone Sky
Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis series:
Dawn
Adulthood Rites
Imago
Ann Leckie’s Ancillary trilogy:
Ancillary Justice
Ancillary Sword
Ancillary Mercy
Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series:
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
A Closed and Common Orbit
Record of a Spaceborn Few
The Galaxy, and the Ground Within
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga books
The entire series (16 books) is must reading for sci-fi fans (I read five in the past three years)
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, sequel to her classic The Handmaid’s Tale
The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders
Binti and Noor by Nnedi Okorafor
The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The Found and the Lost (collection of novellas) by Ursula K. Le Guin (also reread one of my all-time favourite novels, written by Le Guin: The Dispossessed).
Turning away from sci-fi, my favourite fiction novel of the past few years was The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish (my favourite fiction novel of the past decade was also written by a woman: Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch).
Other favourite fiction read during this period includes:
Shadow Tag, The Round House and The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Milkman by Anna Burns
All My Puny Sorrows and Women Talking by Miriam Toews
Since this is a film blog, I will end with a nod to a largely unknown and under-appreciated French-Canadian filmmaker who made my favourite film of 2019 (And the Birds Rained Down) and has made three other films (Familia, Gabrielle, Merci Pour Tout), all of which are very well-made and deserve a viewing, though few readers will have heard of them. In my opinion, Louise Archambault is one of the very best film directors in Canada.
