So I’ve finally finished reading all the Hugo nominees, and the Hugo winner, from 2009. This was a pretty amazing group of books, I’ll be perfectly honest. I haven’t read every nominee from every year, so me making a statement that this was an amazing year for the top books doesn’t hold as much weight, but my goodness. Each and every one of these books was great.

I started with the nominees, and just finished reading the winner (The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman).

Anathem by Neal Stephenson was up first. I really enjoyed his early books. I was introduced to him like many through Snow Crash, and then backtracked and read Zodiac, and I even dug up a copy of The Big U from a library before it was back in print. However as he went on, I got more and more disinterested in what he was writing. He was a great author, and the detail was remarkable, but it was like each book the editor got more and more slack. Cryptonomicon was long and meandering and I still don’t know what it was about really. It seemed way too long and lacking in a plot. The Baroque Cycle….It was like he went so far off the deep end that he couldn’t just write one long book anymore, it was so long and lacking in editing that they broke it up into three. Maybe that’s not how it was, but that’s how it felt to me. I couldn’t read them. Anathem is a return to form for Stephenson. Yes, it’s still long but it’s cropped down from his previous efforts, and yes the book takes a bit to get off the ground as it creates the world but it’s a completely different world from Earth so it takes a bit to set it up. It’s possibly his best book.  It’s an interesting and new world, it’s got interesting characters, and a plot. And it’s got his trademark asides, tangents and conversations, but they’re great, and they tie in to the story well. An amazing book that all lovers of sci-fi and smart fiction should read.

After reading Anathem I decided to check out the rest of the 2009 class to see what could possibly be nominated next to it, as well as BEAT a book so good.

Next up came Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross. This book is in some ways an homage to books like Friday by Robert Heinlein, down to the buxom female on the cover. The book is set in a future where humanity is all dead, and the intelligent robots we created to be our servants and workers are left behind, still soldiering on. The main character a former sex robot now with no humans to service making her way through the solar system. The book itself took awhile for me to get into. The writing style, while good, was not necessarily elementary. My brain had to switch into a higher gear. ONce there though, and once I started understanding the world and what was going on, I got into it. Unlike Anathem, Stross doesn’t spend 100 pages establishing the world. He jumps into the action on page 1 and you have to figure out what’s going on as you read. That’s all well and good, but it was such a different world it was hard at first to get with the program. By the end though I was really enjoying the book. The visuals were astonishing, the story gripping.

Anathem still on top, but Saturn’s Children very good. What’s next.

John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale. Ok I have to admit, John Scalzi is one of my favorite active writers. One of my favorite overall really. I’ve read everything he’s written now with reading Zoe’s Tale, and I can’t say that for many authors. I love his brand of sci-fi, his space adventure, his non-space adventure. I just really enjoy his writing style and topics and humor. They mesh very well with my own. Zoe’s Tale itself is sort of an alt-perspective novel to his previous one in the Old Man’s War universe ‘The Last Colony’. This one is seen from the perspective of Zoe, the daughter (adopted) of the colony leaders (and main characters in his other Old Man’s War stories). It was interesting to re-read the story but from a different view, which has to be a difficult thing to do without telling the same story twice. On the whole though he did a great job, and I thoroughly enjoyed the book. However, I couldn’t bump it above Anathem on my list. While I love Scalzi’s writing tremendously, Anathem was just a next level book.

Next came the last non-winning nominee Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It was in the young adults fiction section which troubled me, but after reading it I have to question why it was considered young adult fiction (a couple of the characters get naked in it and have sex. Not exactly pg material) Anyway it was a well written story, near future, about a kid and his group of friends who get arrested by homeland security in the wake of a terrorist attack, and then how he gets back at ‘the man’. Interesting book, good for teen rebellion. It was Sci-Fi in that there were a few techs in it that weren’t real, maybe 5-10 years in the future if that. I enjoyed it, it was a quality book, but I threw it in last place.

So last book up. I was dreading it. It was “the winner”. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. How  could it beat Anathem, or even Zoe’s Tale, I just couldn’t conceive. Not only was it a children’s book (It not only won the Hugo but it won the Newberry medal as well for best children’s book) but it was set in a graveyard with ghosts and ghouls and vampires and werewolves, etc. That subject matter just feels so trite these days with the Vampire Tween movies and True Blood, etc. Anyway, I got it out of the library and gave it a whirl.

I take back my dread. It was really an amazing book. It was like the anti-Harry Potter in a way. A story about an orphan boy, raised by mystical figures who teach him magic, to overcome the evil nemisis who killed his family (whom he escaped from as a baby) and win and become an adult. Same basic story, but so much better. Condensed into one book, rather than spread over 7, it keeps an internal logical consistency that the Harry Potter books never did, and the characters make sense, and behave in rational ways (or irrational if they’re meant to). It was really a perfect book in that mold, and I have to give it props. I think Anathem and Saturn’s Children were both written ‘above’ the level of this book and make you think in ways this one doesn’t, but this was really a perfect amalgam of this traditional plot, in a new circumstance, with colorfull characters. I visualized it the whole time reading it. I’m sure the movie, should they make one, will be fabulous. I cast the movie while reading the book (Ian McKellen as Silas…) More than anything though as I said, it just made me realize how bad the Harry Potter books really were. Oh they were enjoyable sure, but I don’t know abot you but when I was reading them many times I wanted to poke my eyes out. Harry not telling the adults tthings, the adults keeping things from Harry, him not trusting anyone, nobody trusting him. God the books were one big trust issue. It made me crazy. The Graveyard Book though doesn’t have that. The boy as a boy is trusting as he should be, too much so, and the adults trust him with some knowledge, but protect him, but don’t lie to him or cover things up.

So there it is. The five Hugo nominees, including the winner from 2009. I agree with The Graveyard Book winning, though I’d have been happy if Anathem had won as well. No reason to not have two winners no? The rest I all whole heartedly recommend for all sci-fi fans, though if you’re going to read Zoe’s Tale be sure to read the whole Old Man’s War series first so you can enjoy it more.