Here’s a recent trend I can get behind: shared worldbuilding. Mur deserves credit as one of the pioneers here, with the rollout of Playing For Keeps and all the Stories of the Third Wave. Another that caught my eye was the Mongoliad, a serial novel by Neal Stephenson, Greg Bear, and others, with lots of fan participation including artwork and stories (and nitpicking).…

From the statistics gathered by Goodreads, here’s everything I rated five stars (which to me means will-reread-again) in 2011:

1. A Memory of Wind, Rachel Swirsky
2. The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang
3. Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin
4. Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, Rudy Rucker
5. Nine Princes in Amber, Roger Zelazny
6. Story Engineering, Larry Brooks
7. Meanwhile, Jason Shiga
8. Earth Abides, George R.