Year-end Book Roundup

[brigdh]

I actually managed to keep track of what books I read this year! Granted, I didn't start until July, which throws off the count a bit, but it's still better than I've ever done before. This count only includes books that I actually read cover to cover, and not articles or edited chapters or so on, which means the vast majority of the reading I did for school is not included. Mainly because I had no interest in keeping track of that many titles and authors.


Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson. 07/04/06
Full Metal Alchemist: Volume One, Arakawa Hiromu. 07/05/06
Full Metal Alchemist: Volume Two, Arakawa Hiromu. 07/05/06
Full Metal Alchemist: Volume Three, Arakawa Hiromu. 07/06/06
Full Metal Alchemist: Volume Four, Arakawa Hiromu. 07/06/06
Melusine, Sarah Monette. 07/07/06
A Factory of Cunning, Philippa Stockley. 07/09/06
Full Metal Alchemist: Volume Five, Arakawa Hiromu. 07/11/06
Full Metal Alchemist: Volume Six, Arakawa Hiromu. 07/12/06
Ship of Magic, Robin Hobb. 07/16/06 (reread)
Mad Ship, Robin Hobb. 07/21/06 (reread)
Ship of Destiny, Robin Hobb. 07/25/06 (reread)
The Well of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde. 07/25/06
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin. 07/26/06
America: The Book, A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, John Stewart, Ben Karlin, David Javerbaum. 07/30/06 (reread)
Monster: Volume Two, Naoki Urasawa. 08/01/06
The Memory of Whiteness, Kim Stanley Robinson. 08/01/06
Alanna: The First Adventure, Tamora Pierce. 08/02/06 (reread)
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clark. 08/06/06
City Come A-Walkin', John Shirley. 08/08/06
Mort, Terry Pratchett. 08/11/06 (reread)
The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Ursula Le Guin. 08/14/06
Monster: Volume Three, Naoki Urasawa. 08/15/06
In the Hand of the Goddess, Tamora Pierce. 08/17/06 (reread)
The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Tamora Pierce. 08/17/06 (reread)
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. 08/22/06
The Song of the Lioness, Tamora Pierce. 08/23/06 (reread)
Baby-ji, Abha Dawesar. 08/24/06
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 09/01/06
Pottery in Archaeology, Clive Orton, Paul Tyers and Alan Vince. 09/01/06
A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle. 09/02/06
The Sign of Four, Arthur Conan Doyle. 09/02/06
Cloud of Sparrows, Takashi Matsuoka. 09/03/06
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith. 09/04/06
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. 09/06/06
Archaeological Theory, Matthew Johnson. 09/11/06 (reread)
Swordspoint, Ellen Kushner. 09/12/06 (reread)
The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner. 09/13/06
Archaeological Excavations at 'Ubeidiya, 1960-1963, M. Stekelis. 09/15/06
The Misanthrope, Moliere. 09/17/06
The Sicilian or Love the Painter, Moliere. 09/18/06
Tartuffe, Moliere. 09/19/06
Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization, Arthur Demarest. 09/20/06
A Doctor in Spite of Himself, Moliere. 09/21/06
The Imaginary Invalid, Moliere. 09/21/06
Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape, Roderick J. McIntosh. 09/23/06
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. 09/23/06
Vurt, Jeff Noon. 09/25/06
The Razor's Edge, W. Somerset Maugham. 09/29/06
The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas. 10/21/06
Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was, Susan Pollock. 10/23/06 (reread)
Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman. 10/24/06
Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. 10/26/06
Salon Fantastique, Eds: Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. 11/04/06
Ancient Jomon of Japan, Junko Habu. 11/06/06
Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians, Timothy R. Pauketat. 11/10/06
Freedom and Necessity, Steven Brust & Emma Bull. 11/15/06
The Fall of the Kings, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. 11/24/06 (reread)
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky. 12/02/06
The Wee Free Men, Terry Pratchett. 12/02/06
Before Writing: From Counting to Cuneiform, Denise Schmandt-Besserat. 12/02/06
Angel with the Sword, C. J. Cherryh. 12/04/06
The Compass Rose, Ursula Le Guin. 12/10/06
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos (translated by Richard Aldington). 12/15/06
The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare. 12/15/06
Henry V, Shakespeare. 12/18/06
Perdido Street Station, China Mieville. 12/24/06
Venetia, Georgette Heyer. 12/26/06


Feel free to ask me for thoughts on any of these, if you'd like; I know I'm terrible at blogging my reactions to books.

Comments

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Actually I am curious about Cloud of Sparrows as I am a sucker for pretty titles. It seems to have good reviews on amazon, but some bitching about the ending.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Which (if any) of the archeology/anthropology books would you recommend for a layperson?

[kessie.livejournal.com]

Oh, what did you think of The Left Hand of Darkness? I had to read that for my Popular Lit class last year, so it'd be nice to hear a non-academic reaction to it. :D

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I disliked it. It's not terrible, and if you just want mindless Meiji-era Japanese fiction, it would be fine book to read. But I thought most of the characterizations were really simplistic, so it's not something I'd recommend if you want a good book.

Man, it has a pretty title though, doesn't it? That's probably the main reason I read it myself.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I bounced off it.

Please tell me what you thought of...

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Perdido Street Station, Venetia, Henry V, Babyji, Les Liaisons and Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley.

[ravenbell.livejournal.com]

::Whistles:: Wow. If you've read any of Gaiman's other collections, how was "Fragile Things"?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Either Demarest's Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization or Pollock's Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden That Never Was, depending on which area you find more interesting. Pollock identifies as a feminist archaeologist, which you might like, but doesn't do much with it in this book. The others are either not layperson books (the theory and excavation ones), so layperson that they talk down to the reader and become boring (the Indus book), or involve way too much of the author's crazy postmodern theories (the Niger and Cahokia books. I am normally totally a postmodernist myself, but some archaeologists take it to the extreme of "Well, we can't prove anything for sure, so therefore archaeology isn't a science, so therefore it's valid for me to write poetry about what these artifacts make me feel." Which I guess is fine, if that's what you want to do, but I'm not sure I see the point of studying it).

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I liked it a lot. I'd heard so much about it that I basically knew the entire plot before I started it, but it still managed to be very different from the image I'd formed of it. It was much darker than I expected. I think I've liked the short stories I've read by Le Guin since even better, though.

Re: Please tell me what you thought of...

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Perdido Street Station had an excellent plot, and read much faster than I expected of such a big book. I was sort of disappointed that it focused so much on the main group of characters; when the moths first showed up, I thought it was going to be about the effects of constant nightmares on such a huge city. Which I think I actually would have preferred; I would have loved to see the wide-spread ramifications and how the people who didn't know what was happening reacted. The one thing I didn't like was how the descriptions of the city were constantly so bleak and dirty. Everything was a slum, everything was falling apart and ugly and weedy and crowded and on and on. I felt like, dude, is there seriously not one pretty spot in your entire city?

Venetia was so funny! I really liked it, particularly Venetia's scholar brother. I had a little bit of a problem with the "guy grabs protesting Venetia and forces her to kiss him" trope, but not so much as to ruin the rest of the book. I'm planning on reading more Heyer, but this is the only one of hers that I've had an easy time finding, as it was just re-released by Harlequin.

Henry V was pretty much the most boring play of Shakespeare's I've ever read. There were several very nice speeches, including the famous "we band of brothers" one, and there's an excellent scene at the end where Henry seduces a French princess, but there's practically no plot. Unless "people talk about going to war with France, there's a battle and then a peace treaty" with hardly any subplots or even much depth to the main events counts as a plot.

Baby-ji was awesome. I adored the main character. Much of it wasn't very realistic- I'd think a high-school girl would not be able to hook up with a divorced adult woman that easily- and the ending wrapped things up too quickly, but I loved the narrative voice so much that I didn't really care. There's a bit where she tries to deal with the question of why it's considered wrong to treat pretty people better than others, since beauty is something you're born with and can't change, but society gives all sorts of advantages and privileges to smart people, whose talent is also often innate. Which is something that I had all sorts of teenage angst over too, but that I've never seen in a book before, so I was very shocked and pleased to see it here. It was just a fun book.

Les Liaisons was also awesome! So much better than I expected; it's the best epistolary novel I've read. It does such neat things with the format. This was a bad translation, though; I caught several typos and awkward phrasings, and there was one really strange footnote. The translator felt the need to write several paragraphs about how charity used to be so celebrated as a virtue, but nowadays people are evil and degraded and whatever. I do have to wonder why on earth he was translating this book if he wanted to celebrate the virtues of the 1700s. I caught 'Cruel Intentions' last night on TV (that terrible teen movie adaptation of the book), and it looks even worse when compared to how excellent the book was. I thought it was interesting too that in the book it's the Vicomte who wants to sleep with the Marquise, while they flipped it for 'Cruel Intentions'. My guess is they wanted to really drag the female character through the dirt, which raises interesting questions, but I'd have to watch the whole movie to be sure, and I don't want to do that.

Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley is an all right introduction to the Indus Valley/Harappan culture (it's got a different name depending on who you're talking to), but it's pretty simplistic. He doesn't get into enough detail to be interesting, so it starts to get boring by the end. It does have a lot more photos than the average archaeology book, which is nice to be able to see what you're reading about. The author's really nice in person, though.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I though Fragile Things wasn't as good as Smoke and Mirrors (does he have more short story collections than those two?), but it still had several excellent stories and is very worth reading. My favorite was the Sherlock Holmes/H. P. Lovecraft crossover, which sounds like it would be terrible and make no sense, but was actually perfect and lovely.

[b-hallward.livejournal.com]

The Big Sleep. Is it better, worse or just different from the movie?

Which of Moliere's plays did you like the best? Least?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the movie. #^^# It was very good; better than the The Maltese Falcon, which I read before I started keeping track, though I think the whole noir style is too understated for me.

The Imaginary Invalid was the funniest. The main character of The Misanthrope was fascinating, but the play couldn't quite decide if it wanted to be serious or a comedy, which kept throwing me out. The worst, no question, was The Sicilian, which was just silly and over-the-top.

[parallactic.livejournal.com]

What did you think of the Terry Pratchett you've read? He's one of my favorite authors.

How was Moliere? Is he worth reading? How dense or accessible would he be to a modern reader?

I think I want to dip my toes into magical realism, so how was Love in a Time of Cholera?

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Drat. I hate when books have pretty titles and then are boring or the book is not related to the title. I guess I'll pass then, as I have way too many books on my to be read pile already.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

I am glad you liked it, as that was my question as well. How did you like the Tamora Pierce books?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I was totally head-over-heels obsessed with the Alanna quartet when I was about eight (I dressed as her one year for Halloween!), so my reaction is probably not entirely logical. But I adore the books, I adore the world, George is solely responsible for my lifelong love for thieves and rouges, and the Bhazir (sp?) for my kink for deserts and the people in them.

I really want to read the other series Pierce has set in the world, since I hadn't known she'd written other books there until last year.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I adore Terry Pratchett. He's one of my favorite authors, too. I thought Thump!, his latest adult Discworld, was one of the best things I've read recently. It's just not on this list because I read it before I started keeping track.

He's fine. No more difficult that any other classical dramatist, and his plays are very short, so they're fairly easy to get through. I'd recommend sticking to his better known works if you want to read him, since both The Sicilian and The Doctor in Spite of Himself were sort of silly. I don't know if he's worth reading in the sense of "it'll change your life!"; he's no Shakespeare. He came off to me as better entertainment than deep thinking.

I liked Love in a Time of Cholera much better than A Hundred Years of Solitude, the author's more famous book. They're both very well-written, very lyrical, but I have a problem feeling connected with his characters. I don't know why that is (well, in A Hundred Years... it's because there's a gigantic cast, so you don't spend much time with any of them), but I never really cared about any of them. Which is a big turn-off for me, because I like to be heavily invested in the characters I read about, but might not bother you as much.

[ravenbell.livejournal.com]

There was also Angels and Visitations, which is a little hard to get a hold of, but had great things in it.

I think I've read the story you're talking about - "A Study in Emerald," right? Awesome stuff.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

What did you think of Melusine?

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

OOOH, read the "Protector of the Small" series, as that is my favorite :).

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's right. I've never managed to get a copy of that, though I'd love to read it.

Yep, that's it. Great story.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Is that the one that starts with 'First Test'? I keep flipping through it when I'm in bookstores, but I haven't bought it yet.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I liked it! Not as much as most people I know did- I think because I wasn't as sympathetic to Felix as the narrative wanted you to be- but I thought the worldbuilding was really cool. I'm going to read the sequel, but haven't got around to it yet.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

Yep. That's the one!

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

But as horrible as Felix was, didn't Mildmay make up for it?
He did, at least for me :).

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Heh. I didn't think Felix was horrible so much as stupid, but yeah, I really liked Mildmay.

[annoyedwabbit.livejournal.com]

your list of books is filled with awesome and cool. o_o I see manga, fantasy, weird clasics, AND asian history! :D

Just for that (well, okay, that and your enthusiastic paragraph in your profile about friending...), I am friending you.

[parallactic.livejournal.com]

I think you meant Thud!. :) I also liked his latest.it's still Pratchett, and he still does good social satire, but--it also feels like he's retreading old ground.

Thanks for your write up Moliere. That's good to know.

I don't think I'd do well with A Hundred Years of Solitude, because I have trouble keeping track of huge casts. Cholera seems like what I should start with if I ever get around to reading Marquez.

Thanks!

Re: Please tell me what you thought of...

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Venetia is one of my favorite Heyers, but Harlequin has a lot of her others out now as well. Other favorites are The Unknown Ajax (not so much a romance as a family drama/comedy/character study), Cotillion (one of my very favorite romantic heroes ever and also hilarious), Sylvester (the heroine is snubbed by the hero, and vengefully writes him into a novel as the villain, Count Ugolino), Frederica (just really funny and sweet, and Sprig Muslin (ditto.)

There, that should get you started.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, Thud!. I knew I should have looked that up instead of just trying to remember. I'd been feeling the same as you about a lot of his recent books- the newspaper one, and the post office, and a few other ones- but I genuinely loved Thud!.

A Hundred Years of Solitude is particularly bad because it follows four or five generations of a family, so a lot of characters are named after each other. It gets really hard to keep track of who's who when three people have the same name. I also thought Cholera was just more interesting though, so I'd definitely recommend you start with that.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I really like... I think his name is Neal? The sarcastic smart guy who shows the Kel around. He seems like just my type of character.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hee, thank you! Though I can't promise that my general daily posts have quite that much diversity. *grins*

But still, you're welcome to friend me, and nice to meet you!