Books of the Year!

[brigdh]

I figure that I am unlikely to finish another book before this evening, so here's the list of all the books I read in 2008. The total count in 107. Feel free to ask me for opinions on any of them.


The Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke 1/4/08
The Realms of the Gods - Tamora Pierce 1/7/08
The Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula Le Guin 1/9/08
The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula Le Guin 1/10/08
How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe - Thomas Cahill 1/14/08
Every Creeping Thing: True Tales of Faintly Repulsive Wildlife - Richard Conniff 1/15/08
Parasite Rex - Carl Zimmer 1/16/08
The Catch Trap - Marion Zimmer Bradley 1/16/08
First Test - Tamora Pierce 1/17/08
Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies - Eds: Robert M. Ehrenreich, Carole L. Crumley, Janet E. Levy 1/18/08
Page - Tamora Pierce 1/19/08
The Tollgate - Georgette Heyer 1/20/08
Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith 1/20/08
Court Duel - Sherwood Smith 1/21/08
The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant - Dan Savage 1/21/08
The Reluctant Widow - Georgette Heyer 1/25/08
Morality for Beautiful Girls - Alexander McCall Smith 1/26/08
Archaeologies of Complexity - Robert Chapman 1/30/08
The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family - Dan Savage 2/2/08
Europe in the Neolithic: The Creation of New Worlds - Alasdair Whittle 2/16/08
The Archaeology of Social Boundaries - Ed: Miriam Stark 2/19/08
A Conspiracy of Paper - David Liss 2/20/08
Devil's Cub - Georgette Heyer 2/21/08
I, Claudius - Robert Graves 3/4/08
Kushiel's Scion - Jacqueline Carey 3/6/08
Pistols for Two - Georgette Heyer 3/8/08
Empress - Karen Miller 3/17/08
Friday's Child - Georgette Heyer 3/20/08
The Kalahari Typing School for Men - Alexander McCall Smith 3/21/08
The Orphan's Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice - Catherynne Valente 3/22/08
Cousin Kate - Georgette Heyer 4/1/08
The Barbarians Speak: How the Conquered Peoples Shaped Roman Europe - Peter Wells 4/11/08
1421: The Year China Discovered America - Gavin Menzies 4/14/08
Saiyuki Reload 5 - Kazuya Minekura 4/19/08
Saiyuki Reload 6 - Kazuya Minekura 4/19/08
Saiyuki Reload 7 - Kazuya Minekura 4/19/08
Colors Insulting to Nature - Cintra Wilson 4/20/08
The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson 4/25/08 (reread)
Republics of Ancient India: c. 1500 B.C. to 500 B.C. - J. P. Sharma 5/1/08
Slammerkin - Emma Donaghue 5/3/08
Claudius the God - Robert Graves 5/7/08
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 5/11/08
Gender and Material Culture - Ed. Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe
My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy - Andrea Askowitz 5/13/08
The Conquerer - Georgette Heyer 5/16/08
Before They Are Hanged - Joe Abercrombie 5/20/08
Maxium City: Bombay Lost and Found - Suketu Mehta 5/23/08
A Fine and Private Place - Peter Beagle 5/30/08
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte 6/9/08 (audiobook, reread)
Imajica - Clive Barker 6/12/08
Washington Square - Henry James 6/14/08
I Am America and So Can You! - Stephen Colbert 6/24/08 (audiobook, reread)
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 6/30/08
The Fox Woman - Kij Johnson 7/4/08
Bingo - Rita Mae Brown 7/7/08
Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie 7/8/08
Small Gods - Terry Pratchett 7/9/08 (reread)
City of Glory - Beverly Swerling 7/14/08
Nomads and the Outside World (2nd ed.) - Anatoly M. Khazanov 7/18/08
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamtress - Bai Sijie 7/19/08
Aztec - Gary Jennings 7/25/08
Saiyuki Reload 8 - Kazuya Minekura 7/25/08
The Good Fairies of New York - Martin Millar 7/26/08
Kushiel's Justice - Jacqueline Carey 7/29/08
Victory of Eagles - Naomi Novak 8/1/08
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen 8/3/08
Faro's Daughter - Georgette Heyer 8/4/08
The Devil in the White City - Erick Larson 8/6/08
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies - Alexander McCall Smith 8/6/08
Blue Shoes and Happiness - Alexander McCall Smith 8/7/08
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive - Alexander McCall Smith 8/7/08
The Miracle at Speedy Motors - Alexander McCall Smith 8/8/08
Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade - James Reston, Jr. 8/9/08
The Dark Knight Returns - Frank Miller 8/17/08
Cyteen - C. J. Cherryh 8/18/08
The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalouge of Their Virtues - Susan Griffin 8/20/08
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty - Anne Rice 8/22/08
Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1949 - Stella Dong 8/26/08
The Luxe - Anna Godbersen 9/1/08
Boy Meets Boy - David Levithan 9/1/08
Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett 9/8/08
Last Argument of Kings - Joe Abercrombie 9/19/08
Beauty's Punishment - Anne Rice 9/20/08
The Riven Kingdom - Karen Miller 9/26/08
Man Makes Himself - V. Gordon Childe 9/27/08
Black Sheep - Georgette Heyer 10/3/08 (reread)
New Light on the Most Ancient East - V. Gordon Childe 10/6/08
The Grand Sophy - Georgette Heyer 10/10/08 (reread)
The Study of Dress History - Lou Taylor 10/10/08
The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England - Amanda Vickery 10/13/08
Emma - Jane Austen 10/20/08
Charity Girl - Georgette Heyer 10/24/08
Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images - Eds: Desiree G. Koslin and Janet E. Snyder 11/2/08
Lady Knight - Tamora Pierce 11/14/08
False Colours - Georgette Heyer 11/15/08
Nation - Terry Pratchett 11/16/08
Honky - Dalton Conley 11/18/08
The Clothed Body in the Ancient World - Ed. Liza Cleland, Mary Harlow, and Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones 11/26/08
The Sex Lives of Cannibals - J. Maarten Troost 11/28/08
Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris 12/5/08 (audiobook)
Mansfield Park - Jane Austen 12/8/08
Cotillion - Georgette Heyer 12/19/08 (reread)
Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote 12/21/08
Becoming Madame Mao - Anchee Min 12/23/08
Friday's Child - Georgette Heyer 12/24/08 (reread)
Lady of Quality - Georgette Heyer 12/25/08
Rumors - Anna Godbersen 12/29/08
The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman 12/31/08


Bests and Worsts, in order of awesomeness (or horribleness):
5 Worst Books of the Year:
Aztec. This book is so bad that recounting its plot has become a party story for me. It features incest, misogyny, identical twins, lesbian rape scenes, and long-lost deformed sisters.
1421: The Year China Discovered America. Inaccurate and stupid.
A Conspiracy of Paper. I liked this better when Neal Stephenson wrote it.
Sense and Sensibility. Blah.
The Riven Kingdom. Very boring, standard generic medieval fantasy with teenage girl protagonist. Mostly one of the worst because the first book in the trilogy was so awesome this was a huge disappointment.

5 Best Books of the Year:
Nation. I adored this. Wonderful, lovely, thoughtful. Also, yay for Terry Pratchett, who has just been made a knight!
Empress. Very interesting fantasy, a sort of take off of ancient Mesopotamia, with a very harsh, cold female protagonist, who would probably be the villain in any other fantasy book.
The Fox Woman. Really beautiful. A gorgeous story.
I, Claudius. Fantastic. All kinds of scandal and gossip and politics. And the narrator's voice is wonderful.
Emma. So! Funny!

General trends: I read much more YA and nonfiction this year that I have tended to in the past. Also romance, but only Georgette Heyer, as opposed to other authors.

Comments

[coyotegoth.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for Parasite Rexin the mail; what did you think of it?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

It's great fun! Not something I would reread, and very light, but deeply enjoyable and interesting. However, I am glad I read it in January, and not while or immediately before traveling in exotic locales, since I think I would have become deeply hypochondriac about having caught one parasite or another.

[synergic.livejournal.com]

fffff I am defeated.

Hello again!

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

But you read a lot of really long books. So it's not really a defeat.

And hello! So god to see you again.

[synergic.livejournal.com]

That might work on me if you were only, say, doubling my book count. But no.

I'm just glad you knew who it was!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

OMG, Aztec! I sneak-read that in the ashram library when I was ten, and I think it scarred me. Leprosy! Hearts ripped out! Magic mushroom sex! Melted freak-show freaks!

I seem to have forgotten the long-lost deformed sisters. Unless they were the cone-shaped women?

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

It is scarring!

Yes, the cone-shaped woman in the freak-show turns out to actually be the main character's long-lost sister, who became cone-shaped when she was tortured and set on fire by the son of the local noble, because he was so angry when she was revealed not to be a virgin. See? The book is horrifying!

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Now I feel I must read this, except it sounds too horrible.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Oooh. I am curious about: The Catch Trap, The Archaelogy of Social Boundaries, and Before They Are Hanged.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

The Catch Trap went through all my circle of friends this year. It's a very early book for openly portraying a gay relationship (I Believe it's from the 70s?), and apparently several people remembered it with great fondness from reading it in high school, and I may well have liked it a lot more if I had first read it when I was 14. It's about a family of trapeze artists and the guy who joins their team, and falls in love with one of the sons of the family. Very codependent, weirdly power-balanced, epic melodrama follows. But great fun, in an over-the-top sort of way.

The Archaeology of Social Boundaries is a collection of fairly short chapters on the topic, all case studies of the ways people mark social distinctions (mostly, but not entirely, ethnicity) through material culture. So, looking at things like how people use different styles of pots and other things to mark differences between different groups of people. Intended for an archaeological audience, but I would expect it wouldn't be difficult to understand.

Before They Are Hanged is the second book in Joe Abercrombie's trilogy (the first one is The Blade Itself, the last one is The Last Argument of Kings). I absolutely adored this trilogy. It's a take on the epic fantasy genre, done gritty and self-aware, although not quite a parody. It has all the standard characters: the barbarian berserker, the old wise wizard, the commoner who turns out to be the one needed to lead the army, etc. The books start out really funny, and get gradually darker until the trilogy ends in a very nihilistic place. My favorite character is a torturer who is himself crippled as a result of having been tortured; he has a great narrative voice, sarcastic and cynical and hilarious.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I am envious both of your count and of your ability to keep track of the books you read! I would love your thoughts on The Kid and the Claudius books. I very much enjoyed I, Claudius but never got around to reading further.