2008: Books Read
Jan. 1st, 2009 02:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zanzjanOnly read a pathetic 39 books this year, but I've been kinda busy. I'd hoped to make it to 40, and I expect I'll have finished my first book of 2009 before New Year's Day is over, but distraction with furnace woes derailed my plans to curl up in the comfy chair in the library and read for the evening.
There were a lot of really worthwhile books in this year's lot. If I had to pick any as the absolute top, I'd have to choose Karl Schroeder's Virga trilogy. The worldbuilding was exquisite, and on top of that it was also just a great, fun, cool adventure story. With pirates! Man, this series just pushed all my happy-reader buttons and I couldn't get enough. I find myself hoping he adds more books to that series over time, as I suspect he could go quite a while yet before he exhausts even a tiny percentage of what he's built.
Other great reads: Stross's Halting State, McDonald's Brasyl, and Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- all Hugo contenders (the last the winner) and each of them deserved the award. In some ways it was a relief not to be voting this year, as I'm not sure I could have picked among them. I would strongly suggest not reading McDonald and Chabon back to back, though; McDonald's book is liberally peppered with Brazilian slang (with a handy glossary in the back), and Chabon's is similarly filled with Yiddish slang (with a handy glossary in the back) and by the time I was done reading both I kept mentally switching back and forth in my brain from Yiddish --> Portuguese --> English and ending up very confused.
Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear was ludicrously fantastic, and there's not a thing I could say about the plot that wouldn't spoil it something awful. I finally read me some Scalzi and didn't regret it one bit. Oh, and Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full, picked up entirely on a whim because the cover caught my eye, was delightful. Rachel Caine remains my top (really, only) choice for the occasional paranormal-romance wordcandy fix.
As far as worst book, there weren't any absolute dogs in this year's run, but the blatant sexism and racism in some of the Agatha Christies was bothersome (yeah yeah, "times they were written in" and all that.) I also finally got around to C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet and very much enjoyed the first half of the book (where stuff actually happened) but then the second half was just total smug, somewhat condescending theological wankery. I also entirely failed to enjoy Ken MacLeod's Execution Channel, where I usually like his books -- this one just felt like the concepts hadn't had the time they needed to mature, as if he wrote it before he was ready. That was probably the most disappointing book of the year.
Anyhow, the full list of books is here, with a * beside ones I thought were notably good:
Stephen Brust, Jhegaala
Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain
Tobias Buckell, Ragamuffin
Jim Butcher, Fool Moon
Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance
Rachel Caine, Midnight Alley
Rachel Caine, Feast of Fools
Rachel Caine, Thin Air
Rachel Caine, Gale Force
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union*
Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders
Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library
Agatha Christie, Evil Under The Sun
Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein*
Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy
Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear*
Steven Gould, Blind Waves
Steven Gould, Jumper: Griffin's Story
Maurice LeBlanc, The Hollow Needle
Stanislaw Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Ken MacLeod, Execution Channel
Ian McDonald, Brasyl*
Terry Pratchett, Nation*
John Scalzi, Old Man's War*
John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades*
John Scalzi, The Last Colony*
John Scalzi, Zoe's Tale*
Karl Schroeder, Sun of Suns*
Karl Schroeder, Queen of Candesce*
Karl Schroeder, The Pirate Sun*
Charles Stross, Halting State*
Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue
Leonie Swann, Three Bags Full*
Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw
There were a lot of really worthwhile books in this year's lot. If I had to pick any as the absolute top, I'd have to choose Karl Schroeder's Virga trilogy. The worldbuilding was exquisite, and on top of that it was also just a great, fun, cool adventure story. With pirates! Man, this series just pushed all my happy-reader buttons and I couldn't get enough. I find myself hoping he adds more books to that series over time, as I suspect he could go quite a while yet before he exhausts even a tiny percentage of what he's built.
Other great reads: Stross's Halting State, McDonald's Brasyl, and Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union -- all Hugo contenders (the last the winner) and each of them deserved the award. In some ways it was a relief not to be voting this year, as I'm not sure I could have picked among them. I would strongly suggest not reading McDonald and Chabon back to back, though; McDonald's book is liberally peppered with Brazilian slang (with a handy glossary in the back), and Chabon's is similarly filled with Yiddish slang (with a handy glossary in the back) and by the time I was done reading both I kept mentally switching back and forth in my brain from Yiddish --> Portuguese --> English and ending up very confused.
Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear was ludicrously fantastic, and there's not a thing I could say about the plot that wouldn't spoil it something awful. I finally read me some Scalzi and didn't regret it one bit. Oh, and Leonie Swann's Three Bags Full, picked up entirely on a whim because the cover caught my eye, was delightful. Rachel Caine remains my top (really, only) choice for the occasional paranormal-romance wordcandy fix.
As far as worst book, there weren't any absolute dogs in this year's run, but the blatant sexism and racism in some of the Agatha Christies was bothersome (yeah yeah, "times they were written in" and all that.) I also finally got around to C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet and very much enjoyed the first half of the book (where stuff actually happened) but then the second half was just total smug, somewhat condescending theological wankery. I also entirely failed to enjoy Ken MacLeod's Execution Channel, where I usually like his books -- this one just felt like the concepts hadn't had the time they needed to mature, as if he wrote it before he was ready. That was probably the most disappointing book of the year.
Anyhow, the full list of books is here, with a * beside ones I thought were notably good:
Stephen Brust, Jhegaala
Tobias Buckell, Crystal Rain
Tobias Buckell, Ragamuffin
Jim Butcher, Fool Moon
Rachel Caine, The Dead Girls' Dance
Rachel Caine, Midnight Alley
Rachel Caine, Feast of Fools
Rachel Caine, Thin Air
Rachel Caine, Gale Force
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union*
Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders
Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library
Agatha Christie, Evil Under The Sun
Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein*
Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy
Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear*
Steven Gould, Blind Waves
Steven Gould, Jumper: Griffin's Story
Maurice LeBlanc, The Hollow Needle
Stanislaw Lem, Tales of Pirx the Pilot
C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Ken MacLeod, Execution Channel
Ian McDonald, Brasyl*
Terry Pratchett, Nation*
John Scalzi, Old Man's War*
John Scalzi, The Ghost Brigades*
John Scalzi, The Last Colony*
John Scalzi, Zoe's Tale*
Karl Schroeder, Sun of Suns*
Karl Schroeder, Queen of Candesce*
Karl Schroeder, The Pirate Sun*
Charles Stross, Halting State*
Charles Stross, The Jennifer Morgue
Leonie Swann, Three Bags Full*
Jo Walton, Tooth and Claw
