Books Read In 2014

[hatgirl]

Every year I keep track of how many new books I finished. In 2011 I read 63 books, in 2012 I read 58, in 2013 I read 56, and in 2014 I read... 39

Comments

[peadarog]

I see a few Bob Shaw books on the list, but not among those I've read or would consider his most famous. What did you think?

[hatgirl]

My eclectic Bob Shaw collection was sourced from Chapters' secondhand department and free-to-good-home tables at Octocon and P-Con.

My favourites so far are Vertigo (aka Terminal Velocity), The Ceres Solution and Night Walk. Those three books all have main characters with disabilities, and Bob Shaw writes them with an element of... truthiness... that impresses me. He's very good at expressing the polite, controlled, rage of living with a long-term disability. I believe he had vision and migraine difficulties throughout most of his life, which he probably drew on for his fiction... I really need to get an academically-inclined nerd interested in writing a paper on the topic.

I wasn't crazy about Dark Night in Toyland, a short story collection. The shorts tended towards the "dark", but didn't really having anything original to say. So it was just a bunch of miserable stories about miserable people being miserable. The Palace of Eternity was also a swing-and-a-miss for me. It starts off as a MilSF genre story and morphs into a

[peadarog]

Thanks, that's a good overview! Yes, Who Goes Here, The Ragged Astronauts and Orbitsville would be among the big ones for him. I loved all of them when I read them long, long ago.