Books I Read for 2010

[maneki_angel]

Stole Fiona's idea to create a yearly book list. Not as long as I would have liked it to be, but I only have another 1.5 years of didactic coursework from pharmacy school to squash my reading time.

Comments

[4__letter__lie]

Holy poop! I only manage to finish 5 books tops per year. Txtbooks/course readers/internet take up the rest of my attention span :/

How the frack did you manage to read House of Leaves?! I started getting confused with all footnotes/different fonts.

+ Are those Orson Scott Card books related to Ender's Game (I finally finished that! ... wait, did I borrow that from you or Nurina????)?

/fin

[maneki_angel]

House of Leaves was ssooo long. Too long. I checked it out from the library and had to return it halfway through. Then when I read the second half a month later it wasn't as scary anymore.

The OSC books aren't from Ender's Game, do you want to borrow Speaker of the Dead? Or Ender's Shadow was really good too! (And Shadow is more like Ender's Game, whereas Speaker of the Dead seems more like an adult novel.)

[danseinfernale]

wuuut! I need to read the Book Thief, and House of Leaves. Geek Love is helllaa.

What do you think of David Foster Wallace?

[maneki_angel]

The Book Thief was so good! House of Leaves only scared me for the first 400 pages, then it just dragged on forevs. Geek Love was so good, read it based on your recommendation!

I love all the non-fiction stuff I've read by David Foster Wallace. The first essay I read by him was about how in schools your writing is only considered good if you can write like a WASP and creative liberities are really discouraged. Which I totally relate to, because I feel like I can write essays in 'White English' and while I think my other classmates are good writers it's not what the teacher is looking for.

[danseinfernale]

Wait, REALLY? I have always heard that DFW takes the exact opposite stance and is annoyingly prescriptivist which is why I've always put off reading things by him. I guess it's time to stop listening to my friends, ha. I'll read some of his stuff then!

[maneki_angel]

He is a prescriptivist but honestly I jizz errywhere over his grammar because I just love when people can articulate goods ideas and package them right (slightly unrelated note: sometimes I cannot believe I'm dating someone who can't use 'to' vs 'too' correctly all the time, and that's just the beginning of his problems ;_; Arizona school systems y u so bad). Somehow DFW manages to make being a prescriptivist his style and his writing is so unerring self-conscious and full of footnotes it is exactly what I could picture myself doing too. In DFW's book Consider the Lobster he has a hilarious essay about why he was warped into a prescriptivist (at least he's not just doing it to be a pompous asshole) and then he goes on to talk about linguistics war so that might be a good place to start.

[mxoutlaw]

still in Seattle? I was looking through old entries on the Audio Binge community and saw you had given me Cursive albums years ago.

I go to WSU now and am more active on http://twitter.com/Audiobinge and last.fm by the same username.

[plum_passions]

Are there more than three books in the golden compass series??

[maneki_angel]

Pullman wrote 2 additional short stories in that world- Lyra's Oxford is a short story about Lyra after her and Will separate while Once Upon A Time in the North follows Lee Scoresby and Hester before HDM.

Pullman has been working on "The Book of Dust" (although a couple years ago I remember him titling it "The People's Republic of Heaven") as kind of a follow-up to HDM for years but I think it's growing unruly; he originally planned to write about Lyra when she was 16 (~2 years after Lyra's Oxford) but now he's talking about splitting the story as a prequel to HDM and then having a follow-up.