2012 what? you guessed it - books read!
Well, It's mid/late-February, and I think it's time for a 2012 books read update, as well as a final look back at what I'd read in 2011.
So, let's see, 2011 was a good year for books for me. First off, I devoured both of Pat Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles that have been published so far. The vast majority of the books I've been reading lately have been library borrows. The same was true for Rothfuss. But I loved these enough that I went out to a phyical brick and mortar bookstore, and bought a copy of Wise Man's Fear. I still need to purchase a copy of Name of the Wind, and that's a priority on my to do list, but, as there's no independent bookstores an easy shlepp near me, I'm stuck with deciding whether to patronize the corporate monstrosity brick and mortar, or the corporate monstrosity internet seller. I can get it for like $2 on internet monstrosity. But I want to find a mom-and-pop store if I can. Also, I reread Feist's Riftwar Saga. I love those books. So, all in all, I am happy with the quality of the books I read.
As for quantity, I read 41 books in 2011. This is a serious increase from the 2010 total of 23 books, and 2009's 25 books. I credit this mostly with my serious increase in audiobook listening. I've fallen behind in my podcast listening and my music intake, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, that's enough navel gazing for now. Let's get on with the books I've read in the first 6 weeks of the new year, shall we?
@A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle was not a large part of my childhood, I am sad to say. I was vaguely familiar with her when Dianella and I got tegether in college. Dianella, on the other hand, was a huge fan of hers, even getting a copy of A Wrinkle in Time autographed. All that said, I was pretty sure I had read this one as a kid. We read it too Willow a chapter a night starting somewhere around Christmas, and I can honestly say I'd never read a word of this book before then. I liked it. Reading it as an adult for the first time, I can't say it blew me away, but I definitely liked it. Recommended.
@Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - I loved this concept, and I really liked this book. By the same author as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it posits that the central dominating pursuit of Lincoln's life was the eradication of vampires from American soil. It follows real biographies of Lincoln fairly closely, adding really cool subtext into a lot of actual events. I liked it. If Lincoln's real life hadn't been so hard and bleak, I would have loved it. Recommended.
@Moonwalking with Einstein - Probably like most people who picked up this book, I thought it would have a lot to tell me about improving my everyday memory. It didn't. But it did tell me a bunch about how to get better at memorizing things. Aside from that it was a fun book. Recommended.
@The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay - How to talk about these books? People are calling them the next Twilight or Harry Potter, I think mostly because they are a popular YA series being turned into a movie series where the last book is split into 2 movies. I absolutely devoured the first book. I loved it. I found the concept to be an amazing post-apocalyptic dystopia, with equal parts Stephen King's novella "The Running Man", modern day 'Reality' TV, and the movie bastardization of Stephen King's novella "The Running Man". I loved it. The second book took me a little longer to get into, but I think overall I liked it more than it deserved. Thematically, it was great, I just didn't like the plot progression, and I felt the ending was forced and rushed. The final book, Mockingjay, on the other hand, I despise. The entire first 3/4 of it I felt were as forced as book 2's ending, I thoroughly disliked the plot direction, and the main character was entirely passive or reactive, and mopey. The final 1/4, I felt was contradictory to the set-up of the first, deliberately manipulative, and unneccesary. Overall, I wish I had read the first book, and not known there were sequels.
@Kitty and the Silver Bullet - This was really good. I devoured the first three Kitty Norville books. This one was a treat also, but has begun to get into larger overarching plot ideas that aren't really in my happy place. I'm not complaining - it's a great addition to the series, it's just that we're starting to part company in terms of interest. I've begun the next book in the series, and we'll see if I remain interested in the plots. I am very invested in the characters by now, so that may carry me along for quite a ways. We'll see. Recommended, but read the first parts of the series first.
@The Forgotten 500 - The story of a series of daring rescues of downed American (and other Allied) airmen from Yugoslavia during WWII. The actual story of the rescues is phenomenal, the book itself is mediocre. The vast majority of the book is spent discussing the political history of 20th century Yugoslavia, the origins of the CIA, and the personal backstories of half a dozen Americans involved on either side of the rescue. After 3/4 of the book, we finally get to the story of the rescue, which was actually a 9 month long series of separate missions, and he tells the story of the first one in fabulous detail with very heightened (and warranted drama). Then the basically says, "and they did it over and over for 9 months without a hitch." I found that left the entire story feeling incredibly flat. I dunno. I'd give it 3/5 stars overall. Very important to get the story out, I just wish it was told better. Recommended.
@Blackout - I love Connie Willis, and I love her Oxford time travel series. Thank you Sterling Walker so much for introducing me to her work back in the day! The year is 2060, time travel is a reality, but the only people who can do it are grad students in the History department at Oxford doing thesis research. The department adnministration is bumbling and inept, so everyone's thesis work is constantly undermined and screwed up. Enter 3 twenty-something grad students, sent back in time to witness key events in WWII England in 1940. And now, they can't get back. The first half of a book split in 2 by the publisher for being too long. Reading the second part very soon! Highly Recommended! (Previous familiarity with her other time travel books not required, but tremendously fun. Read "The Doomsday Book" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog" today!)
@Master and Commander - I am thoroughly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I hadn't seen the movie, though my Dad highly recommends it. I actually decided to read it because Naomi Novik apparently used it heavily for her inspiration in writing the Temeraire (His Majesty's Dragon) series. Highly enjoyable. All that said, I must remark on the narrator (I listened to it) - Patrick Tull. This man can do things with consonants that defy biological explanation. His voice is Extraordinary! I wish I had listened to the Brandon Sanderson novels of last year as narrated by him! I might have actually enjoyed Warbreaker! Oh god, and the accents he can do! Do yourself a favor, and listen to a book - any book - narrated by Patrick Tull! Thankfully, he also narrated several of the books that follow Master and Commander in the series (there are 20.5 of them!) Highly Recommended.
@11/22/63 - This is the book Stephen King has been practicing for for the last 40 years. Every word of character sketching and Americana he has written through the years was entirely honing his craft for this piece. No one does small town America like King, and no one does late 1950s small town America anywhere even close to him. Factor in a siginificant chunk hanging out in Derry, Maine a year after the events of It, a look at possible conspiracy theories about JFK, and an indepth look at Oswald's life, and I am beyond sold. My only whine is the last 5-10 pages or so. I know it wasn't King's initial ending, and that he rewrote it on the suggestion of his editor. And... it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like King, or like it was the fore-ordained ending. I dunno how to describe it. Oh well. For a 30-hour audiobook, if I can only complain about the last 10 minutes, I can't complain at all.
@Feed - I LOVED this book. Which surprises me. It's got a few tell tale bits that I don't usually like, at all. Almost deal breakers for me - among them being 2 different couples losing a child, but it's done tastefully, and not melodramatically, both are offscreen, and one of them is 15 years in the past. But, on the whole, I felt that the way it treated the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse was so awesome, that I didn't even notice the other stuff. I wasn't terribly surprised by the big reveal of who the villain of the plot was, but I was incredibly surprised by a plot twist not long after that. A twist that could have been done oh so poorly, but really worked in this case. I think if that one scene had been done wrong, the entire rest of the book may have felt like a cheesy amateur playing in the big kid's playground, but because it worked, the whole thing shone. It resonated. All that said, I don't know if I'll read the next 2 in the series or not. We'll see. I'll definitely pick up the next one, and we'll see if it grabs me the way this one did. Overall plot - 20 years after the zombie apocalypse, and we're at a standstill. Everyone in the world is infected by a virus, but most have no signs of infection. As soon as you die, however, you reanimate as a zombie, or if you get bitten by someone who's already reanimated, your infection 'wakes up'. That's the background. The plot is that in this world, a group of bloggers are following a presidential candidate around the country as he campaigns, and they all deal with life with zombies along the way. Great book. Very Highly Recommended.
In other news, I have been really getting into Goodreads.com lately. It's a great place to be. If you're there and we're not already friended, feel free to friend me. My username is the same there as it is everywhere else on the web - mdunnbass. It's a place to review books you've read, discuss favorite authors, books, characters, etc. And you can generate a Netflix-style queue/wishlist of books you'd like to read. Unlike Netflix, however, they don't actually send you those books. Also, it's free. I've been copy and pasting my impressions and reviews of books from here onto there, but at least here's they're collated. They have a thing there - a reader's challenge - where you challenge yourself to read X number of books in a year, and then track your progress. And after 3 years of falling books read totals , and 1 year of improvement, I am aiming high this year for 50. I am 13 books along the way so far. I'm ahead of the game for the year, but I know I will trail off later.
In yet other news, I will continue the pattern of lamenting that I don't post on LJ nearly enough anymore, and make the empty promise to remedy that in the near future. That said, I do read all of the posts that my friends post, so I am still around. I just have fallen victim to the wicked virus that is Facebook. I am recovering though, losing much less productivity to it than in times past, and am almost recovered from my infection.
In the meantime, go read!
No worries,
Matt
So, let's see, 2011 was a good year for books for me. First off, I devoured both of Pat Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles that have been published so far. The vast majority of the books I've been reading lately have been library borrows. The same was true for Rothfuss. But I loved these enough that I went out to a phyical brick and mortar bookstore, and bought a copy of Wise Man's Fear. I still need to purchase a copy of Name of the Wind, and that's a priority on my to do list, but, as there's no independent bookstores an easy shlepp near me, I'm stuck with deciding whether to patronize the corporate monstrosity brick and mortar, or the corporate monstrosity internet seller. I can get it for like $2 on internet monstrosity. But I want to find a mom-and-pop store if I can. Also, I reread Feist's Riftwar Saga. I love those books. So, all in all, I am happy with the quality of the books I read.
As for quantity, I read 41 books in 2011. This is a serious increase from the 2010 total of 23 books, and 2009's 25 books. I credit this mostly with my serious increase in audiobook listening. I've fallen behind in my podcast listening and my music intake, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Anyway, that's enough navel gazing for now. Let's get on with the books I've read in the first 6 weeks of the new year, shall we?
- A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle
- Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
- The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, Read by Carolyn McCormick
- Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins, Read by Carolyn McCormick
- Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins, Read by Carolyn McCormick
- Kitty and the Silver Bullet, by Carrie Vaughn
- The Forgotten 500, by Gregory A. Freeman, read by Patrick Lawlor
- Blackout, by Connie Willis
- Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian, read by Patrick Tull
- 11/22/63, by Stephen King, Read by Craig Wasson
- Feed, by Mira Grant
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
@A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle was not a large part of my childhood, I am sad to say. I was vaguely familiar with her when Dianella and I got tegether in college. Dianella, on the other hand, was a huge fan of hers, even getting a copy of A Wrinkle in Time autographed. All that said, I was pretty sure I had read this one as a kid. We read it too Willow a chapter a night starting somewhere around Christmas, and I can honestly say I'd never read a word of this book before then. I liked it. Reading it as an adult for the first time, I can't say it blew me away, but I definitely liked it. Recommended.
@Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - I loved this concept, and I really liked this book. By the same author as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it posits that the central dominating pursuit of Lincoln's life was the eradication of vampires from American soil. It follows real biographies of Lincoln fairly closely, adding really cool subtext into a lot of actual events. I liked it. If Lincoln's real life hadn't been so hard and bleak, I would have loved it. Recommended.
@Moonwalking with Einstein - Probably like most people who picked up this book, I thought it would have a lot to tell me about improving my everyday memory. It didn't. But it did tell me a bunch about how to get better at memorizing things. Aside from that it was a fun book. Recommended.
@The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay - How to talk about these books? People are calling them the next Twilight or Harry Potter, I think mostly because they are a popular YA series being turned into a movie series where the last book is split into 2 movies. I absolutely devoured the first book. I loved it. I found the concept to be an amazing post-apocalyptic dystopia, with equal parts Stephen King's novella "The Running Man", modern day 'Reality' TV, and the movie bastardization of Stephen King's novella "The Running Man". I loved it. The second book took me a little longer to get into, but I think overall I liked it more than it deserved. Thematically, it was great, I just didn't like the plot progression, and I felt the ending was forced and rushed. The final book, Mockingjay, on the other hand, I despise. The entire first 3/4 of it I felt were as forced as book 2's ending, I thoroughly disliked the plot direction, and the main character was entirely passive or reactive, and mopey. The final 1/4, I felt was contradictory to the set-up of the first, deliberately manipulative, and unneccesary. Overall, I wish I had read the first book, and not known there were sequels.
@Kitty and the Silver Bullet - This was really good. I devoured the first three Kitty Norville books. This one was a treat also, but has begun to get into larger overarching plot ideas that aren't really in my happy place. I'm not complaining - it's a great addition to the series, it's just that we're starting to part company in terms of interest. I've begun the next book in the series, and we'll see if I remain interested in the plots. I am very invested in the characters by now, so that may carry me along for quite a ways. We'll see. Recommended, but read the first parts of the series first.
@The Forgotten 500 - The story of a series of daring rescues of downed American (and other Allied) airmen from Yugoslavia during WWII. The actual story of the rescues is phenomenal, the book itself is mediocre. The vast majority of the book is spent discussing the political history of 20th century Yugoslavia, the origins of the CIA, and the personal backstories of half a dozen Americans involved on either side of the rescue. After 3/4 of the book, we finally get to the story of the rescue, which was actually a 9 month long series of separate missions, and he tells the story of the first one in fabulous detail with very heightened (and warranted drama). Then the basically says, "and they did it over and over for 9 months without a hitch." I found that left the entire story feeling incredibly flat. I dunno. I'd give it 3/5 stars overall. Very important to get the story out, I just wish it was told better. Recommended.
@Blackout - I love Connie Willis, and I love her Oxford time travel series. Thank you Sterling Walker so much for introducing me to her work back in the day! The year is 2060, time travel is a reality, but the only people who can do it are grad students in the History department at Oxford doing thesis research. The department adnministration is bumbling and inept, so everyone's thesis work is constantly undermined and screwed up. Enter 3 twenty-something grad students, sent back in time to witness key events in WWII England in 1940. And now, they can't get back. The first half of a book split in 2 by the publisher for being too long. Reading the second part very soon! Highly Recommended! (Previous familiarity with her other time travel books not required, but tremendously fun. Read "The Doomsday Book" and "To Say Nothing of the Dog" today!)
@Master and Commander - I am thoroughly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. I hadn't seen the movie, though my Dad highly recommends it. I actually decided to read it because Naomi Novik apparently used it heavily for her inspiration in writing the Temeraire (His Majesty's Dragon) series. Highly enjoyable. All that said, I must remark on the narrator (I listened to it) - Patrick Tull. This man can do things with consonants that defy biological explanation. His voice is Extraordinary! I wish I had listened to the Brandon Sanderson novels of last year as narrated by him! I might have actually enjoyed Warbreaker! Oh god, and the accents he can do! Do yourself a favor, and listen to a book - any book - narrated by Patrick Tull! Thankfully, he also narrated several of the books that follow Master and Commander in the series (there are 20.5 of them!) Highly Recommended.
@11/22/63 - This is the book Stephen King has been practicing for for the last 40 years. Every word of character sketching and Americana he has written through the years was entirely honing his craft for this piece. No one does small town America like King, and no one does late 1950s small town America anywhere even close to him. Factor in a siginificant chunk hanging out in Derry, Maine a year after the events of It, a look at possible conspiracy theories about JFK, and an indepth look at Oswald's life, and I am beyond sold. My only whine is the last 5-10 pages or so. I know it wasn't King's initial ending, and that he rewrote it on the suggestion of his editor. And... it doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like King, or like it was the fore-ordained ending. I dunno how to describe it. Oh well. For a 30-hour audiobook, if I can only complain about the last 10 minutes, I can't complain at all.
@Feed - I LOVED this book. Which surprises me. It's got a few tell tale bits that I don't usually like, at all. Almost deal breakers for me - among them being 2 different couples losing a child, but it's done tastefully, and not melodramatically, both are offscreen, and one of them is 15 years in the past. But, on the whole, I felt that the way it treated the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse was so awesome, that I didn't even notice the other stuff. I wasn't terribly surprised by the big reveal of who the villain of the plot was, but I was incredibly surprised by a plot twist not long after that. A twist that could have been done oh so poorly, but really worked in this case. I think if that one scene had been done wrong, the entire rest of the book may have felt like a cheesy amateur playing in the big kid's playground, but because it worked, the whole thing shone. It resonated. All that said, I don't know if I'll read the next 2 in the series or not. We'll see. I'll definitely pick up the next one, and we'll see if it grabs me the way this one did. Overall plot - 20 years after the zombie apocalypse, and we're at a standstill. Everyone in the world is infected by a virus, but most have no signs of infection. As soon as you die, however, you reanimate as a zombie, or if you get bitten by someone who's already reanimated, your infection 'wakes up'. That's the background. The plot is that in this world, a group of bloggers are following a presidential candidate around the country as he campaigns, and they all deal with life with zombies along the way. Great book. Very Highly Recommended.
In other news, I have been really getting into Goodreads.com lately. It's a great place to be. If you're there and we're not already friended, feel free to friend me. My username is the same there as it is everywhere else on the web - mdunnbass. It's a place to review books you've read, discuss favorite authors, books, characters, etc. And you can generate a Netflix-style queue/wishlist of books you'd like to read. Unlike Netflix, however, they don't actually send you those books. Also, it's free. I've been copy and pasting my impressions and reviews of books from here onto there, but at least here's they're collated. They have a thing there - a reader's challenge - where you challenge yourself to read X number of books in a year, and then track your progress. And after 3 years of falling books read totals , and 1 year of improvement, I am aiming high this year for 50. I am 13 books along the way so far. I'm ahead of the game for the year, but I know I will trail off later.
In yet other news, I will continue the pattern of lamenting that I don't post on LJ nearly enough anymore, and make the empty promise to remedy that in the near future. That said, I do read all of the posts that my friends post, so I am still around. I just have fallen victim to the wicked virus that is Facebook. I am recovering though, losing much less productivity to it than in times past, and am almost recovered from my infection.
In the meantime, go read!
No worries,
Matt