![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
123 books--less than 2010 (126), more than 2009 (116), almost the same as 2008 (122).
So here's the list, with the rating following. In some cases, I've reconsidered the rating in retrospect, with the new rating in parentheses. There are a handful with split ratings, where I thought something about the book was so good and something else so bad that I could not evaluate it as a whole.
1 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss 4.5 (5)
2 The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi 5
3 Marketing Management by Russell S. Winer 2
4 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling 1/5 (2)
5 Lirael by Garth Nix 4
6 Poison Study by Maria Snyder 3.5
7 The Translated Man and other stories by Chris Braak 4
8 Majician/51 by Mike Barr 1
9 The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 by Harold Nicolson 3
10 Great House by Nicole Krauss 3 (2)
11 Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal 4
12 Saturnalia by Lindsey Davis 3
13 I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Prachett 4
14 For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 5
15 The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston 4
16 Changes by Jim Butcher 4.5
17 The Space Child's Mother Goose by Frederick Winsor 3
18 The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman 3
19 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 5/3 (4)
20 Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson 4 (4.5)
21 The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett 3
22 Race to the End by Ross MacPhee 3
23 Mainspring by Jay Lake 4
24 The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson 3 (4)
25 The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson 4
26 Matched by Ally Condie 3
27 Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey 3.5
28 Saratoga by David Garland 1.5
29 The Postmistress by Sarah Blake 4
30 Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by G. Richard Shell 5
31 Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar ed. by Mercedes Lackey 2.5
32 2009 The Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. by Rich Horton 4.5
33 The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet 3.5
34 Island of the Lost by Joan Druett 4
35 Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations by Jeffrey Pfeffer 3
36 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 4.5
37 The Pearl/The Red Pony by John Steinbeck 3.5
38 The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold 4
39 Mind's Eye Theater: The Book of Props by Mark Juran and Fran Donato 2
40 The Tragedy of King Lear by William Shakespeare 5
41 Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence by Roy F. Baumeister 3
42 Side Jobs by Jim Butcher 3.5
43 The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig 4 (3.5)
44 Blindsight by Peter Watts 4.5
45 The Family Trade by Charles Stross 2
46 Passage by Connie Willis 4.5
47 One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jaspar Fforde 3.5
48 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 5
49 Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 4.5
50 Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins 4
51 The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss 4
52 Room by Emma Donohue 4
53 O Is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton 3
54 A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar 3
55 The Art Thief by Noah Charney 2
56 The Betrayal of the Blood Lily by Lauren Willig 3.5
57 The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt 4
58 Nero by Edward Champlin 2
59 Scoop to Kill by Wendy Lyn Watson 4
60 Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang 3
61 Ophelia by Lisa M. Klein 3
62 A Short History of China and Southeast Asia by Martin Stuart-Fox 3
63 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 4
64 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 5
65 Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine by A. Zee 4
66 Pasquale's Angel by Paul McAuley 3
67 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence 3.5
68 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 2/4
69 Heartless by Gail Carriger 5
70 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 4.5
71 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin 5
72 Erekos by A. M. Tuomala 4
73 Getting to Yes: Negotiatin Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury 3
74 Ghost Story by Jim Butcher 4
75 Catopolis by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack 2.5
76 The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender 4.5
77 Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford 3.5
78 Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson 4
79 Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike 2.5
80 Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey 3
81 Samurai Warriors by Stephen Turnbull 2.5
82 The Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig 4
83 Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham 3.5
84 The Lighthouse by P.D. James 3
85 The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross 4
86 Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture by Peter Gay 2
87 Broken by Susan Jane Bigelow 4
88 A Traveller's History of North Africa by Barnaby Rogerson 5
89 Macbeth by William Shakespeare 5
90 The Sleeping Beauty by Mercedes Lackey 3.5
91 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 4
92 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow 4
93 Vecellio's Renaissance Costume Book by Cesare Vecellio 4
94 Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone 4
95 The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie 2.5
96 Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow 3
97 Hickey of the Beast by Isabel Kunkle 4
98 Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar 5 (4.5)
99 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 4.5
100 Odd Girl Out by Timothy Zahn 3.5 (3)
101 The Last Defender of Camelot by Roger Zelazny 3.5
102 (re)Visions Alice ed. by Kate Sullivan 4
103 The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock 3
104 Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance by Emily Franklin and Brendan Halpin 2.5
105 The Family Man by Elinor Lipman 3.5
106 Strange Bedpersons by Jennifer Crusie 4
107 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell 4
108 Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy by Leslie Langtry 1.5
109 Middlemarch by George Eliot 3.5
110 State of Wonder by Ann Prachett 5
111 The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen 3.5
112 Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro 3
113 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 5
114 The Man with Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse 4
115 3rd Degree by James Patterson and Andres Gross 3 (2.5)
116 1632 by Eric Flint 3
117 Silas Marner by George Eliot 4.5
118 Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay 5
119 Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See 3
120 A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & the Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote 5
121 The World According to Garp by John Irving 3
122 Letters to a Young Chef by Daniel Boulud 2.5
123 The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley 2.5
Because I like to overanalyze things and I have access to Excel, I've kept track of some stats. My original ratings average to 3.61, while the adjusted ratings average to 3.58. I think this makes a certain amount of sense--I considered a 3 to be an average book, but I do generally try to read good books and try not to read bad books, with the occasional true stinker thrown in for entertainment value. 74 of the books had at least one male author and 52 had at least one female author (there are some books with multiple authors and some anthologies included). I guess having roughly 60% be male is about right--I'd rather have it be 50-50, but it's a regrettable fact that men dominate a lot of genres.
I kept track of what I considered the primary genre of the book to be and how many of each genre I read(although some of these could be debated):
Fantasy 33
Science Fiction 18
Fantasy/Science Fiction 2
History 12
Classic literature 11
Literary fiction 11
Mystery 9
Romance 6
Historical fiction 5
Textbook 4
General Fiction 3
Memoir 3
Biography 2
Sociology 2
RPG Supplement 1
Linguistics 1
The Fantasy/Science fiction classification is for anthologies that contained both--for individual works, I generally picked the genre I thought best reflected the goals of the book. (So if it's a book set in space with unicorns and a strong romantic plot, but the unicorns are bioengineered and the bulk of the tension is whether the space station gets blown up with the will-they-won't-they thing being the subplot, I called it SF instead of fantasy or romance.) General fiction was for stuff that I just couldn't think of a better classification for. Commercial stuff set in modern times without a literary bent or a genre focus.
So what were my favorites? Here are my top five:
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Dazzlingly inventive, with fascinating characters and really impressive prose. Biopunk at the end of the world.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I read this first this year, and snubbed it with a 4.5 because I was still working out kinks in the ratings. I shouldn't have. Some of the best epic fantasy I've ever read.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I know there are flaws, and I don't particularly care. This was one of the most immersive, addictive, can't-stop-thinking-about-it books I've read in a long time. More dystopia, with the worst reality tv show ever starring kids with the best right to be emo I can think of.
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay. Evocative fantasy in a setting that I don't see enough of. It's possible I need a little more distance to evaluate this one, but I was really impressed.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. A door-stopper that made me really understand the politics leading up to and during the Civil War in a way that was never clear before. Insightful and fascinating.
And then there's the walk of shame, the worst things I read this year. I read it so you don't have to!
Majician/51 by Mike Barr. I feel bad criticizing this one, it was so awful. There's basically nothing right. Bad writing, nonsensical plot, horrible sexism, inexplicable aliens, wretched pacing, misuse of theoretically interesting elements and settings. Embarrassingly bad.
Saratoga by David Garland. Stupid plot, a historian's Marty Stu, and a terrible villain, with horrifying racism galore. Good job, Mr. Historian! Why not just declare in your afterword that Native Americans are animals, not people, and the only good one's a dead one and be done with it?
'Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy by Leslie Lantry. Heroine may be the worst person to ever live, and I don't think much of her supposedly virtuous boyfriend, either. Really wished they'd both died. Tee hee! Also, bonus strikes against you because Science Says You're Wrong.
The Art Thief by Noah Charney. Marty Stus are extra awesome when they have the same job and went to the same school as the author. Confusingly convoluted with terrible pacing and dislikeable characters. A hot mess.
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. I had a debate about whether to include this one--it's one of the founding works of steampunk and the world building is fantastic. But the insulting portrayal of women, sudden unexplained appearance and disappearance of Cthulhu, inexplicable pacing issues, and completely incoherent LSD ending overrule its virtues, I think. An ambitious failure.
So that's the year. Stay tuned for next year's reviews!
So here's the list, with the rating following. In some cases, I've reconsidered the rating in retrospect, with the new rating in parentheses. There are a handful with split ratings, where I thought something about the book was so good and something else so bad that I could not evaluate it as a whole.
1 The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss 4.5 (5)
2 The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi 5
3 Marketing Management by Russell S. Winer 2
4 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling 1/5 (2)
5 Lirael by Garth Nix 4
6 Poison Study by Maria Snyder 3.5
7 The Translated Man and other stories by Chris Braak 4
8 Majician/51 by Mike Barr 1
9 The Congress of Vienna: A Study in Allied Unity: 1812-1822 by Harold Nicolson 3
10 Great House by Nicole Krauss 3 (2)
11 Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal 4
12 Saturnalia by Lindsey Davis 3
13 I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Prachett 4
14 For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 5
15 The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston 4
16 Changes by Jim Butcher 4.5
17 The Space Child's Mother Goose by Frederick Winsor 3
18 The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman 3
19 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy 5/3 (4)
20 Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson 4 (4.5)
21 The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett 3
22 Race to the End by Ross MacPhee 3
23 Mainspring by Jay Lake 4
24 The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson 3 (4)
25 The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson 4
26 Matched by Ally Condie 3
27 Reserved for the Cat by Mercedes Lackey 3.5
28 Saratoga by David Garland 1.5
29 The Postmistress by Sarah Blake 4
30 Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People by G. Richard Shell 5
31 Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar ed. by Mercedes Lackey 2.5
32 2009 The Best of Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. by Rich Horton 4.5
33 The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet 3.5
34 Island of the Lost by Joan Druett 4
35 Managing with Power: Politics and Influence in Organizations by Jeffrey Pfeffer 3
36 The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 4.5
37 The Pearl/The Red Pony by John Steinbeck 3.5
38 The Spirit Ring by Lois McMaster Bujold 4
39 Mind's Eye Theater: The Book of Props by Mark Juran and Fran Donato 2
40 The Tragedy of King Lear by William Shakespeare 5
41 Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence by Roy F. Baumeister 3
42 Side Jobs by Jim Butcher 3.5
43 The Temptation of the Night Jasmine by Lauren Willig 4 (3.5)
44 Blindsight by Peter Watts 4.5
45 The Family Trade by Charles Stross 2
46 Passage by Connie Willis 4.5
47 One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jaspar Fforde 3.5
48 The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 5
49 Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins 4.5
50 Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins 4
51 The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss 4
52 Room by Emma Donohue 4
53 O Is for Outlaw by Sue Grafton 3
54 A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar 3
55 The Art Thief by Noah Charney 2
56 The Betrayal of the Blood Lily by Lauren Willig 3.5
57 The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt 4
58 Nero by Edward Champlin 2
59 Scoop to Kill by Wendy Lyn Watson 4
60 Lady Lazarus by Michele Lang 3
61 Ophelia by Lisa M. Klein 3
62 A Short History of China and Southeast Asia by Martin Stuart-Fox 3
63 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 4
64 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 5
65 Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine by A. Zee 4
66 Pasquale's Angel by Paul McAuley 3
67 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence 3.5
68 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne 2/4
69 Heartless by Gail Carriger 5
70 Doomsday Book by Connie Willis 4.5
71 Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin 5
72 Erekos by A. M. Tuomala 4
73 Getting to Yes: Negotiatin Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury 3
74 Ghost Story by Jim Butcher 4
75 Catopolis by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Deaver-Pack 2.5
76 The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender 4.5
77 Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford 3.5
78 Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson 4
79 Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike 2.5
80 Unnatural Issue by Mercedes Lackey 3
81 Samurai Warriors by Stephen Turnbull 2.5
82 The Mischief of the Mistletoe by Lauren Willig 4
83 Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Lizzie Collingham 3.5
84 The Lighthouse by P.D. James 3
85 The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross 4
86 Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle Class Culture by Peter Gay 2
87 Broken by Susan Jane Bigelow 4
88 A Traveller's History of North Africa by Barnaby Rogerson 5
89 Macbeth by William Shakespeare 5
90 The Sleeping Beauty by Mercedes Lackey 3.5
91 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 4
92 Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow 4
93 Vecellio's Renaissance Costume Book by Cesare Vecellio 4
94 Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone 4
95 The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie 2.5
96 Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow 3
97 Hickey of the Beast by Isabel Kunkle 4
98 Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar 5 (4.5)
99 Ready Player One by Ernest Cline 4.5
100 Odd Girl Out by Timothy Zahn 3.5 (3)
101 The Last Defender of Camelot by Roger Zelazny 3.5
102 (re)Visions Alice ed. by Kate Sullivan 4
103 The Rhetoric of Death by Judith Rock 3
104 Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance by Emily Franklin and Brendan Halpin 2.5
105 The Family Man by Elinor Lipman 3.5
106 Strange Bedpersons by Jennifer Crusie 4
107 Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell 4
108 Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy by Leslie Langtry 1.5
109 Middlemarch by George Eliot 3.5
110 State of Wonder by Ann Prachett 5
111 The Surgeon by Tess Gerritsen 3.5
112 Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro 3
113 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 5
114 The Man with Two Left Feet by P.G. Wodehouse 4
115 3rd Degree by James Patterson and Andres Gross 3 (2.5)
116 1632 by Eric Flint 3
117 Silas Marner by George Eliot 4.5
118 Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay 5
119 Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See 3
120 A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & the Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote 5
121 The World According to Garp by John Irving 3
122 Letters to a Young Chef by Daniel Boulud 2.5
123 The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley 2.5
Because I like to overanalyze things and I have access to Excel, I've kept track of some stats. My original ratings average to 3.61, while the adjusted ratings average to 3.58. I think this makes a certain amount of sense--I considered a 3 to be an average book, but I do generally try to read good books and try not to read bad books, with the occasional true stinker thrown in for entertainment value. 74 of the books had at least one male author and 52 had at least one female author (there are some books with multiple authors and some anthologies included). I guess having roughly 60% be male is about right--I'd rather have it be 50-50, but it's a regrettable fact that men dominate a lot of genres.
I kept track of what I considered the primary genre of the book to be and how many of each genre I read(although some of these could be debated):
Fantasy 33
Science Fiction 18
Fantasy/Science Fiction 2
History 12
Classic literature 11
Literary fiction 11
Mystery 9
Romance 6
Historical fiction 5
Textbook 4
General Fiction 3
Memoir 3
Biography 2
Sociology 2
RPG Supplement 1
Linguistics 1
The Fantasy/Science fiction classification is for anthologies that contained both--for individual works, I generally picked the genre I thought best reflected the goals of the book. (So if it's a book set in space with unicorns and a strong romantic plot, but the unicorns are bioengineered and the bulk of the tension is whether the space station gets blown up with the will-they-won't-they thing being the subplot, I called it SF instead of fantasy or romance.) General fiction was for stuff that I just couldn't think of a better classification for. Commercial stuff set in modern times without a literary bent or a genre focus.
So what were my favorites? Here are my top five:
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Dazzlingly inventive, with fascinating characters and really impressive prose. Biopunk at the end of the world.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. I read this first this year, and snubbed it with a 4.5 because I was still working out kinks in the ratings. I shouldn't have. Some of the best epic fantasy I've ever read.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I know there are flaws, and I don't particularly care. This was one of the most immersive, addictive, can't-stop-thinking-about-it books I've read in a long time. More dystopia, with the worst reality tv show ever starring kids with the best right to be emo I can think of.
Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay. Evocative fantasy in a setting that I don't see enough of. It's possible I need a little more distance to evaluate this one, but I was really impressed.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. A door-stopper that made me really understand the politics leading up to and during the Civil War in a way that was never clear before. Insightful and fascinating.
And then there's the walk of shame, the worst things I read this year. I read it so you don't have to!
Majician/51 by Mike Barr. I feel bad criticizing this one, it was so awful. There's basically nothing right. Bad writing, nonsensical plot, horrible sexism, inexplicable aliens, wretched pacing, misuse of theoretically interesting elements and settings. Embarrassingly bad.
Saratoga by David Garland. Stupid plot, a historian's Marty Stu, and a terrible villain, with horrifying racism galore. Good job, Mr. Historian! Why not just declare in your afterword that Native Americans are animals, not people, and the only good one's a dead one and be done with it?
'Scuse Me While I Kill This Guy by Leslie Lantry. Heroine may be the worst person to ever live, and I don't think much of her supposedly virtuous boyfriend, either. Really wished they'd both died. Tee hee! Also, bonus strikes against you because Science Says You're Wrong.
The Art Thief by Noah Charney. Marty Stus are extra awesome when they have the same job and went to the same school as the author. Confusingly convoluted with terrible pacing and dislikeable characters. A hot mess.
The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. I had a debate about whether to include this one--it's one of the founding works of steampunk and the world building is fantastic. But the insulting portrayal of women, sudden unexplained appearance and disappearance of Cthulhu, inexplicable pacing issues, and completely incoherent LSD ending overrule its virtues, I think. An ambitious failure.
So that's the year. Stay tuned for next year's reviews!
