Books read, 2013
Dec. 31st, 2013 10:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonelvisThis took a good two, two and a half hours to write. Maybe I should make a New Year's resolution to start tracking things on Goodreads so that I don't have to come back to my totally unannotated list of books and try to remember what I had to say about each one, or maybe I should just jot down a few notes after I finish each book. Somehow, though, that feels like cheating.
Onwards!
Gun Machine, Warren Ellis
A serial-killer thriller set in New York City, in which detectives find an apartment full of hundreds of guns carefully arranged in intricate patterns, and discover that each is connected to an unsolved murder. I love Ellis' prose anyway, but this is an even better book than Crooked Little Vein -- it hangs together more solidly. I believe it's been optioned for a TV series, but who knows if that will ever come to pass.
The Moor, Laurie King
It was … fine? Kind of boring, honestly, compared to the previous Mary Russell books, but possibly there are only so many ways you can write "… and then Holmes and I tramped across some rocks and squishy grass" before I lose interest.
The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling
One of two JKR books I read this year. It takes a little while to get going, but as usual, she's got a deft touch with characterization and voice. While I cannot claim to have first-hand familiarity with small-town politics, the petty infighting and intrigues will be familiar to anyone who went to high school, frankly. (Did I just violate Snacky's Law in a book review? I think I might have.) Part of the end is grim but not unexpected, and while the book isn't perfect, it was good to see how capably Rowling could handle a completely different genre.
King Rat, China Miéville
An older Miéville I hadn't read before: less revelatory than his more recent work, but still vivid and imaginative, blending fairy-tale elements (human suddenly discovers he's king of the rats) with some of the grittiest parts of the real world.
Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head, Jen Larsen
Hey, look at that! I wrote about this briefly in a locked entry! "It's movingly written, and a brave, frank account of what it's like to have weight-loss surgery and still, hundreds of pounds later, realize that you haven't fixed what's broken inside your head that makes you feel fat and unloved. Parts of this were painfully familiar, and I do mean 'painfully.' But assuming you're not triggered by ED or ED-adjacent discussion, it's an amazing book everyone should read."
After Visiting Friends, Michael Hainey
Hainey's father died at 35, and the circumstances of his death remained a mystery for years. After Visiting Friends is Hainey's story of investigating that death and coming to terms with what he does – and does not – discover. Particularly recommended for anyone interested in the history of journalism, and what life was like for journalists in Chicago in the 60s. (Oddly, this is the second book I've read in the past couple years to cover that beat, so to speak; Roger Ebert's memoir addresses it as well.)
The Wool Omnibus, Shift, and Dust, Hugh Howey
I loved the worldbuilding in Wool. Loved it. I also loved many of the characters, particularly hard-edged, stubborn Juliette. And then I read Shift, which went on for way too long, had cardboard characters, and had almost no women; in fact, I thought the two main female characters could be neatly summarized as "personality-free political wife" and "male gazey femme fatale." Honestly, the story could (and should) have been told in half the space. Dust was somewhat better, and at least wrapped things up in some not completely half-assed way, but basically, I wish I'd read the first one and stuck to Wikipedia for the others.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm told this was the point when Conan Doyle was starting to run out of ideas and write increasingly ridiculous plots, and frankly, you can tell. But I enjoyed it well enough, and it was nice to revisit some stories I'm sure I haven't read in thirty years.
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
I'd intended to read some Banks before Loncon this year, since Banks was going to be the guest of honor, and I'd never read anything of his. Unfortunately, he died in June, probably right before I picked up this book. It's short and more than a little horrifying; stunningly written, but also an extremely unpleasant read. I guessed the plot twist at the end, but that made no difference to how I experienced the book; my issues with it are purely that I felt like I needed to wash my hands every time I put it down. And yet, as I said, it's really well-written, so despite my dislike for this book, I'm willing to give Banks another shot.
Reconstructing Amelia, Kimberly McCreight
This was being touted as the next Gone Girl, a book I loved. It is not Gone Girl, although there's the outward structural similarity of having to piece together a mystery about a life that wasn't quite what it seemed. Basically, I think my expectations were too high; it's a perfectly good book, but it didn't grab me nearly as hard as Gone Girl did.
The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey
Somewhere about halfway through the book, I realized I didn't have the patience for another book series in which a spunky-but-flawed teenage heroine works with a not-entirely-trustworthy group of allies to take down the system. In particular, Cassie's no Katniss, and a plotline involving a wave of sickness that kills people and leaves behind a small group of survivors is handled much better in Joan Frances Turner's Dust and Frail. I finished The 5th Wave, but I'm not going to bother with the rest of the series.
London Falling, Paul Cornell
At last, a book I totally, totally loved. A group of police officers investigating a murder suddenly gains the power to see London's mysterious and mystical underworld, which turns out to be the key to solving both this murder and a number of other horrific crimes. London Falling was tense, thrilling, grim, and funny, all at the same time, and I couldn't put it down. It's also been optioned for a TV series, and I sincerely hope it gets picked up.
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker
This novel is so beautifully written. It's exactly what it says on the tin: the story of a golem and a jinni, both brought by fate and accident to New York City in the early 1900s. They meet by chance and slowly develop a friendship, albeit a difficult one; the golem was built to be a humble servant, while the jinni is an arrogant free spirit, and bonding isn't easy for either of them. The novel also serves as a portrait of Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrant culture at the turn of the last century, and as a Jew, many of the cultural touchpoints felt very familiar to me. Highly recommended.
Queers Dig Time Lords, edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas
Mad Norwegian Press has published a number of great essay collections about genre material, and this one is no exception. I found it slightly less consistently good than Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time, but I still enjoyed it. (My one complaint: I could have done with fewer essays about Captain Jack, only because I'm tired of the character -- but that's my personal preference, and given Jack's undeniable importance to Doctor Who and Torchwood in terms of providing queer representation, I can't really fault the editors for including this much material about him.)
The Cuckoo's Calling, Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
My second Rowling book of the year, and an even better one than The Casual Vacancy. She's clearly read enough detective novels to have a solid grip on the genre's tropes. Combine that with her flair for characterization, and it's a terrific read. I'm looking forward to the next books in the series.
Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
The first book pick for Evil Book Club over on Tumblr, not that I've read any of the others yet. (Well, I'd already read The Devil in the White City, a must-read if you've ever wanted a book about the history of the U.S.' first serial killer juxtaposed with the history of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Which you want, trust me.) Anyway, Soon I Will Be Invincible is told from the alternating POVs of a reluctant superhero and an overeager supervillain, and makes you sympathetic to both: the superhero, a cyborg, struggles to connect with her remaining humanity, while the supervillain desperately wants to be noticed at all. It's a surprisingly sensitive book beneath its generic comic-book trappings.
Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
The best book I read all year. There were other books I loved, but none spoke to me quite the way Pynchon's language always does, and particularly not when he's covering an era I knew very well: the dotcom bubble circa 2001. No one writes like this man -- check out the quotes, if you don't believe me -- which means I spent a good month working my way through this, because I wanted to take my time and savor every word. My favorite book of his since Against the Day.
Tainaron, Leena Krohn
I got this as a free e-book giveaway from the publisher, and I'm very glad I did, because the prose was utterly gorgeous. Tainaron is structured as a series of letters home from an ambassador of sorts, now living in a city of giant insects whose culture, history, and lifecycle are completely different from that of the unnamed, ungendered narrator. It practically reads as a series of prose poems, each painting a picture of a day in the city, and what the narrator learns from its inhabitants.
Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
I'd read this before -- it's my favorite of the Hunger Games trilogy -- but I re-read it in advance of the movie. Since it's a re-read, I'm not posting a review.
Fangirl, Ken Baker
Several friends had spoken highly of a novel called Fangirl, so I fired up the brand-new Boston Public Library app and promptly checked out what turned out to be an entirely different novel called Fangirl. Whoops. Well, at least that explained why I was slightly disappointed with this one -- it's a wish-fulfillment story about a 14-year-old girl who wants to be a songwriter, and who winds up meeting her teen pop-star crush, who falls for her. It's sweet enough, and competently written; it's just not hugely special.
Richard II, William Shakespeare
Another text read in advance of seeing a movie, although this is a Shakespeare play I hadn't read before. I tend to be less interested in the histories simply because history in general is not my favorite subject, and I frankly have a hard time keeping track of the characters. Still, I'm glad I read it in advance, as it was helpful background for the RSC production -- and as it happens, I liked the play in both written and filmed form.
Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell
This was the right Fangirl, and a far better book than the Baker one. I loved the characters, and obviously, the fanfic world Cath inhabits was terribly familiar. But it's Cath's internal struggles as an anxious introvert that felt most familiar to me, even if her family life was (mercifully) quite different than my own.
The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo
This year's final book is one I loved so much that I need to buy it; the copy I read came on loan from the BPL. It's difficult to say too much about it without spoiling a major conceit of the book, but let's just say that what begins as the story of a late-teen Chinese girl in colonial Malaya who's asked to participate in an unusual marriage rapidly becomes something far more mythic and literally spectral. I suspect I'll be able to read this one over and over without getting tired of it.
Also read this year: the second volume of Saga, the second and third parts of The Search (A:tLA comics), the first Guardians of the Galaxy collection, some X-Men comics, and the Momofuku cookbook. I wouldn't normally include a cookbook on this list, but nearly half of it is essays about how the Momofuku restaurants started, David Chang's cooking philosophy, and all the mistakes he's made along the way. It's fascinating, and pretty much impossible to read without getting hungry. (I will make his crispy pork belly someday, oh yes.)
Next up for 2014: the husband's latest unpublished novel.
Onwards!
Gun Machine, Warren Ellis
A serial-killer thriller set in New York City, in which detectives find an apartment full of hundreds of guns carefully arranged in intricate patterns, and discover that each is connected to an unsolved murder. I love Ellis' prose anyway, but this is an even better book than Crooked Little Vein -- it hangs together more solidly. I believe it's been optioned for a TV series, but who knows if that will ever come to pass.
The Moor, Laurie King
It was … fine? Kind of boring, honestly, compared to the previous Mary Russell books, but possibly there are only so many ways you can write "… and then Holmes and I tramped across some rocks and squishy grass" before I lose interest.
The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling
One of two JKR books I read this year. It takes a little while to get going, but as usual, she's got a deft touch with characterization and voice. While I cannot claim to have first-hand familiarity with small-town politics, the petty infighting and intrigues will be familiar to anyone who went to high school, frankly. (Did I just violate Snacky's Law in a book review? I think I might have.) Part of the end is grim but not unexpected, and while the book isn't perfect, it was good to see how capably Rowling could handle a completely different genre.
King Rat, China Miéville
An older Miéville I hadn't read before: less revelatory than his more recent work, but still vivid and imaginative, blending fairy-tale elements (human suddenly discovers he's king of the rats) with some of the grittiest parts of the real world.
Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head, Jen Larsen
Hey, look at that! I wrote about this briefly in a locked entry! "It's movingly written, and a brave, frank account of what it's like to have weight-loss surgery and still, hundreds of pounds later, realize that you haven't fixed what's broken inside your head that makes you feel fat and unloved. Parts of this were painfully familiar, and I do mean 'painfully.' But assuming you're not triggered by ED or ED-adjacent discussion, it's an amazing book everyone should read."
After Visiting Friends, Michael Hainey
Hainey's father died at 35, and the circumstances of his death remained a mystery for years. After Visiting Friends is Hainey's story of investigating that death and coming to terms with what he does – and does not – discover. Particularly recommended for anyone interested in the history of journalism, and what life was like for journalists in Chicago in the 60s. (Oddly, this is the second book I've read in the past couple years to cover that beat, so to speak; Roger Ebert's memoir addresses it as well.)
The Wool Omnibus, Shift, and Dust, Hugh Howey
I loved the worldbuilding in Wool. Loved it. I also loved many of the characters, particularly hard-edged, stubborn Juliette. And then I read Shift, which went on for way too long, had cardboard characters, and had almost no women; in fact, I thought the two main female characters could be neatly summarized as "personality-free political wife" and "male gazey femme fatale." Honestly, the story could (and should) have been told in half the space. Dust was somewhat better, and at least wrapped things up in some not completely half-assed way, but basically, I wish I'd read the first one and stuck to Wikipedia for the others.
The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm told this was the point when Conan Doyle was starting to run out of ideas and write increasingly ridiculous plots, and frankly, you can tell. But I enjoyed it well enough, and it was nice to revisit some stories I'm sure I haven't read in thirty years.
The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
I'd intended to read some Banks before Loncon this year, since Banks was going to be the guest of honor, and I'd never read anything of his. Unfortunately, he died in June, probably right before I picked up this book. It's short and more than a little horrifying; stunningly written, but also an extremely unpleasant read. I guessed the plot twist at the end, but that made no difference to how I experienced the book; my issues with it are purely that I felt like I needed to wash my hands every time I put it down. And yet, as I said, it's really well-written, so despite my dislike for this book, I'm willing to give Banks another shot.
Reconstructing Amelia, Kimberly McCreight
This was being touted as the next Gone Girl, a book I loved. It is not Gone Girl, although there's the outward structural similarity of having to piece together a mystery about a life that wasn't quite what it seemed. Basically, I think my expectations were too high; it's a perfectly good book, but it didn't grab me nearly as hard as Gone Girl did.
The 5th Wave, Rick Yancey
Somewhere about halfway through the book, I realized I didn't have the patience for another book series in which a spunky-but-flawed teenage heroine works with a not-entirely-trustworthy group of allies to take down the system. In particular, Cassie's no Katniss, and a plotline involving a wave of sickness that kills people and leaves behind a small group of survivors is handled much better in Joan Frances Turner's Dust and Frail. I finished The 5th Wave, but I'm not going to bother with the rest of the series.
London Falling, Paul Cornell
At last, a book I totally, totally loved. A group of police officers investigating a murder suddenly gains the power to see London's mysterious and mystical underworld, which turns out to be the key to solving both this murder and a number of other horrific crimes. London Falling was tense, thrilling, grim, and funny, all at the same time, and I couldn't put it down. It's also been optioned for a TV series, and I sincerely hope it gets picked up.
The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker
This novel is so beautifully written. It's exactly what it says on the tin: the story of a golem and a jinni, both brought by fate and accident to New York City in the early 1900s. They meet by chance and slowly develop a friendship, albeit a difficult one; the golem was built to be a humble servant, while the jinni is an arrogant free spirit, and bonding isn't easy for either of them. The novel also serves as a portrait of Eastern European and Middle Eastern immigrant culture at the turn of the last century, and as a Jew, many of the cultural touchpoints felt very familiar to me. Highly recommended.
Queers Dig Time Lords, edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas
Mad Norwegian Press has published a number of great essay collections about genre material, and this one is no exception. I found it slightly less consistently good than Chicks Dig Time Lords and Chicks Unravel Time, but I still enjoyed it. (My one complaint: I could have done with fewer essays about Captain Jack, only because I'm tired of the character -- but that's my personal preference, and given Jack's undeniable importance to Doctor Who and Torchwood in terms of providing queer representation, I can't really fault the editors for including this much material about him.)
The Cuckoo's Calling, Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)
My second Rowling book of the year, and an even better one than The Casual Vacancy. She's clearly read enough detective novels to have a solid grip on the genre's tropes. Combine that with her flair for characterization, and it's a terrific read. I'm looking forward to the next books in the series.
Soon I Will Be Invincible, Austin Grossman
The first book pick for Evil Book Club over on Tumblr, not that I've read any of the others yet. (Well, I'd already read The Devil in the White City, a must-read if you've ever wanted a book about the history of the U.S.' first serial killer juxtaposed with the history of the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Which you want, trust me.) Anyway, Soon I Will Be Invincible is told from the alternating POVs of a reluctant superhero and an overeager supervillain, and makes you sympathetic to both: the superhero, a cyborg, struggles to connect with her remaining humanity, while the supervillain desperately wants to be noticed at all. It's a surprisingly sensitive book beneath its generic comic-book trappings.
Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
The best book I read all year. There were other books I loved, but none spoke to me quite the way Pynchon's language always does, and particularly not when he's covering an era I knew very well: the dotcom bubble circa 2001. No one writes like this man -- check out the quotes, if you don't believe me -- which means I spent a good month working my way through this, because I wanted to take my time and savor every word. My favorite book of his since Against the Day.
Tainaron, Leena Krohn
I got this as a free e-book giveaway from the publisher, and I'm very glad I did, because the prose was utterly gorgeous. Tainaron is structured as a series of letters home from an ambassador of sorts, now living in a city of giant insects whose culture, history, and lifecycle are completely different from that of the unnamed, ungendered narrator. It practically reads as a series of prose poems, each painting a picture of a day in the city, and what the narrator learns from its inhabitants.
Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins
I'd read this before -- it's my favorite of the Hunger Games trilogy -- but I re-read it in advance of the movie. Since it's a re-read, I'm not posting a review.
Fangirl, Ken Baker
Several friends had spoken highly of a novel called Fangirl, so I fired up the brand-new Boston Public Library app and promptly checked out what turned out to be an entirely different novel called Fangirl. Whoops. Well, at least that explained why I was slightly disappointed with this one -- it's a wish-fulfillment story about a 14-year-old girl who wants to be a songwriter, and who winds up meeting her teen pop-star crush, who falls for her. It's sweet enough, and competently written; it's just not hugely special.
Richard II, William Shakespeare
Another text read in advance of seeing a movie, although this is a Shakespeare play I hadn't read before. I tend to be less interested in the histories simply because history in general is not my favorite subject, and I frankly have a hard time keeping track of the characters. Still, I'm glad I read it in advance, as it was helpful background for the RSC production -- and as it happens, I liked the play in both written and filmed form.
Fangirl, Rainbow Rowell
This was the right Fangirl, and a far better book than the Baker one. I loved the characters, and obviously, the fanfic world Cath inhabits was terribly familiar. But it's Cath's internal struggles as an anxious introvert that felt most familiar to me, even if her family life was (mercifully) quite different than my own.
The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo
This year's final book is one I loved so much that I need to buy it; the copy I read came on loan from the BPL. It's difficult to say too much about it without spoiling a major conceit of the book, but let's just say that what begins as the story of a late-teen Chinese girl in colonial Malaya who's asked to participate in an unusual marriage rapidly becomes something far more mythic and literally spectral. I suspect I'll be able to read this one over and over without getting tired of it.
Also read this year: the second volume of Saga, the second and third parts of The Search (A:tLA comics), the first Guardians of the Galaxy collection, some X-Men comics, and the Momofuku cookbook. I wouldn't normally include a cookbook on this list, but nearly half of it is essays about how the Momofuku restaurants started, David Chang's cooking philosophy, and all the mistakes he's made along the way. It's fascinating, and pretty much impossible to read without getting hungry. (I will make his crispy pork belly someday, oh yes.)
Next up for 2014: the husband's latest unpublished novel.