jaythebooknerd
2009 Reading Stack
Looking a little sheepishly at my photoshop nightmare. Over twenty of the books I read this year were from the library so weren't available for my year end picture. The result was a good hunk of my book stack being stand-ins which I pasted pics of spines over. I gave up trying to do a convincing job. Roughly speaking it's probably this high. I have no idea why this is a fun thing for me to do...
Now the actual books.
Favourite Fiction:
A tie between 2666 and Berlin Alexanderplatz (this excludes the Proust project, cause In Search of Lost Time is on a level all its own). Also mentions for Never Let Me Go, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and The Kindly Ones.
Favourite Non-Fiction (which there is precious little of):
The Selfish Gene - cause that Mr. Dawkins can write entertainingly about a subject, and clearly.
Book I was glad to finally give up on:
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I'm allergic to this guy. I accept this and have gratefully moved on.
Most Disappointing Book:
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I really loved her last novel Beyond Black, but WH felt like a step back, more of a historical argument than a fully realized novel. Not a horrible book, but I was expecting more.
Author I'm most happy to have discovered:
Paul Di Filippo, who was chatting on the starship sofa, sofanauts.com podcast. I picked up one of his books, then another, and then another. That's a good sign in an author, and, man, he is odd in a very satisfy, 18th century kind of way, but in sf.
Though there is only one Proust here I'm over half way through Sodom and Gomorrah but I'll save that for next year's stack.
2009 Reading Stack
Looking a little sheepishly at my photoshop nightmare. Over twenty of the books I read this year were from the library so weren't available for my year end picture. The result was a good hunk of my book stack being stand-ins which I pasted pics of spines over. I gave up trying to do a convincing job. Roughly speaking it's probably this high. I have no idea why this is a fun thing for me to do...
Now the actual books.
Favourite Fiction:
A tie between 2666 and Berlin Alexanderplatz (this excludes the Proust project, cause In Search of Lost Time is on a level all its own). Also mentions for Never Let Me Go, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and The Kindly Ones.
Favourite Non-Fiction (which there is precious little of):
The Selfish Gene - cause that Mr. Dawkins can write entertainingly about a subject, and clearly.
Book I was glad to finally give up on:
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I'm allergic to this guy. I accept this and have gratefully moved on.
Most Disappointing Book:
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I really loved her last novel Beyond Black, but WH felt like a step back, more of a historical argument than a fully realized novel. Not a horrible book, but I was expecting more.
Author I'm most happy to have discovered:
Paul Di Filippo, who was chatting on the starship sofa, sofanauts.com podcast. I picked up one of his books, then another, and then another. That's a good sign in an author, and, man, he is odd in a very satisfy, 18th century kind of way, but in sf.
Though there is only one Proust here I'm over half way through Sodom and Gomorrah but I'll save that for next year's stack.