1 post tagged “sci fi”
Man, I was weak on the book front this year. I think I only read 19 or so, down a full third from 27 the year before. A few of those were really long, though. One fantasy trilogy was 3,000 pages and I read another sci-fi book of about 800 pages.
I partly attribute the decrease in books read to decreased commute time
that began shortly after mid-year when I discovered the commuter bus
that shaved a good 30 minutes off my daily round-tip commute on the BART. Another
reason was that there was about one full month where all I read was
magazines, front to back. And not crap like Time or Newswee, but meaty stuff befitting a true intellectual and renaissance man, publications such as Discover and The Atlantic Monthly.
I also read a lot of decent, but not great, books this
year. Only a couple really stood out as being incredible, gripping
reads. Here is what I would say are my top 5:
5. The Blind Side,
Michael Lewis: Another fine sports tale by one of my favorite authors.
Learn how a combination of blood-thirsty defensive ends, a family of
lily-white evangelical Christians, and freakish physical talents
transformed a ghetto-dwelling youngster into one of football's hottest
commodities.
4. Inside Intel, Tim Jackson: A great expose of everyone's favorite
semiconductor company.
3. A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin: A gritty, detailed
fantasy that is what you get when you take hobbits and that whole good-evil
struggle thing out of Tolkein.
2. Light,
M. John Harrison: A poignant little sci-fi tale that combines the grit
and melancholy of William Gibson with the light, witty touch of Douglas
Adams.
1. Guests of the Ayatollah, Mark Bowden: A detailed, engrossing account of the
Iran hostage crisis. Amazingly reported and written, with nary a dull moment, this was easily my favorite book of the year.
Here are my bottom 5:
5. Orphans of Chaos, John C. Wright. Wright penned one of the most remarkable sci-fi trilogies in recent years with his space opera The Golden. Orphans was not so much bad as simply disappointing. Book two is coming out soon and I am hoping it's an improvement on the first.
4. An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds: The Instapundit posts his
wisdom in book form. I suppose if you were new to him you'd find his
musings on nanotech, media, space policy and terrorism interesting but
for me it was just a dead-tree edition of his blog.
3. A Feast of Crows,
book four in the fantasy series mentioned in my Top 5. I dropped it
after about 100 pages. I reluctantly started it out of a sense of duty
to keep up with the epic, but then I realized that if you can't be
bothered to wrap up a story in your first 3,000 pages, I can't be
bothered to continue reading your stuff.
2. Coffee: A Dark History, Antony Wild: An economically illiterate look at the
coffee industry by a former bean trader who feels guilty about his past job for some reason but is
too intellectually lazy to do anything other than rely on Noam Chomsky and
anti-globalization activists to inform his view.
1. Vellum,
Hal Duncan: Another book I didn't actually finish, this one is a
fantasy novel about the ongoing struggle between the angels. I am
always down for some good War in Heaven action, but what decent writing
there was wasn't enough to overcome the confusing structure and
numerous nonsequiters.
What were your best/worst reads of the year?
