Jump to content

The 2014 Nightly Reading Revelry


Cashmere
 Share

Recommended Posts

42. Things We Set on Fire by Deborah Reed

I got this free from Amazon Prime. It's a story about sisters that are estranged from each other and their mother who are brought back together when one sister is dying. It's mostly about grudges and people being stubborn, which I can't really relate to. It wasn't horrible, but it also wasn't really my thing.


43. The Betrayers by David Bezmogis -A-

This was a random grab from the library. I couldn't get into it. It has 2 main male characters, and I kept getting them mixed up. Maybe it's one that would have been better if I read it instead of listening to it.


44. Drown by Junot Diaz

I really didn't like the last book I read of Junot Diaz's, but it was on my iPod and I needed something that wouldn't suck me in too much during jury duty, so it filled that requirement nicely. It's a bunch of short stories about how crappy life is for people living in the U.S. who are from the Dominican Republic.


45. Written in my own Heart's Blood by Diana Gabaldon

I am still totally sucked into this series. This one wasn't my favorite because it mostly ignored the story line that I found most interesting, but I still liked it well enough to be excited for the next one.


46. The Atlantis Gene by A.G. Riddle

This book was weird. It tied together aliens, government conspiracies, autism research, and "science". Not terrible, but not great either.


47. The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordin

This was a fun story. I went into it not knowing anything about it, other than it was made into a movie at some point. I enjoyed it quite a bit. There was one minor annoyance with the voice actor that voiced the audiobook though. Percy Jackson is supposed to live in NYC, but the voice actor had a pronounced new england accent. I'm actually glad he didn't speak with a NYC accent, because that's annoying for a whole book (I know from experience!), but it would have been less distracting if his speech was closer to standard english.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

43. The Betrayers by David Bezmogis -A-

This was a random grab from the library. I couldn't get into it. It has 2 main male characters, and I kept getting them mixed up. Maybe it's one that would have been better if I read it instead of listening to it.

That's been on my radar screen as a possible read since before it came out (the premise sounded interesting) but your take gives me all the excuse I needed to push it off for the time being. Thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

76. Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein. Hurray for eugenics and also the traditional all-American family but mostly eugenics!

 

77. Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein. 4 stories squashed together into one : planetbound undercover beggar adventure, space gypsy adventure, space police adventure, and planetbound boardroom adventure. The first is Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, the second two are standard Heinlein fun, and the last feels as original as the first three parts are derivative (or, to be fair, since this was cooked up in 1957 they’re not so much mostly derivative as they are what other stuff gets derived from) but the whole manages to be greater than the sum of its parts and it’s easy to see why this is often acclaimed as the best of Heinlein’s juveniles.

 

78. Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett. A girl joins up with the army to make war in a man’s world but soon learns war is a woman’s game. I have avoided Pratchett’s Discworld for years. First, because there’s so much of it. And, second, he was diagnosed with brain diseases and made it clear to the public he’d want a dignified death rather than a slow, painful, and confused one I didn’t want to feel bad when that happened so I figured best leave that alone. I am going to feel so bad and sad when he dies now but these books are a lot of fun oh well can’t be helped at this point.

 

79. The Truth by Terry Pratchett. ACTUALLY, IT’S ABOUT ETHICS IN VIDEOGAME ANKH-MORPORK JOURNALISM.

 

80. Thud! by Terry Pratchett. Peace among the nations and a mystery solved. Also featuring the most terrifying recital of a children’s book by a demonically possessed main character seen by me so far.

 

81. Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett. This one’s about sports and how sports is magic. A lot of these are about how something that isn’t magic is magic but in the deep down way of it’s what brings people together and makes life meaningful and not in the sparkling firecracker way of real magic from wizards.

 

82. Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett. Aren’t trains fun choo choo.

 

83. Sourcery by Terry Pratchett. There’s a really good bit where a wizard asked to demonstrate magic for the baddie makes a little floating orb depicting a beautiful garden and the baddie thinks that’s nice and improves on it by touching the orb and turning reality inside out so the real world is the floating hallucination and they’re now surrounded by the incredibly vivid garden.

 

84. Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett. Macbeth (and a little Hamlet and really a lot of Shakespeare in general) but with jokes and footnotes. Yeah, they all have jokes and footnotes but I remember really liking them extra lots this time around.

 

85. Grimscribe and Noctuary and The Shadow at the Bottom of the World and Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti. No matter how many times I read and re-read his stories the details never stick but the feeling remains. I can’t recall what any of his stories are about (they’re mostly about a guy who goes to a place and doesn’t see a certain thing, I think) but the feeling is always there.

 

86. The Affective Life of Law by Ravit Reichman. A look at law and literature framed around case studies of the writings of Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Hannah Arendt. A reread.

 

87. The Nickronomicon by Nick Mamatas. His Lovecraft-related stories. The last one that’s new for the collection is excellent. And the two with the nice perspective zigzag at the end (“Wuji” and “Dead Media”) as well.

 

88. Time Bites : Views and Reviews by Doris Lessing. Acerbic reviews and introductions. Furnishes one with a nice reading list.

 

89. Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt. Corporatespeaksatire. Not the OMGAMAZING triumph of her first book but expertly toned humour sustained for this length (not just for a short story which is what the idea would be in the hands of most anyone else) is worth applause.

 

90. Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle. A well structured piece of true intimate horror.

 

91. The Collected Poems Of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith. The best ones are “Sunt Leones”, “God and Man”, “From the Coptic”, “But Murderous”, “God the Eater”, “The Past”, “Voice from the Tomb (1)”, Mrs Arbuthnot” but lots are charming and the little illustrations are cutesy.

 

92. The Arrows of Time by Greg Egan. The finale of his Orthogonal trilogy, a capper to a hard-SF masterpiece picturing an upsidedown universe where the classic twin-in-a-rocketship relativity experiment would have the opposite result (the fastflying twin growing older, the earthbound twin staying the same age) of our own physics. Every twist and quirk of this scenario is explored and every sociopolitical consequence of those outcomes elaborated. Egan’s infodumps are constant, detailed, and textbreaking yet always justified and rooted in the fierce need his characters have to understand their circumstances in order to control and change it. Taken together the trilogy is not only among the greatest SF of all time but stands as a Buddenbrooks for the 21st century which looks not backwards (or even forwards) but cosmically askew; about things to come by writing of things that can’t explored by people who aren’t.

 

93. Fatale by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. I got the final two trades and went back and re-read the first three and now the whole thing really works together as a big chunk better in my brain than it did in individual pieces. Can’t even imagine how fractured it must have felt reading it month to month in single issues.

 

94. Seconds by Bryan Lee O’Malley. A chef troubled by her future gets a few second chances. Really good, beautifully coloured, the horror movie logic of events works well.

 

95. JLA : Earth 2 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. The thumbnails and the glimpse of alternate Aquaman and J’onn are fun but I would have loved a full script (like they did with the Arkham Asylum anniversary reprint) instead of just a section of it.

 

96. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. fine I was wrong about Nabokov geez give me a break world how come all my artistic prejudices aren’t 100 percent proved right

 

I started but was unable to finish or continue with the following : A Mirror In The Roadway by Morris Dickstein, Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett, Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov, Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt, The Novel : an alternative history Volumes I and II by Steven Moore, When Toys Come Alive by Lois Rostow Kuznets, King Artus translated by Curt Leviant, Futures From ‘Nature’ edited by Henry Gee.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I started but was unable to finish or continue with the following : Zombie Spaceship Wasteland by Patton Oswalt

Really? It's rare that we've both touched the same book, but I read this in 2011 while on vacation. Did you just dislike him in general, prefer different humor, lose the book, or...?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Tone whiplash. Mixed reminiscences about early jobs and heartbreakingly detailed career disappointments bashing up against the funny. I skipped to the end where some of his fake reviews for AintItCoolNews and makebelieve script treatments are (at least in my paperback copy) and then decided against going back to catch the chapters I'd missed. I'm a big fan of Oswalt (he spent an October once posting a recommended short story for each day on MySpace to which I owe a lot of good horror authors added to my reading list; his standup is funny; every interview I've read or heard from him or any appearance on a podcast has a little something in it that I find to be either true or well expressed or helpfully informative about popcultural matters and sometimes all three at once) and I don't feel like I was robbed of my four dollars and nineteen cents. I know he's got a new book coming out in January and I'll almost certainly be reading (and maybe not-finishing) that too.

 

You most definitely need to read 4 more this month to get to 100 for the year! More than that is good too.

 

I just started the 1488-page Joseph And His Brothers by Thomas Mann so that might not happen but if it does I'll be sure to update my very important and super accurate (I forgot about Robert Liddell's Some Principles of Fiction and also several volumes of Carey & Gross's The Unwritten) list of books.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

So I haven't updated and don't remember off the top of my head what I haven't updated.

 

Here are the most recent:

 

43. Neil Patrick Harris Choose Your Own Autobiography

Neat concept.

 

44. Unbroken

I've been told for a couple years how great the book is, but never read it. Finally did. It really is that great.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

41. Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, Russ Braun, Steve Leialoha, et al., Fables, v. 20: Camelot. In which Snow White's put-upon sister Rose Red decides she was meant for greater things than just supervising the Farm, gets the impression that she's meant to bring hope back to the citizens of Fabletown, and decides to build a new Round Table and audition new Knights to serve it. Meanwhile there's tons of other plot threads continuing their respective weaving throughout the vast tapestry of this excellent long-running series that makes Once Upon a Time look sick and makes me want to avoid Into the Woods even if it's any good, because it still won't be Fables.

 

42. Bill Willingham, Peter & Max: a Fables Novel. The first and only prose novel in the series tells the origin and current whereabouts of three characters largely overlooked in the first nineteen volumes: the heroic Peter Piper, his wife the assassin Bo Peep, and his murderous brother the Pied Piper. The two survivors actually figure into the events of Camelot, so I finally got around to it just in time. A worthy addition to the mythos, plus a fairytale-loophole ending I'm mad at myself for not predicting thanks to some sharp misdirection.

 

43. Donovan Scherer, Fear & Sunshine. A blind Artists Alley purchase at Wizard World Chicago. A novel shaped like a graphic novel (so basically I was tricked) about a little girl named Sunshine who inherits her parents' monster-making legacy, has the powers of Professor Sprout, befriends Death and other creepy-crawlies, and fights a Big Bad who actually calls himself Fear. It's cute in some parts.

 

I'm 200+ pages away from the end of what I'm currently reading, so this most likely concludes my 2014 reading list. Huzzah!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

And this caps off my reading for 2014. So close to 50.


48. Power Play by Catherine Coulter

As far as crime thrillers go, this one was great. I didn't read the earlier books in the series, but that didn't change my enjoyment level. Lots of characters, good intersecting plot lines, and an enjoyable book overall. I'd read more by her.


49. Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

I liked the concept of this book, and I didn't have a problem with the structure, but I just didn't care about the characters as much as I wish I would have. I appear to be in the minority there based on other reviews I've read, so I'm not sure why it didn't resonate with me. Maybe it was the format. I listened to it on a Playaway media player, and I didn't like the controls. There was no way to lock it so that the buttons weren't active, so I constantly had to pay attention to it, which took away from allowing me to get sucked into the story. Also, the Playaway kept going into sleep mode and reverting back to an earlier chapter if I didn't pause it every few minutes. It is the worst format for an audiobook hands down.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Thanks to all who participated in the 2014 Reading Revelry! Here's the breakdown of how much reading everyone did this year:


Played along at home:

Poisin: honorable mention because I know she read at least 1!

David: 1



Good show

pavonis: 6

Marc DuQuesne: 22

Cerina: 44 children's books (give or take)


Avid readers

NumberSix: 43

Fozzie: 44 (plus some possibly unnamed ones)

Cashmere: 49

Darth Krawlie: 55


And the 2014 Most Avidest of all the Readers Award goes to:

R.CAllen who completed 96 books, which he listed on his very important and super accurate exhaustive list



I hope to see you all back for the 2015 version!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.