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Jan. 3rd, 2010 09:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labellementeuseUnder the cut are the 64 books I read in 2009 that I had not read before. I was quite strict with myself about not counting re-reads, which was a bit unfortunate when in the second half of the year I took a paper which involved reading two books a week, almost each and every one of which I had read before. However, it's been terrific to keep a record of my reading like this, because it means that whenever people ask me to recommend a book I can go and find something here! It's great.
1. The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman - predictably pretty great, not sure how I felt about the ending.
2. Robots of Dawn - Isaac Asimov - quite good! Enjoying a bit of an old-fashioned SF renaissance.
3. The Friday Night Knitting Club - Kate Jacobs - For most of the book I thought it was a fairly tiresomely written but occasionally interesting chicklit - the author was doing some interesting stuff with women as independent from men, emphasising women's relationships with each other, featuring women from a range of races, even a mixed-race couple, although of course heterosexual romance was a big feature. But then, in the middle of the book, the main character dies! Like, it's a chick lit novel, and towards the end of the novel the POV character kicks the bucket! I was copmpletely thrown! What is all this drama doing in my light novel! Anyway, I think that was fairly interesting in its way, and now I'm not sure what to think of it!
4. Divas Don't Knit - Gil McNeil - this is more what I was expecting from the Jacobs: funny, light chick-lit about knitting, female relationships, friendships, children. All the knitters in the books are still women, mind you, and she's nowhere near as interested in questions about race relations, independence, gender - but on the other hand it's a much better read, I really think the Jacobs was awkwardly written. So there we go.
5. Needles & Pearls - Gil McNeil - this is what I was expecting it to be, i.e. exactly the same as its prequel at #4. Fun, light, tidbits about knitting and yarn. Although the author is supposedly a long-time knitter, I'm kind of sceptical of someone who can sincerely mention knitting a shawl, wrapping it just after casting off, and giving it to someone - seriously, shawls are must-blocks.
6. Gods in Alabama - Joshilyn Jackson - I very much enjoyed this, with the kind of exotic fascination New Zealanders tend to have for the parts of the USA that don't generally appear in sanitised fashion on TV (that is to say, those parts that aren't New York, Los Angeles, and various parts of Vancouver dressed up as alien worlds.) It's a reasonably slim easy-going paperback, but I nevertheless thought it was pretty great. Recommended.
7. Hero - Perry Moore - this is a gay YA superhero book that I put off reading for a really long time. If you know me at all, you know this is bizarre, because "gay YA superhero book" is like the ultimate Venn Diagram of Things I Love In Fiction. However, it is also an example of that genre known as "seriously depressing gay YA books", which I tend to dislike thoroughly - this is why I have read Boy Meets Boy about five thousand times, and Night Kites only half a time. Anyway, I finally sucked it up and read it today because it was the only book of the ones got out of the library that I had left, and I did enjoy it, although I still felt it was a bit depressing and people-suck-y, which I enjoy only in limited quantities because I really don't think people sck that badly.
8. Small Favours - Jim Butcher - Dresden Files #10 - thank god for Jim Butcher. I was having a bad day and was at the library poking around in a sulky mood - you know, the one where you definitely want to read something, but you definitely don't want to read that. Or that. Or that. To top it all off I'm starting to realise that 100 new-to-me books in a year means I basically have to read two new books a week, which doesn't leave a lot of time for re-reads, and I love re-reading. So basically, I was looking for comfort reading that was totally predictable - it had to be new to me, but not *feel* new to me. Butcher was the perfect choice - I really enjoy the Dresden Files, they continue as well as ever, and it's totally predictable comfort reading.
9. Summer Knight - Jim Butcher. (I also re-read a couple of Dresden Files books - bad me!)
10. Victory of Eagles - Naomi Novik - excellent as usual although I thought the ending was unusually tense with very little in the way of relief at the end - not even any makeouts with Jane which is a real shame. I'm looking forward to the next book but man, I'm not sure I can cope with Laurence never being able to go home to England. OTOH, hopefully this means there'll be more Emily in the next book, which is good because I ♥ Emily nearly as much as her mother. I also really enjoyed the broader dragon characterisation in this book.
11. Between, Georgia - Joshilyn Jackson - I enjoyed it a lot.
12. Tom Brown's School Days - Thomas Hughes - for uni. OK after the first 50 pages.
13. Ella Minnow Pea - adorable! I love epistolary novels, and this one was especially charming
14. A Sweet Girl Graduate - L T Meade - for uni again. I really don't know what to think about it. The book seemed to have several different points and I was never really sure what they were and each seemed to be more important at a different moment - kind of frustrating to read/get to grips with, as was the kind of tiresome bitchy behaviour of some of the girls.
15. Lauren Weisberger - The Devil Wears Prada
16. Amy Levy - The Romance of a Shop - also for uni
17. JM Barrie - Peter Pan - technially a re-read but I'm counting it because I didn't remember much about it, like for e.g. how CREEPY it is.
18. Tom & Some Other Girls, by someone whose name I don't remember.
19. The Mines of Solomon, H Rider Haggard
20. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell - very much enjoyed it.
21. Jpod, Douglas Copeland - it was pretty funny but I found the self-referentiality tired and the bits with 40 pages full of pi unnecessarily gimmicky.
22. Shadow Gate, Kate Elliott - really enjoyed it.
23. Fly By Night, Frances Hardinge - loved loved loved it, also it has just about the perfect ending. Thanks![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
karenhealey for the rec!
24. Warriors of Ethandun, N. M. Browne - I did enjoy this and I think it's probably a better book than the second book in the series, Warriors of Camlann, but it's still not as good as the first book, Warriors of Alavna. I think a study of this series from a transgender perspective would be really really interesting - the female lead, Ursula, does actually deliberately and accidentally shift sex several times (mostly in the first book, not at all in the second for plot reasons, and once or twice in the third). Although she does identify as female, she also embraces the chance to be literally male. It's interesting. Not sure how I feel about the end yet - quite heavy on the romance which is OK, it's good that both Dan and Ursula become athletes, not sure how I feel about the fact that Ursula has to sacrific her magic and also chance to experience masculinity for the series to have a "happy ending". However, I give the first book in this series, Warriors of Alavna, a blanket rec - do give it a go.
25. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, Jane Austen & that other dude - very very funny (& a little gross) right up until the last few paragraphs which really annoyed me.
26. Stephanie Pearl McPhee Casts Off - absolutely hilarious as she always, always is.
27. the Accidental Sorceror - KE Mills
28. Kate Atkinson - When Will There Be Good News?
29. Frank L Baum - The Wizard of Oz
30. Megan Whalen Turner, Instead of Three Wishes. A+++ would read again.
31. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers. First nonfiction read cover to cover of the year! (In... July. LATE July.) I resisted this book for a long time but found it utterly compulsive reading (maybe because the alternative was Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler towards which I feel somewhat negatively and which I had to read for class, but that doesn't really explain why I picked it up at the bookshop and read for an hour and then bought it so I could read it on the way home when I originally went to the bookshop to buy a recipe book for B for his birthday, and already had two reading books with me.)
32. Philip K Dick, The Simulacra for class.
33. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, reluctantly finished for class.
34. Kate de Goldi, The 10 PM Question, ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.
35. Pat Cadigan, tea from an Empty Cup - really enjoyed it, not sure how much of that was just contrast though.
36. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.
37. Linda Hirschman, Get to Work
38. Kristin Cashore, Graceling, as amazing as everyone says.
39. Maurice Gee, The Firestarter.
40. Julie Powell, Cleaving. Didn't like it nearly as much as Julie et Julia.
41. Justine Larbaleister, Liar. Um, ouch/wow.
42. Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth. I liked it a lot, but oh, sad! For a book that's all about hope (and, obscurely, an anti-religion book that's a big fan of faith) it sure kills a lot of people.
43. Kristin Cashore, Fire. Pretty good but not as good as Graceling (but then, what could be?)
44. Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. Hm. Funny of course. Lots of cameos which is interesting. I think I really liked this. Certainly more memorable than some of the recent ones.
45. Maurice Gee, Orchard St - pretty sure I hadn't read this one before.
46. Audrey Niffeneger, Her Fearful Symmetry - I nearly gave up on this at the end, really glad I didn't.
47. Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret. LOVED IT.
48. Justine Larbaleister, How To Ditch Your Fairy. Funny & cute. Raced through it in about 2 hours. Only wished that Charlie had ended up with Fio instead of Stefan.
49. Witch High, edited by Denise Little. I picked this up for the Diane Duane story, The House, that rounds off the anthology, but the book as a whole is a charming, clever read, especially if you like young adult fiction, magic, school stories, or any combination of the above. The House is, of course, the standout for me - featuring Brianna, the girl with the gingerbread-related science fair - but I also particularly liked Kristine Rausch's Domestic Magic and Esther Friesner's You Got Served (Esther Friesner wrote the terrific book Temping Fates that I highly recommend - YA fiction about a teen who gets a summer job... working for the Fates. Yes, them.)
50. Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty. Hm.
51. Bruce Mason, The Pohutukawa Tree. This is actually a play, which I read because I'd heard it discussed briefly as a tremendously important New Zealand work, it's the graduation show at Toi next year, and I've never seen it. Also, plays are fast to read! It's very good, sad of course, but I can't wait to see it performed.
52. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Yowza! I get a lot of references I hadn't got previously. Very much enjoyed it and I think it'll go nicely with the next play I want to read, Ophelia Thinks Harder.
53. Nick Hornby, Slam. Eh. It was a Nick Hornby novel, the second I've read, I'm not impressed and won't be picking up anything else by him. Readable, sure, but neither especially educational or inspiring. And certainly not moving language.
54. Jean Betts, Ophelia Thinks Harder. Hm. I enjoyed this, it's basically a feminist polemic (3 act play) rewriting of Hamlet, with mostly new language, but I had some issues. F'rexample, giving Ophelia Hamlet's speeches is a cute idea, but they didn't all fit in with the story that was being told - I thought some of Betts' self-penned Ophelia Going Crazy speeches did the job better (where the job is demonstrating that Ophelia can have just as much depth as Hamlet. There's a rather terrific scene where Polonius is talking to Ophelia telling her how Hamlet is so sensitive and crazy and she has to take care of him because he's NUTS but that's OK, and then she says something a little bit crazy and he says "Sheesh, hysterical women, pull yourself together!" (Only funnier.) That's my favourite scene.)
55. A S Byatt, The Children's Book. Although I feel the ending is a little rushed and VERY painful, I LOVED this book. Just straight-up beautiful writing set in a period that interests me and characters who I found delightful. I feel tremendously lucky that this is the first A S Byatt book I have read, and I now have a lot of her other books I can read!
56. Jim Butcher, Turn Coat. - I actually read this on the plane back from England and didn't note it down on account of coming back home and feeling like death warmed up, and just remembered it now skimming the list and seeing Small Favours and thinking hey, didn't I read another new Dresden book this year? Yes I did.
57. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
58. Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
59. Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now. I was warned about this book bykarenhealey so this didn't shock me, but here's what the back copy of the book sounds like: A Secret Garden/Flambards mashup. Here's what the contents of the book are more like: A Secret Garden/Tomorrow When the War Began/Flowers In the Attic mashup. I loved it!
60. Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix. Um... eh? Writing was OK, I guess, but I was really not a fan of the pacing. Too much, too fast, I barely cared when bad stuff happened, there was never any sense of tension at all. Judgement: cool characters, but failure to build mood. I did enjoy both Chen Yong and Ai Ling. I liked the way that, even though this was a book about girl-power feminism, like think Mulan, it also became a book about people of colour, on multiple levels: firstly because it's set in Generic Asia instead of Generic Europe, but this is (deliberately, I assume) not pointed or intrusive or exotified, although I can't say the same about the cover art (ugh). But secondly because Chen Yong is mixed race. Both Chen Yong and Ai Ling are aware that they suffer discrimination, and as they travel together they each become aware that the other is also suffering discrimination, and that they had been complicit in this at some points. That went down excellently for me, I thought it was extremely well-done. It went a long way towards making sure that this wasn't a story that used people of colour to tell a story about how their own society sucked - like, Mulan is a story about a Chinese girl, but it's also a story about how much Chinese culture is like, SO sexist! Disney is like, SO enlightened! So anyway.
61. Robin McKinley, Chalice. Loved it! I did think the ending was a little unearned, but generally, everything I look for in a Robin McKinley book was there in spades.
62. K A Applegate, Megamorphs: Back to Before. Holy shit y'all, an Animorphs I hadn't read before!
63. Jaclyn Moriarty, Dreaming of Amelia. Not my favourite of hers, but still very good; I love this series.
64. Susan Pfeffer, Life as We Knew It. I picked this up in Borders (*ducks*) today because I left my book at home and wanted something to read while I ate lunch, plus I was like, "Susan Pfeffer? As in Susan Beth Pfeffer, writer of cheery middle-grade fiction? She's writing apocalyptic YA now? Huh." So anyway, I enjoyed it, but it's no different from the other 12 YA apocalypse/survival novels you read this year, except way more leftie (religion causes people to starve themselves to death, the president is a Texan idiot, but centralised government is still the solution! Yeah.)
So that was my Year In Fiction, plus three non-fiction books: Gladwell's Outliers, Julie Powell's Cleaving, and Linda Hirschman's Get to Work.) I do read non-fiction, but I tend not to read whole books because I find them tiresome. Here are some unfortunate statistics, though.
- I read, as far as I can tell, two books by people of colour: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix. Even if I've missed someone, I don't feel comfortable with that total, since I consider myself a conscientious reader.
- Everything I read was Western (that is to say, written in the west: Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix is clearly set in a fictionalised Asian country, but Pon is working in the USA), and mostly written by white anglo-saxon Protestants or lapsed Protestants - that is to say, people with the same sociocultural background as myself.
- The only books I read in translation were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its first sequel.
-I read five works by New Zealanders: Two by Maurice Gee that were required by class, plus Kate de Goldi's The 10PM Question and a play each by Bruce Mason and Jean Betts.
Best book of my year: Kate de Goldi's The 10PM Question, by a country mile. I am not sure if this has been published outside NZ, but if it has been I urge you all to read it.
I'm starting my 2010 list with: Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, which I finished today.
1. The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman - predictably pretty great, not sure how I felt about the ending.
2. Robots of Dawn - Isaac Asimov - quite good! Enjoying a bit of an old-fashioned SF renaissance.
3. The Friday Night Knitting Club - Kate Jacobs - For most of the book I thought it was a fairly tiresomely written but occasionally interesting chicklit - the author was doing some interesting stuff with women as independent from men, emphasising women's relationships with each other, featuring women from a range of races, even a mixed-race couple, although of course heterosexual romance was a big feature. But then, in the middle of the book, the main character dies! Like, it's a chick lit novel, and towards the end of the novel the POV character kicks the bucket! I was copmpletely thrown! What is all this drama doing in my light novel! Anyway, I think that was fairly interesting in its way, and now I'm not sure what to think of it!
4. Divas Don't Knit - Gil McNeil - this is more what I was expecting from the Jacobs: funny, light chick-lit about knitting, female relationships, friendships, children. All the knitters in the books are still women, mind you, and she's nowhere near as interested in questions about race relations, independence, gender - but on the other hand it's a much better read, I really think the Jacobs was awkwardly written. So there we go.
5. Needles & Pearls - Gil McNeil - this is what I was expecting it to be, i.e. exactly the same as its prequel at #4. Fun, light, tidbits about knitting and yarn. Although the author is supposedly a long-time knitter, I'm kind of sceptical of someone who can sincerely mention knitting a shawl, wrapping it just after casting off, and giving it to someone - seriously, shawls are must-blocks.
6. Gods in Alabama - Joshilyn Jackson - I very much enjoyed this, with the kind of exotic fascination New Zealanders tend to have for the parts of the USA that don't generally appear in sanitised fashion on TV (that is to say, those parts that aren't New York, Los Angeles, and various parts of Vancouver dressed up as alien worlds.) It's a reasonably slim easy-going paperback, but I nevertheless thought it was pretty great. Recommended.
7. Hero - Perry Moore - this is a gay YA superhero book that I put off reading for a really long time. If you know me at all, you know this is bizarre, because "gay YA superhero book" is like the ultimate Venn Diagram of Things I Love In Fiction. However, it is also an example of that genre known as "seriously depressing gay YA books", which I tend to dislike thoroughly - this is why I have read Boy Meets Boy about five thousand times, and Night Kites only half a time. Anyway, I finally sucked it up and read it today because it was the only book of the ones got out of the library that I had left, and I did enjoy it, although I still felt it was a bit depressing and people-suck-y, which I enjoy only in limited quantities because I really don't think people sck that badly.
8. Small Favours - Jim Butcher - Dresden Files #10 - thank god for Jim Butcher. I was having a bad day and was at the library poking around in a sulky mood - you know, the one where you definitely want to read something, but you definitely don't want to read that. Or that. Or that. To top it all off I'm starting to realise that 100 new-to-me books in a year means I basically have to read two new books a week, which doesn't leave a lot of time for re-reads, and I love re-reading. So basically, I was looking for comfort reading that was totally predictable - it had to be new to me, but not *feel* new to me. Butcher was the perfect choice - I really enjoy the Dresden Files, they continue as well as ever, and it's totally predictable comfort reading.
9. Summer Knight - Jim Butcher. (I also re-read a couple of Dresden Files books - bad me!)
10. Victory of Eagles - Naomi Novik - excellent as usual although I thought the ending was unusually tense with very little in the way of relief at the end - not even any makeouts with Jane which is a real shame. I'm looking forward to the next book but man, I'm not sure I can cope with Laurence never being able to go home to England. OTOH, hopefully this means there'll be more Emily in the next book, which is good because I ♥ Emily nearly as much as her mother. I also really enjoyed the broader dragon characterisation in this book.
11. Between, Georgia - Joshilyn Jackson - I enjoyed it a lot.
12. Tom Brown's School Days - Thomas Hughes - for uni. OK after the first 50 pages.
13. Ella Minnow Pea - adorable! I love epistolary novels, and this one was especially charming
14. A Sweet Girl Graduate - L T Meade - for uni again. I really don't know what to think about it. The book seemed to have several different points and I was never really sure what they were and each seemed to be more important at a different moment - kind of frustrating to read/get to grips with, as was the kind of tiresome bitchy behaviour of some of the girls.
15. Lauren Weisberger - The Devil Wears Prada
16. Amy Levy - The Romance of a Shop - also for uni
17. JM Barrie - Peter Pan - technially a re-read but I'm counting it because I didn't remember much about it, like for e.g. how CREEPY it is.
18. Tom & Some Other Girls, by someone whose name I don't remember.
19. The Mines of Solomon, H Rider Haggard
20. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell - very much enjoyed it.
21. Jpod, Douglas Copeland - it was pretty funny but I found the self-referentiality tired and the bits with 40 pages full of pi unnecessarily gimmicky.
22. Shadow Gate, Kate Elliott - really enjoyed it.
23. Fly By Night, Frances Hardinge - loved loved loved it, also it has just about the perfect ending. Thanks
karenhealey for the rec!24. Warriors of Ethandun, N. M. Browne - I did enjoy this and I think it's probably a better book than the second book in the series, Warriors of Camlann, but it's still not as good as the first book, Warriors of Alavna. I think a study of this series from a transgender perspective would be really really interesting - the female lead, Ursula, does actually deliberately and accidentally shift sex several times (mostly in the first book, not at all in the second for plot reasons, and once or twice in the third). Although she does identify as female, she also embraces the chance to be literally male. It's interesting. Not sure how I feel about the end yet - quite heavy on the romance which is OK, it's good that both Dan and Ursula become athletes, not sure how I feel about the fact that Ursula has to sacrific her magic and also chance to experience masculinity for the series to have a "happy ending". However, I give the first book in this series, Warriors of Alavna, a blanket rec - do give it a go.
25. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, Jane Austen & that other dude - very very funny (& a little gross) right up until the last few paragraphs which really annoyed me.
26. Stephanie Pearl McPhee Casts Off - absolutely hilarious as she always, always is.
27. the Accidental Sorceror - KE Mills
28. Kate Atkinson - When Will There Be Good News?
29. Frank L Baum - The Wizard of Oz
30. Megan Whalen Turner, Instead of Three Wishes. A+++ would read again.
31. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers. First nonfiction read cover to cover of the year! (In... July. LATE July.) I resisted this book for a long time but found it utterly compulsive reading (maybe because the alternative was Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler towards which I feel somewhat negatively and which I had to read for class, but that doesn't really explain why I picked it up at the bookshop and read for an hour and then bought it so I could read it on the way home when I originally went to the bookshop to buy a recipe book for B for his birthday, and already had two reading books with me.)
32. Philip K Dick, The Simulacra for class.
33. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, reluctantly finished for class.
34. Kate de Goldi, The 10 PM Question, ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.
35. Pat Cadigan, tea from an Empty Cup - really enjoyed it, not sure how much of that was just contrast though.
36. Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age.
37. Linda Hirschman, Get to Work
38. Kristin Cashore, Graceling, as amazing as everyone says.
39. Maurice Gee, The Firestarter.
40. Julie Powell, Cleaving. Didn't like it nearly as much as Julie et Julia.
41. Justine Larbaleister, Liar. Um, ouch/wow.
42. Carrie Ryan, The Forest of Hands and Teeth. I liked it a lot, but oh, sad! For a book that's all about hope (and, obscurely, an anti-religion book that's a big fan of faith) it sure kills a lot of people.
43. Kristin Cashore, Fire. Pretty good but not as good as Graceling (but then, what could be?)
44. Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals. Hm. Funny of course. Lots of cameos which is interesting. I think I really liked this. Certainly more memorable than some of the recent ones.
45. Maurice Gee, Orchard St - pretty sure I hadn't read this one before.
46. Audrey Niffeneger, Her Fearful Symmetry - I nearly gave up on this at the end, really glad I didn't.
47. Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret. LOVED IT.
48. Justine Larbaleister, How To Ditch Your Fairy. Funny & cute. Raced through it in about 2 hours. Only wished that Charlie had ended up with Fio instead of Stefan.
49. Witch High, edited by Denise Little. I picked this up for the Diane Duane story, The House, that rounds off the anthology, but the book as a whole is a charming, clever read, especially if you like young adult fiction, magic, school stories, or any combination of the above. The House is, of course, the standout for me - featuring Brianna, the girl with the gingerbread-related science fair - but I also particularly liked Kristine Rausch's Domestic Magic and Esther Friesner's You Got Served (Esther Friesner wrote the terrific book Temping Fates that I highly recommend - YA fiction about a teen who gets a summer job... working for the Fates. Yes, them.)
50. Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty. Hm.
51. Bruce Mason, The Pohutukawa Tree. This is actually a play, which I read because I'd heard it discussed briefly as a tremendously important New Zealand work, it's the graduation show at Toi next year, and I've never seen it. Also, plays are fast to read! It's very good, sad of course, but I can't wait to see it performed.
52. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Yowza! I get a lot of references I hadn't got previously. Very much enjoyed it and I think it'll go nicely with the next play I want to read, Ophelia Thinks Harder.
53. Nick Hornby, Slam. Eh. It was a Nick Hornby novel, the second I've read, I'm not impressed and won't be picking up anything else by him. Readable, sure, but neither especially educational or inspiring. And certainly not moving language.
54. Jean Betts, Ophelia Thinks Harder. Hm. I enjoyed this, it's basically a feminist polemic (3 act play) rewriting of Hamlet, with mostly new language, but I had some issues. F'rexample, giving Ophelia Hamlet's speeches is a cute idea, but they didn't all fit in with the story that was being told - I thought some of Betts' self-penned Ophelia Going Crazy speeches did the job better (where the job is demonstrating that Ophelia can have just as much depth as Hamlet. There's a rather terrific scene where Polonius is talking to Ophelia telling her how Hamlet is so sensitive and crazy and she has to take care of him because he's NUTS but that's OK, and then she says something a little bit crazy and he says "Sheesh, hysterical women, pull yourself together!" (Only funnier.) That's my favourite scene.)
55. A S Byatt, The Children's Book. Although I feel the ending is a little rushed and VERY painful, I LOVED this book. Just straight-up beautiful writing set in a period that interests me and characters who I found delightful. I feel tremendously lucky that this is the first A S Byatt book I have read, and I now have a lot of her other books I can read!
56. Jim Butcher, Turn Coat. - I actually read this on the plane back from England and didn't note it down on account of coming back home and feeling like death warmed up, and just remembered it now skimming the list and seeing Small Favours and thinking hey, didn't I read another new Dresden book this year? Yes I did.
57. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
58. Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played with Fire
59. Meg Rosoff, How I Live Now. I was warned about this book by
karenhealey so this didn't shock me, but here's what the back copy of the book sounds like: A Secret Garden/Flambards mashup. Here's what the contents of the book are more like: A Secret Garden/Tomorrow When the War Began/Flowers In the Attic mashup. I loved it!60. Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix. Um... eh? Writing was OK, I guess, but I was really not a fan of the pacing. Too much, too fast, I barely cared when bad stuff happened, there was never any sense of tension at all. Judgement: cool characters, but failure to build mood. I did enjoy both Chen Yong and Ai Ling. I liked the way that, even though this was a book about girl-power feminism, like think Mulan, it also became a book about people of colour, on multiple levels: firstly because it's set in Generic Asia instead of Generic Europe, but this is (deliberately, I assume) not pointed or intrusive or exotified, although I can't say the same about the cover art (ugh). But secondly because Chen Yong is mixed race. Both Chen Yong and Ai Ling are aware that they suffer discrimination, and as they travel together they each become aware that the other is also suffering discrimination, and that they had been complicit in this at some points. That went down excellently for me, I thought it was extremely well-done. It went a long way towards making sure that this wasn't a story that used people of colour to tell a story about how their own society sucked - like, Mulan is a story about a Chinese girl, but it's also a story about how much Chinese culture is like, SO sexist! Disney is like, SO enlightened! So anyway.
61. Robin McKinley, Chalice. Loved it! I did think the ending was a little unearned, but generally, everything I look for in a Robin McKinley book was there in spades.
62. K A Applegate, Megamorphs: Back to Before. Holy shit y'all, an Animorphs I hadn't read before!
63. Jaclyn Moriarty, Dreaming of Amelia. Not my favourite of hers, but still very good; I love this series.
64. Susan Pfeffer, Life as We Knew It. I picked this up in Borders (*ducks*) today because I left my book at home and wanted something to read while I ate lunch, plus I was like, "Susan Pfeffer? As in Susan Beth Pfeffer, writer of cheery middle-grade fiction? She's writing apocalyptic YA now? Huh." So anyway, I enjoyed it, but it's no different from the other 12 YA apocalypse/survival novels you read this year, except way more leftie (religion causes people to starve themselves to death, the president is a Texan idiot, but centralised government is still the solution! Yeah.)
So that was my Year In Fiction, plus three non-fiction books: Gladwell's Outliers, Julie Powell's Cleaving, and Linda Hirschman's Get to Work.) I do read non-fiction, but I tend not to read whole books because I find them tiresome. Here are some unfortunate statistics, though.
- I read, as far as I can tell, two books by people of colour: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, and Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix. Even if I've missed someone, I don't feel comfortable with that total, since I consider myself a conscientious reader.
- Everything I read was Western (that is to say, written in the west: Cindy Pon's Silver Phoenix is clearly set in a fictionalised Asian country, but Pon is working in the USA), and mostly written by white anglo-saxon Protestants or lapsed Protestants - that is to say, people with the same sociocultural background as myself.
- The only books I read in translation were The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its first sequel.
-I read five works by New Zealanders: Two by Maurice Gee that were required by class, plus Kate de Goldi's The 10PM Question and a play each by Bruce Mason and Jean Betts.
Best book of my year: Kate de Goldi's The 10PM Question, by a country mile. I am not sure if this has been published outside NZ, but if it has been I urge you all to read it.
I'm starting my 2010 list with: Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, which I finished today.
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Date: 2010-01-06 08:10 pm (UTC)I finished How I Live Now yesterday and it blew me away. Like you, I was sort of expecting teen "coming of age" novel and... yeah. Wow.
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Date: 2010-01-06 11:01 pm (UTC)I liked Life as We Knew It a LOT (love apocafic), and I'm interested to see what she does in the third book, because if the entire world is covered in volcanic ash, central government can't be much of a solution for long because there IS no solution, which becomes clearer in the second one.