silverflight8: animated gif of illustrated desk and shelves covered in books (retro internet desk animated)
I have read 29 books so far, not counting re-reads.

Best Book You've Read So Far
This is difficult, but probably Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee. It's such a gem of a book, does really novel things, and despite the confusion caused by being plunged right into the action, does have all the information contained in the book, seeded here and there. Very satisfying.

Best Sequel You're Read So Far
Hm. Red Side Story was okay, but probably the prize goes to the two other novels in the Machineries of Empire series (Yoon Ha Lee). Sometimes when book 1 is very good, books 2/3 tend to be disappointing, but I really didn't feel that way. Well, OK, the ending to book 3 I kind of felt a little flat about, but then there was a short story that fixed that all up for me again ("Glass Cannon") :D

New release you haven't read yet, but want to
Lyorn, by Steven Brust. I really want to but I am currently in about 4 book clubs, which kind of happened accidentally, so I have a lot to read right now.

Most anticipated release for the second half of the year
I am so bad at keeping up. Sherry Thomas just released the newest Lady Sherlock book, which I need to read!

Biggest disappointment
The Wolf Who Loved Me by Lydia Dare, which was somehow both disappointing on a romance level and on a werewolf level :(
Also the first 1/3 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the garbage anthropology that made me almost quit. The entire premise of the book is that our primate ancestors were too stupid, incurious, and feeble to ever become humans, that our humanity and qualities in ourselves that we prize come from outer space. Which as a human is just so insulting; plus over the years we have accumulated a lot of anthropological evidence showing that our species' flexibility, ability to learn, and care for others is actually very deeply rooted in our hominin past. I understand Clarke is making a point. His point is stupid.

Biggest surprise
I did not expect to like The Forgotten Beasts of Eld so much. I think if I had read this when I was fourteen, it would have briefly or maybe permanently become part of my personality. Even now I feel shaken a little.

Favorite new author
Hm, I've read two Loretta Chase novels and liked both, so probably her for now. Sometimes I find liking one book by an author kind of like striking gold once and not liking the rest (as much, or at all) so having two is always a good thing. I'm quite capable of liking one book by one author and then going on a wholesale tear through all their works - I am slowly reading all of Ngaio Marsh, though her books can be very uneven in quality - but sometimes it is worth it and sometimes it is not. Especially romance, occasionally it really is just one book that hits my buttons just right and all the rest of the back catalogue are meh.

Newest Fictional Crush
Shuos Jedao from Machineries of Empire, undoubtedly. He's just so good at things, and I am so weak to that.

Newest Favorite Character
Sybel from The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Book That Made You Cry
I don't think any books so far.

Book That Made You Happy
So many of these books! Starter Villain by John Scalzi was a fun romp with cats. The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren was pretty sweet and funny.

What Books Do You Need to Read by the End of the Year?
I am 3/6th of the way through my Hugo Best Novel read this year, and am for once actually going to finish!! Other than that, I am pretty much just doing my usual, reading books for book clubs and trying to catch up on my TBR, pretty free-form.
silverflight8: Barcode with silverflight8 on top and userid underneath (Barcode)
This year I wrote one fic for Queen's Thief (Megan Whalen Turner), Rooftop Sneaking for morganstern, 1,500 words, about Eugenides teaching Eddis how to sneak around her palace.

I already recced my fic but I want to rec it again: Kushiel's Keys, by vibishan, 8,000 words, a what-if AU if Morwen succeeded in getting a child from Imriel and what would happen. Very very cool to see what might have been - lots of callbacks to the books' real chronology but also a lot of inventiveness that makes the AU great.

--

Stats about my novel reading in 2014!

brief rundown with mini-reviews of my favourite books this year )
silverflight8: stacked old books (books)
I stole this from cloudsinvenice without asking so you should go read her entry first --> http://cloudsinvenice.livejournal.com/43998.html.

==

1. How many books did you read this year?
I finished 38 books :(

a) fic
b) time

I should run a regression on how many books I read:

Digression into an elementary regression under the cut. This is totally normal. tl;dr: MANY VARIABLES, NOT AS MANY BOOKS. )

Rest of the meme, since I'm not sure what will happen if I try to nest two cuts inside each other. Something to test later. )

==
(If you want to do this meme, here's a little textbox.)
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)

Bold: read fully

Italics: partially read/heavily abridged

Underline: required reading


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series- J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations-Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Ubervilles-Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner-Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi-Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities-Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down -Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

 

 

 

31/100 read fully;  9/100 partially; in total, 40/100.

silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
It makes me want to cry when I saw on [livejournal.com profile] bookfails  that so many of the books I loved were loathed by posters. I think it's because of the mandatory reading lists (after all, this was the "Required Reading List" hate week, so there was lots). Books that like Gone With The Wind (Mitchell is brilliant, end of story), The Great Gatsby (absolutely despairing, but beautifully so), To Kill a Mockingbird (you think it's dated? Hello?!), The Mayor of Casterbridge (!). I despair for the way they teach English...
silverflight8: bee on rose  (Default)
If unloved is a word at all.

At any rate, I was going to talk about reading lists. Especially the ones that teachers give students to read over the summer.
I don't know about your school system, but mine makes students read books over summer break. Things like classic literature (usually Shakespearean texts) and other world literature.
And sure, reading lists are useful. Most people don't pick up great big heavy books labeled CLASSIC on their spines because the general opinion on literature seems to be that they are: a. endless and boring, b. full of symbolism and imagery and foreshadowing and other literary terms that always seem to pop up unexpectedly, and c. are not exciting. And I admit, some of them are. If you don't love, love to read thick books, don't knock yourself out by trying to read War and Peace. Take it from someone who has--it's not fun to slog through. I can't read Jules Verne, either, and other venerated but deathly-boring authors, But there are others out there--look for the ones that *oops!* also achieved big sales. While Jane Austen's language might take a bit getting used to, her books are excellent. Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind has unbelievable prose. Catch-22 infuriated me to no end, but made me laugh. And of course the famous classics: Lord of the Rings, L.M. Montgomery, Daphne du Maurier, Aurthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald's works, Shakespeare's works , and scores that I haven't read.

But then again, who likes being thrust a sheet of paper and told to read these titles? And then be expected to analyze them afterward? Reading, at least for me, has always been purely for fun--I don't consciously go  about looking for themes, and identifying "Character A is a character foil to Character B". Bestseller novels are bestselling for  a reason. And not only that, but popular culture has messages, too--it's not just an airheaded statement. Temeraire, The Dog Barked in the Nighttime, The Raw Shark Texts, Diana Gabaldon, Diane Duane, and on and on.

Reading lists are a necessary evil--but they're not everything, thank God.

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