First, the Nazis came for the copy editors...

[triadruid]

Read a LOT more this year than in previous years - actually probably more than ever, at least since the Book-It program in grade school, which hardly counts.

Also managed to read quite a bit more of the non-fiction on my list, which was nice. Of course, that doesn't mean the to-read list actually got any shorter... The two things I noticed this year is that I was reading a LOT of stories with Nazis or Nazi symbolism in them, and that copy editing is a dead art. I'd say I could go into that as a new career, except apparently Microsoft Word has put them all out of business. *groan*

Legend: bold means I've read it already, Italics means I'm working on it, and * means I've read it before. means..well, you get the idea.

1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (7, solid idea for a thesis/paper but way too drawn out in book form)
   
2. Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms (8, good Watch story overall but somewhat transparent)
   
3. Terry Pratchett, Soul Music (7.5, Death is usually one of my favorites but things-breaking-in-from-other-realities has gotten old)
   
4. Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times (8.5, Rincewind+Cohen+Red Army Lemmings!)
   
5. Terry Pratchett, Maskerade (8.75, quite solid and nicely paced, lots of good references/puns)
   
6. Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (7.5, Death and yet...lacking somehow - maybe it's because I heard part of it on tape last fall)
   
7. John Ringo, There Will Be Dragons (7.5, I really can't make up my mind on this yet; parts of it are dreadfully trite, and yet, shield walls and nanotechnology)
   
8. William Sleator, Interstellar Pig* (8, solid little story, clocks in at under 200 pages but still enjoyable even as an adult. I still want to play the &*(%$^&#* game!)
   
9. Terry Pratchett, Strata (8.75, great story marred by terrible copyediting, but you can see where the Discworld series came from with this, and even when I thought I had the story figured out, I was wrong in the end)
   
10. Peter Beresford Ellis, The Druids* (7, I never actually finished this one the first time through in the late 90's, and my experience this time was different enough that I was disappointed. Someone from ADF should write a more scholarly version at some point...)
    
11. Terry Pratchett, Jingo (7, lots of Vimes and the City Watch, Vetinari juggling, and Nobby in harem pants, and yet it was not all that compelling)
    
12. Pete Pande and Larry Holpp, What is Six Sigma? (7, solid but superficial look at the process; read it on a lark related to some decision-making research I'm doing right now)
    
13. Neil F. Comins, What if the moon didn't exist? Voyages to Earths that might have been (7.5, great speculation marred slightly by a tendency to simplify things (he truly changes only one variable at a time, which is awkward) and preach about the environment)
    
14. David Welch, Decisions, decisions: the art of effective decision making (8, solid book about decision-making process marred only slightly by a tendency to simplify a few tangential things)
    
15. Larry Dressler, Consensus through conversation: how to achieve high-commitment decisions (5, good basic book on consensus, unfortunately I'm trained past this level already)
    
16. Michael Thomas Ford, The Path Of The Green Man: Gay Men, Wicca and Living a Magical Life (6, good book for a gay man looking to learn about Wicca/Paganism, not so much the other way around)
    
17. Jonar Nadar, How to lose friends & infuriate people (3, ow... just ow. Painfully egotistical, badly edited, and totally useless to practical applications until the very last chapter, which has some useful if largely superfluous things to say)
    
18. Christopher Meyer, Relentless growth: how Silicon Valley innovation strategies can work in your business (8, while not very useful to me personally, light-years ahead of Jonar Nadar's book; while they even agreed on a precious few things, Meyer has a delightful habit of using real-world examples and explaining himself)
    
19. William Sleator, Parasite Pig (7.5, less nostalgic love for this one but probably a better story, objectively)
    
20. Larry Niven & Steven Barnes, Achilles' Choice (7, some interesting bits but very simple and no eventual resolution)
    
21. Brooks Haxton (translator), Dances for Flute and Thunder (8, well-wrought if thin book, retellings of ancient Greek poems with an ear for the poetry more than literal accuracy)
    
22. Burton Raffel (translator), Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments (6, another attempt at modernized translations that didn't succeed as well to my ear as Haxton's)
    
23. John Lewin, The House of Atreus (8.5, concise and taut distillation of the Orestia by Aeschylus, got the sense of the play across very well; I actually liked the latter parts of the trilogy better than the "popular" first)
    
24. Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders, The Five Fists of Science (6, couldn't tell the Old White Guys apart in the artwork, and the story was frankly not compelling)
    
25. Hal Clement, Small Changes (6, collection of uneven early hard sci-fi stories, lots of technobabble and sliderules)
    
26. Garth Ennis, Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing (7, mostly solid Constantine but fairly thin and predictable. Swamp Thing + Pot Plant is comedy gold, however)
    
27. Patrick Ford, The Mabinogi and other Medieval Welsh Tales (7.5, uneven, as one might expect from collected works; the actual Mabinogi was better than most of the other tales - Culhwch and Olwen was just painful)
    
28. Harry Turtledove, Great War: Breakthroughs (-precursor: 8, solid end to the Great War series, and I'll be picking up the next set eventually)
    
29. Horace, The Complete Works (7.5, didn't technically read all the Poems, but the Essays & Letters are quite good and still pithy today)
    
30. Samuel R. Delany, The Fall of the Towers (5, really struggled with this one, apparently did not age well from the Sixties, and the we-had-too-much-material-for-one-book-so-we-made-a-short-trilogy thing never seems to turn out well; also, many of his names are the same/similar)
    
31. Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay (8.5, telegraphed the ending too early like many Watch stories, but very enjoyable overall)
    
32. Alan Moore, Promethea* (8, very different on re-read; on the one hand, it was easier to read, but on the other hand, some parts of the Kaballah I didn't even remember - but I was much sleepier the first time around)
    
33. Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent (6, rather incoherent and repetitive)
    
34. Bernard Knox, The Oldest Dead White European Males (7, not bad collection of essays on why not to ignore the Classical Greek classics)
    
35. Aeschylus, Orestia (7, I confess that was a lot harder to read than the abridgment above, but that may have to do with the quality of the translation)
    
36. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (4, a treatise/catharsis masquerading as a novel; read like a diatribe, completely one-dimensional characters, only vaguely saved by the ending, when she kinda hit her stride)
    
37. Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle (7, satirical if somewhat disjointed end-of-the-world tale, good antidote to reading Rand - and only took a day, rather than a week of slogging)
    
38. Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry (8, terrifyingly detailed description via Beacon Press of the global water situation - thankfully it ends on an up note)
    
39. H. P. Lovecraft, The Road to Madness (6.5, totally tired of Lovecraft's writing style after this; he fares much better when read in individual short stories)
    
40. Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum (7, I think I'm burnt-out on Pratchett at the moment; all the Witches stories seem the same to me, though the appearance of the Nac Mac Feegle cracked me up)
    
41. Barry Windsor-Smith, Young Gods & Friends (6, vaguely interesting compilation of a storyline from BWS: Storyteller, but Mr. Windsor-Smith thinks he's much cleverer than he is)
    
42. Kage Baker, Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers (7.5, uneven writing style due to experimenting, but overall enjoyable collection of short stories from her Dr. Zeus Inc. universe; I'll probably start the novels sometime)
    
43. Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant (8.5, on the other hand maybe I'm just tired of the Witches; the City Watch almost never disappoints)
    
44. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (-ish: 7, certainly ground-breaking at the time but I was tired of the motif by the end; also, the false-choices involved were fairly tedious and unrealistic, something the author admitted later in life)
    
45. Thomas E. Patterson, The Vanishing Voter (8, as far as I can tell the logic is sound, and the collection of 100,000 surveys over the 2000 presidential election cycle is Data Love; and he even offers suggestions at the end!)
    
46. Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic (7.75, this pretty-much-confirmed that I'll read anything filed under FIC GAIMAN - still, an enjoyable little comic collection, with John Constantine not being a poor sod for once)
    
47. Victor Gischler, Gun Monkeys (8.5, mostly spotless noir piece with equal parts pathos and bathos)
    
48. Phillip Freeman, The Philosopher and the Druids (8, accessible if at times superficial look at the ancient interactions between the Classical world and the Celtic world - plus, he's from Iowa!)
    
49. Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (8, solid set of stories but too busy and very 'Heinleinian' in character)
    
50. Charles Burns, Black Hole (7.5, strange little coming-of-age graphic novel, picked up on a lark)
    
51. Lawrence Watt-Evans, Night of Madness (7, picked up because it was similar to something in our Amnesia Campaign, turned out to be a second-rate series based on a gaming system idea, coincidentally)
    
52. Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream (8, great skewering of the conventions of pulp genre fiction, a bit over-the-top, but the faux 'literary analysis' at the end makes up for that)
    
53. Various authors, Beyond Singularity (6, mostly boring speculation on what might happen after a Technological Singularity; I don't think most of them went far enough 'out there', and some of the few that did just loaded up on jargon and newspeak)
    
54. W. Michael Gear & Kathleen O'Neal Gear, Dark Inheritance (7.5, solid Crichton-esque tale of genetically augmented apes, but too many Mary Sues magnificent Celtic women and too many "this is how the science works" discussions)
    
55. Ian Watson, Mockymen (6, incoherent occult-scifi piece, some interesting ideas mired in poor editing and jumpy storytelling)
    
56. Stephen King, The Mist* (8, still a solid story)
    
57. Brandon Sanderson, Elantris (7.5, on the one hand it's a little like reading the Good Parts version of the Wheel of Time series, through about Book 6... on the other hand, it's like reading the Good Parts version of the Wheel of Time series through Book 6 - I'm confident he can finish the series well, though, and the ending was very solid)
    
58. Steven J. Mithen, After the Ice (7, pretty good travelogue through 15,000-5,000 B.C.E., though it got a bit repetitive after 400 pages and five continents - unfortunately it was 500 pages and six continents long)
    
59. Jim Butcher, Storm Front (7.5, nice magical detective story, even if the man does have the worst luck in London Scotland Chicago)
    
60. Garth Ennis, Unknown Soldier (7, trade paperback of the comic anti-hero, dark and engrossing but nothing much new here)
    
61. Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights (9, six of the seven individual stories about the Endless recounted here are a sheer...Delight)
    
62. Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night (7.5, not as good as some of his other stuff)
    

And I'm only reading two things actively at the moment, trying to actually taper off and get some other stuff done...

1. Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising (good so far, he's much more accessible when it's not layered in great swaths of allegory)
   
2. Peter David/Stephen King, The Gunslinger Born (looks good so far)

Comments

[celtic-elk.livejournal.com]

Gaiman's Books of Magic was OK, but I really like what John Ney Rieber did when he took it over as a monthly. Great coming-of-age stuff, and more realistic than the Potter books (but with no additional Constantine cameos, sadly).

Happy New Year to you and yours!

[mrs-spart.livejournal.com]

I read Storm Front this year too. I loved it.

Too bad you can't get the free pizza for all the books. ;)

I can't keep track of what I read because I read so much and quickly.