Reading List 2010

[triadruid]

Legend: bold means I've read it already, Italics means I'm working on it, and normal text means it's a potential. * means I've read it before. Previously read books/reviews are in the 'read lists' tag.

1. Arthur C. Clarke, Imperial Earth (7, lots of ideas but very little plot make for rather boring sci-fi)
   
2. Bram Stoker, Dracula (5, I read this strictly for the historical value; the ending in particular was interminable. I seem to have a real difficulty allowing 'classics' to exist solely as a product of their time period/prior literary history)
   
3. Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men* (8, this was the audiobook version which was often hilarious, but Stephen Briggs' Scottiwelsh accentie for the Feegles was nae so gud)
   The Complete Idiot's Guide to Business Statistics (gave it up as an irredeemably wrecked job by Chapter 7)
   
4. T.H. White, The Once and Future King (7, confusingly written Arthurian pastiche that had trouble holding my attention until the later sections)
   
5. Mary Roach, Spook (6, got better as it went along but her glib skeptic's bias and unorthodox methods really put me off this look at the afterlife at first)
   
   Jay Griffiths, A Sideways Look at Time
   

SINGLE/STAND-ALONE
Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon
Elizabeth Bear, Carnival
Emma Bull, The War For The Oaks
Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (and the short story Truncat which follows it)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Jeffrey Gantz (trans), Early Irish Myths and Sagas (we own it)
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
M. John Harrison, Viriconium
Douglas Kennedy, The Big Picture
Stephen King, Under The Dome
Thomas Kinsella, The Tain (we own it)
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America (we own it)
Tyler Rush, Kockroach
Brandon Sanderson, Warbreaker (we own it)
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (we own it)
Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy Of Stone
Neal Stephenson, Anathem
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Nigel Tranter, Druid Sacrifice
Jack Williamson, Terraforming Earth
Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog
Various Authors, Arthurian Legends

SERIES, STARTED
Piers Anthony's Incarnations of Immortality series (next is Bearing an Hourglass - we own it)
Kage Baker, The Company novels (next is In the Garden of Iden)
Elizabeth Bear, Seven for a Secret
Jacqueline Carey, Kushiel's Chosen (we own it), and Kushiel's Avatar
Stephen King et al, The Dark Tower: The Fall of Gilead (not bound as a trade yet)
Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt (we own them)
Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals
E. E. 'Doc' Smith, Skylark Three*, Skylark of Valeron*, and Skylark DuQuesne*
.
.
Elizabeth Bear, Chill (coming February 23, 2010)
Jim Butcher, Changes (coming April 2010)
Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson, Towers of Midnight (coming late 2010)
John Ringo's On Hero's Trail (not written yet)

SERIES, COMPLETE
Steven Baxter, Voyage, Titan, and Moonseed
Elizabeth Bear, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired
Storm Constantine, Stalking Tender Prey, Scenting Hallowed Blood, Stealing Sacred Fire
Alison Croggon, The Naming, The Gift, The Crow, and The Singing
Stephen R. Donaldson, The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through
Homer, The Iliad* and The Odyssey* (we own them)
Ursula K. LeGuin, Gifts, Voices, Powers
China Miéville, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council (we own them)
Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials trilogy (we own them)
Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World (we own them)
Charles Stross, Accelerando and Glasshouse
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky
Peter Watts, Starfish, Maelstrom (we own them), Behemoth: β-Max, and Behemoth: Seppuku
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin, Axis, and Vortex(not out yet)
Jack Womack's Dryco series: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Heathen, Ambient, Terraplane, Elvissey, and Going, Going, Gone

SERIES, ONGOING OR PARTIAL
Various Authors, What Might Have Been (short stories, series of books)
Catherine Asaro's The Lost Continent (or Aronsdale) series
Clive Barker, Imajica and The Reconciliation
Edgar Rice Burroughs, At the Earth's Core and Tarzan at the Earth's Core*
Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Catching Fire (so far)
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger and Sacred Scars (so far)
Dynamite Entertainment's comic series The Boys (ongoing)
Steven Erikson, Malazan Book of the Fallen series (first is Gardens of the Moon)
Frank Herbert's Dune series* (we own the first five)
Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact (and possibly the rest of the trilogy, if it's any good)
George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons (so far; we own them all)
Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies
Irene Radford's Merlin's Descendants series
Justina Robson, Keeping It Real, Selling Out, Going Under, Chasing the Dragon (so far, at least one more coming)
John Scalzi, Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, The Sagan Diary, The Last Colony, and Zoe's Tale
Charles Stross Halting State and 419 (in 2010)
Megan Whelan Turner, The Thief, The Queen of Attiola, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings (in 2010)
David Weber, Oath of Swords (we own it), The War God's Own, Wind Rider's Oath (so far)

NON-FICTION
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational
Dina Bachelor, Break Up or Break Through
Robert Bly, Iron John (we own it)
Randy Conner, Blossom of Bone
Jared Diamond, Collapse (we own it)
Robert S. Fogarty, Desire & Duty at Oneida: Tirzah Miller's Intimate Memoir
David Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague (we own it)
Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas (we own it) and Gödel, Escher, Bach
Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think
Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma
Eric H. Nicoll, A Pictish Panorama: The Story of the Picts
Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche
Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design
Charles Pellegrino, Last Train from Hiroshima
Roger Ransom, The Confederate States of America: What Might Have Been
Matt Ridley, Genome (we own it)
Alan Small, The Picts: A New Look at Old Problems
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror
Various Authors, Applied Calculus (we own it)
David Wann, Biologic

And in the "Just buy it already!" department:
Asimov's Pebble in the Sky*).

Comments

<i>Atlas Shrugged</i>

[zylch.livejournal.com]

Don't bother. Or at least, don't buy a nice copy. Buy one that you plan to throw against the wall two or three times per page (and note the number of pages when choosing that wall). I consider myself to be pretty well out on the "individualist scale," and even I nearly tore my copy in half.

Re: Atlas Shrugged

[liquidfun.livejournal.com]

It's definately an odd book, but the characters' values and their successes/failures incurred because of them make sense if you first read a mini bio of Ayn Rand.

Other than serving as an illustration of Ayn Rand's value system, though, I don't see much point to the book.

It was amazingly popular with "free thinkers" a few decades ago, but I think that was primarily due to the departure from the moral lessons typically espoused at the time.

PS - LJ doesn't allow HTML in subject lines, FYI :)

Re: Atlas Shrugged

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it was added around the same time as Catch-22 was - I have a huge store of 'classics' that I've never been obligated/gotten around to reading. If Catch-22 is going to be any indication, I can leave them where they lie...

Re: Atlas Shrugged

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Changed it to The Fountainhead as that was the one that actually stirred my interest in the woman's writings, and I believe it's a Damn Sight Shorter™.

Re: Atlas Shrugged

[zylch.livejournal.com]

Anthem is a damn sight shorter still, as is We the Living -- those two I've actually made it through. I didn't much like them, but I finished them.

Re: Atlas Shrugged

[im-funsized.livejournal.com]

I was just wandering around and found your lj. Hope you don't mind me adding my two cents.
I liked the fountainhead. It is a little tough sometimes, but I liked the psychology of the main characters.

Re: Atlas Shrugged

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review; based on your user info, I'm intrigued enough to add you. See your own journal for the why...

[chronarchy.livejournal.com]

I have Cei's book of Pagan Prayer. I like it very much.

*grins* Got my copy signed when I met him at Harvard. It was pretty darn cool.

And Ender's Game is an excellent choice. I hope no one ruined the end for you, like they did to me. *sighs*

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

You left your new copy of The Apple Branch at my place Saturday night. I agree that Cei's book is worth having (it's cool for you to borrow it, but I definitely would want it back).

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I special ordered Cei's book today through Aquarius, with the hopes of improving their selection of (Celtic) books, as well as supporting a local pagan business....

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Series suggestion - George R.R. Martin - A Song of Fire and Ice series. I've got the first four (?) and the next one (possibly the last) is out next month. It's horribly complex, possibly more so than Jordan. Well, maybe as much so as Jordan, but without the moral simplifications Jordan makes. And more than a week goes by per book :)

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

If it is indeed the last one, I might add it, but I'm trying to swear off any new unfinished series, after reading both Herbert and Jordan...*shudder*

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I'll vet it for you, as this will probably be another one of those run-to-the-bookstore-the-day-its-released episodes.

Thank'ee sai for the vetting

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Finished Song of Susannah last night, and couldn't *&$%#%^ help myself; got 138 pages into Book 7 before I quit and went to bed. Damn, but that book *moves* along. I told myself I'd stop when it slowed down (I started it because I wanted to learn what the hell happened to Susannah in Fedic with the baby!), I just didn't know that'd take more than 100 pages..

Anyway, what I'm really here asking about is a good choice for helping me understand the mechanics of what you and Nicole are talking about and doing. Is Structure of Magic a better place to start than Prometheus Rising for this sort of reindeer games?

Not that I'm contemplating a change of religion, just getting fairly overloaded on the fantasy-fluff reading material and thought I'd try something else once I got done with DT, before Knife of Dreams comes out...

The Tower and the Magician

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Yeah - Song of Susannah was definitely the "Path of Daggers" of this series... a lot of lead-up for... no resolution, but another book on the way!

Anyway, Tower is crunch-crunch. You'll get through it in no time.

Re: The stuff Nic and I are talking about, I'm not sure either of those gives the full picture. Prometheus Rising is about Timothy Leary's 8 Neurocircuit model of human behavior/personality and the fine art of the paradigm shift. Structure of Magic are more about mental mapping, therapy techniques, and communication styles. Both are full of fun tricks you can play on yourself. Prometheus Rising is easier reading, especially if you don't have much background knowledge of clinical psychology. Neither one has anything to do with changing your religion. (Nor does magicianship in general, really. People of any religion can be magicians - all it requires is that you see yourself with a measure of control over your environment/life/destiny, and that you be able to exert that control in order to make changes in your own consciousness. Being a chaos magician also seems to require that you have the ability to view your personal faith as just one of many options, all more or less of the same value and likelihood of truth -- that it's not the Right One, just the One You Like The Best.) But that's enough of all that.

Re: the Magician

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I think the 8-circuit model is what I'm looking for initially. Structure of Magic seems to be somewhat deceptively titled, and more about neuro-linguistic programming? From one definition set of "magic", anyway...

I think I'm absorbing the Mercy/Severity/Mildness paradigm fairly well from being around you, but the shortcuts in talking about the 4 (8?)circuits are making my head spin. And I'm in a paradigm-shifting mode this year, it seems... not about religion per se, just expanding my toolbox. I get what you're saying about magicians of any faith; just meant to counterpoint your "I thought about changing my religion, again, yesterday".

Re: the Magician

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

The reason that that came up for me is that I'm in a religion that is not terribly devotional, and the commitment I'm in at the moment is going to want some component of religious devotion. I'm trying to feed that need, in order to get a better experience of what I'm doing now.

It still fits within the shell of the Magician, though... I can subsume myself in the smaller shell of the Priest, and may even have to be prodded to return to the larger model, but it's still there. Since I began in the model that one can move between models, I'm not sure I'll ever get out of that, you know? But what's bigger than that? Only the ability to see things as they truly are, and not according to any model at all... but once you've hit that point, how do you know you haven't just gone back into a smaller, more fundamentalist shell within the Magician's model? Is it possible to know a thing is The Truth?

Careful, honey...

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

While I understand the gist of what you're saying, you're much smarter than I am on this topic. Don't expect anything back...

Re: Expecting Return

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I don't. If things come back, that's excellent. If nothing comes back, that's okay too.

It's another typical goal of the Magician -- to throw things out there into the universe in the spirit of experimentation, without attachment to any expected result. Given that the expectations of the observer alter the results of lab experiments, we sort of figure that's true in the field, as it were, as well.

In the words of Uncle Al,

We place no reliance
On Virgin or Pigeon
Our method is Science
Our aim is Religion.

Changing One's Religion

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I suppose for me it is a little different, never having been particularly proficient at either the Priest or the Magician role.

One of the things I'm looking at is taking a closer look at some of my suppositions (including that I'm not very good at the above roles), and see what holds up under scrutiny, and what continues to be self- or other-delusion.

Re: Being good at one's Roles

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I dunno, man. See above re: Science/Religion. I predict that you will find that you are better at both than you think, but you may not come to that conclusion.

I wish you the joy of the study.

In any case, your booklist is probably not the best of all possible worlds to continue this conversation, especially as I have to go through and dig it up every time I want to reply. :-P

booklist debate

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it wasn't my intention to get quite that wordy here, it just seemed the most likely place to ask for recommendations. I've got the silly thing bookmarked, of course, but then it's a little more useful to me.

Re: The Tower

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

It doesn't make or break the story, but it IS interesting to read about the can toi and other such "Tower Tongue" words that SK has made up for the series, because they also show up prominently in Desperation...

[crookedface.livejournal.com]

As an English weenie, I had to read a great many Great Books(TM) in college. I understand why they're considered such--and dearly wish I had most of the time spent reading them back to put to good use! I suggest never reading a book just because it's a Great Book (TM).

The new, unabridged edition of Heinlein's _Stranger..._ is much more powerful than the originally published version.

Bandler & Grinder are always fun to read, though _...Magic 1 & 2_ aren't the best texts at covering the material. You can always borrow mine as a try-it-before-you-buy-it deal (same with the Heinlein and perhaps a couple others).

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I didn't even realize they'd put out an unabridged Stranger. We've got a copy of the original (presumably) at the house, but I may keep that in mind when I get around to it.

I somehow avoided a great many of the "classics" in HS; in retrospect, I'm not "missing" many of them in an emotional attachment sense. ;)

B&G are bloody hard to find at all, and I know we've got copies of _Structure 1&2_. What do you think might be a better overview?

[crookedface.livejournal.com]

The Science Fiction Book Club offers the unabridged version. The cover screams "The Original Uncut..." and it's worth reading. I've read the originally published version several times and got a great deal out of the uncut version, so I reckon the cuts made for a significant change.

_Structure 1&2_ are seminar transcripts, and reading just isn't the same as being in the audience. I found that the whole thing just didn't become workable for me until I read Sue Knight's _NLP at Work_. OF course, I'd read several other texts before that, so perhaps it was just the repetition that did the trick. I still think a straightforward explanation works better than a seminar transcript, though.

Bodenhamer & Hall's _NLP Handbook_ is good, though I gave away my copy of it.

[lilia-blackbear.livejournal.com]

If your copy is from the late 80s or after, it's probably the unabridged.