I was looking through Zeynep's website and she had a list of the latest books she'd read. I thought that it was a pretty neat idea, so I stole it. Most recently read stuff is listed first. Books that I'm rereading are in this color. You can generally tell from the blurb whether I liked the book or not, but an asterisk (*) means that I really, really liked the book in question. And books with two asterisks (**) are even better than that. |
||
| December, 2002: | ||
| The Good Apprentice | Iris Murdoch | Vaguely disturbing because the characters are so realistic and yet so neurotic. "I'm like that! ...but I don't want to be like that." Murdoch's grasp of human frailty always amazes me. |
| The Hunt for Red October | Tom Clancy | Couldn't put it down. Couldn't quite shake the feeling that I was at work, either. Darn good chase story, with spying, politicking, and submarines. |
| Scion of Cyador | L.E. Modesitt | Sequel to below. We follow our hero through the striations of Cyad society. |
| Magi'i of Cyador | L.E. Modesitt | Fantasy; rereading for the sequel. One of Modesitt's Recluce novels, this one on the chaos side of things. |
| *The Gilded Chain, Lord of the Fire Lands, and Sky of Swords | Dave Duncan | It's a trilogy, but not really, because all three books could be standalone. Brilliant pieces of work. Fantasy, swashbuckling swordfights, politicking, love and loyalty, utterly delightful. |
| **The Invention of Love | Tom Stoppard | This play is one of my favorites. Explores the life and times of A.E. Housman, poet and classics scholar. |
| November, 2002: | ||
| NaNoWriMo | ||
| October, 2002: | ||
| *The Return of the King | J.R.R. Tolkien | Also known as "why we love Sam." Epic battles, homecomings, and departures. |
| **Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | Fantastic. Very human, all of it. You keep reading and think, "yes, that is how life is, that is how people are. How clearly he manages to say it all!" A tale of two love stories, one happy, the other decidedly not. |
| *Thief of Time | Terry Pratchett | Discworld novel. Manages to be a sweet love story despite everything going on in the background (saving of the universe, galactic auditors, confused personifications of disaster). Very fun. |
| To Visit the Queen | Diane Duane | Young adult fantasy, wholesome and enjoyable. Feline wizards save the world. Lovely snide references to Victorian England. Sequel to The Book of Night with Moon. |
| Myth-ion Improbable | Robert Asprin | Comedic fantasy. A rollicking good adventure from the classic M.Y.T.H. series. |
| Wizard's First Rule | Terry Goodkind | Impressive, compelling plot, complex fantasy universe... presented in a jarringly amateurish writing style, with unsteady characterization and narrative anachronisms. Gah. It begins an epic series, and I'm not sure I want to tackle the next. |
| September, 2002: | ||
| The Pressed Fairy Book | Terry Jones | Muhahahaha. |
| Lathe of Heaven | Ursula K. Le Guin | Insidious and captivating. SF. The ability to change reality is not so much of a blessing as one might expect. (Naturally.) |
| *Brief Lives | Neil Gaiman | Quite possibly my favorite of all the Sandman graphic novels. Tight, self-contained, and subtle, with good strong themes: love, duty, transience, change. |
| The Last Hero | Terry Pratchett | Discworld novella, gorgeously illustrated by Paul Kidby. Sardonic, hilarious, and touchingly sweet. |
| *The Two Towers | J.R.R. Tolkien | Aragorn faces destiny, Gandalf gives motivational speeches, and Frodo plods further along his hero cycle. I love these books more each time I read them. |
| The Redemption of Althalus | David and Leigh Eddings | Typical Eddingsesque fantasy: reluctant hero becomes devoted avatar and beloved of his deity. Good versus evil, etc, etc. |
| The Silmarillion | J.R.R. Tolkien | Takes the words "epic fantasy" to new heights. Fantastic tales in horribly stilted language. If you can get past the verbiage, you'll love the book. |
| February, 2002: | ||
| *Smoke and Mirrors | Neil Gaiman | Gaiman shorts -- stories, fables, poetry. Beautiful and mystical and mildly disturbing, as one would expect from him. |
| January, 2002: | ||
| Triplanetary | E. E. "Doc" Smith | Old school sci-fi. Strong men, perky women, universe ruled by moralistic humans. Written back in the day when "computer" meant "guy who does calculations." Very interesting stuff, though dated. |
| The Sardonyx Net | Elizabeth Lynn | Sci-fi. A study in crime, morality, and family loyalty, set in a backdrop of interstellar trade. Complex and thoughtful. |
| December, 2001: | ||
| *The Fellowship of the Ring | J.R.R. Tolkien | Rereading before the movie. (yay, movie!) |
| November, 2001: | ||
| *Under the Net | Iris Murdoch | Fiction. Madcap adventure: one man's effort to find peace. Lovely philosophizing; a very British comedy of manners. |
| Travesties | Tom Stoppard | Delightfully intellectual play, typical of Stoppard. Persons great and small converge in Zurich. |
| This Alien Shore | C.S. Friedman | Sci-fi, a tale of self-discovery and power. Poignant, thought-inducing, and far too intricate to be summed up so easily. |
| October, 2001: | ||
| Ficciones | Jorge Luis Borges | Short, trippy pieces of wordplay. |
| September, 2001: | ||
| Metamagical Themas | Douglas R. Hofstadter | A collection of old Scientific American articles by Hofstadter. Self-reference, patterns, and other geeky fun cocktail party talk. |
| Fugitive Pieces | Anne Michaels | Story of two refugees, post-WWII; archaeology, spirituality, philosophy. Very lyrically written (Michaels is a poet, too). |
| The Bell | Iris Murdoch | A mixed-up group of people try to establish a quiet religious retreat, and their philosophies get complicated by sex. Good Murdoch fun. |
| August, 2001: | ||
| The Dispossessed | Ursula K. Le Guin | SF - An interesting exploration of dual societies with opposite takes on individuality. Drags a bit, but covers a lot of philosophical ground. |
| Selected Poems | Boris Pasternak | Pretty vignettes, but I would've been more impressed if they hadn't tried to make the English-translated poems rhyme. I'm not too fond of that. |
| De Profundis and Other Writings | Oscar Wilde | Typical Wilde -- witty, naive, and arrogant. Wilde takes on Socialism and his own incarceration. |
| Ender's Shadow | Orson Scott Card | Sci-fi (space battles), and Card did an excellent job recapturing the intensity of Ender's Game. |
| Destination: Void | Frank Herbert | SF. A bunch of insecure, disposable clones on a spaceship with a God complex. Very weird. |
| July, 2001: | ||
| Song for the Basilisk | Patricia A. McKillip | A dreamlike meld of music, magic, and revenge. |
| A Plague of Angels | Sheri S. Tepper | The colorful veil of fantasy almost manages to hide the didactic social commentary. |
| *American Gods | Neil Gaiman | Urban fantasy. Old gods in the New World... Belief does some really odd things. Utterly amazing story. |
| Dancing at the Edge of the World | Ursula K. Le Guin | A collection of brilliant essays by one of my favorite authors, subtitled "Thoughts on Words, Women, and Places." I highly recommend the "Words" ones. |
| *Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | A rather interesting narrator writes around and about a poem. |
| June, 2001: | ||
| The Book and the Brotherhood | Iris Murdoch | A complex web of Marxist philosophy, 60's-era British society, and (of course) love. |
| World's End | Neil Gaiman | Fantasy. A Sandman graphic novel. Stories told in an inn. |
| *Finity's End | C.J. Cherryh | Classic sci-fi: Space stations, starships, and inconvenient relatives. |
| Franny and Zooey | J.D. Salinger | Word games, played by young people way too self-analytical for their own good. Yes, I liked reading this. |
| The Guns of Avalon | Roger Zelazny | The sequel to Nine Princes in Amber. The series is actually ten books long... |
| *Nine Princes in Amber | Roger Zelazny | An old favorite -- a rather gritty fairy tale of magic, ambition, and brotherly love. |
| Richard III | Shakespeare | We like Richard. Especially if he looks eerily like Ian McKellen. |
| **Cryptonomicon | Neal Stephenson | Cryptography in WWII and the present, with more than a smattering of computers. A very geeky book, incredibly intricate and fun. |
| India Ink | Tom Stoppard | A time-twisting, vaguely disturbing, yet damn good play. |
| Men at Arms | Terry Pratchett | I love those Discworld novels. |
| World Without End | Sean Russell | Darwin meets fantasy. A naturalist discovers magic and falls headlong into court politics. |
| Back to current reading list | ||
|
>> yiwei main
| ||