Books to read, 2006

[featherynscale]

triadruid, as always, reminds me that if I don't make a list, I'll never freaking remember.

My goal this year is to increase the ratio of non-fiction to fiction books that actually get read, and also to continue to move towards having read all of the books in the house.

To-Read: Fiction
- Re-read Wheel of Time Series, Robert Jordan (we own it!)
- Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman (when triadruid finishes it) (we own it)
- Life of Pi, Yann Martel (we own it)
- Siddhartha, Herman Hesse (have to get a copy)
- Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce (have to get one)
- Perdido Street Station, China Mieville (need to get)
- Promethea series (borrow from gamera_spinning)

To-Read: Nonfiction
- Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstedter (we own it, and have for years. Has anyone read it? No.)
- Zero: Biography of a Dangerous Idea (we own it)
- Training Trances (we own it)
- Generation Hex (have to get a copy)
- The Laughing Jesus (in the book club queue)
- The Hidden Messages in Water (in the book club queue)
- Chance, Amir Aczel (in the book club queue)
- The Shadow Club, Roberto Casati (in the book club queue)
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach (need to get)
- Strategies for Success

Also, taking suggestions: What have you read lately that was of interest? I'm interested in pretty much any fiction that isn't a romance or a western (with preference for sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and alternate history), and any non-fiction about math, science, philosophy, psychology/sociology, ethnography, religion, magic, language or non-military history. Thanks!

Comments

[next-bold-move.livejournal.com]

Next book will be Jon and Dany laden. He promised.

I give better fiction than non-fiction recs, so have you read the Kushiel's Trilogy by Jacqueline Carey?

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Ummm... I think so. I've read at least two. Is the third one where she ends up in the barbarian leader's prison? If so, then I've read all of them, and enjoyed them greatly after getting past the first book's continual need to explain what masochism was about.

She's also got a newer, closer-to-genre series called Banewreaker. I've read the first one of those, and will probably finish out the series, but the entire first half of the first book reads like a Silmarillion ripoff. The plot seems to be making different points, as the Big Bad God is a god of lust/desire, and may not eventually turn out to be the villain, but the setup and mythology are extremely similar, even to the language and naming conventions. I have decided to graciously assume that this is intentional on her part and will pay off somewhere later in the series, but I am not sure.

[next-bold-move.livejournal.com]

That was extremely gracious of you, since I read them and felt like she was pressured to come up with a new series before she had an idea, and so fell back on someone else's idea.

Let me know if they pay off in the end, and I will give the series another try. :)

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I'll probably finish them out. I hate to start something and leave it unfinished (although I will, in certain circumstances. Simon Green's Deathstalker series comes to mind *eyeroll*).

I saw the second one in the Half-Price Books the other day, and was extremely disheartened to see something that looked perilously like Gandalf arriving on his white horse at the battle of Helm's Deep on the cover. :( Still, the style is good, if nothing else. I'm thinking it's a library-borrowing grade series, though.

[beccak1961.livejournal.com]

We have read Simon Greens "Tales of the Nightside" We being Zacha and me. I have no idea what attracts me to these, they are badly written and mangled and he has to announce he's "John Taylor" three thousand times each book, but for some reason we keep reading them.

You might try "Dunn's Lady Jess" by Dorana Durgan, an older book but a favorite of mine.

Re: Banewreaker

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

I really think that Banewreaker is doing something rather different than Silmarillion. For one, it didn't take me a year to read it.
I think she's really doing a good job about writing about mythological concepts as real people. In reading Banewreaker, it turns out that the Big Bad is made into the Big Bad and who is bad and who is good is significantly more complicated than what it originally sounded like. I wrote about some of this here.

Re: Banewreaker

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

I agree that she's going somewhere different, it just seems like she's starting in the same place. Sort of as if she'd read the Silmarillion and gone, "Wow, that was pretty good, but wouldn't it have been better if Melkor wasn't really such a bad guy, he just represented something that the other ones couldn't hang with? Let's write that." I mean, some of the characters have practically the same names as their Silmarillion templates. This does, I suppose, make it easier to remember who they are, but still sort of weird.

It's odd, too, because I don't usually mind mythological retreads, if they're taking a different angle on the source material. I mean, I read scads and scads of Arthur, and never worry about it. I don't know why using Silmarillion as base mythology bothers me more.

Anyway, it hasn't stopped me from reading it, certainly.