A new year, a new book list

Yes, I will post about Montreal later. For now, this is where I'm going to list new books read in 2008, appending as I go:

Jan. 1: Imperial Spain, 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott. A good overview. The author assumes a certain knowledge of European history of the period, and this is definitely a book about Spain: the Americas are discussed almost entirely in terms of how Spanish exploration and conquest affected Spain, and the non-Spanish European territories ruled by various of the Spanish kings during that period likewise. That the Holy Roman Emperor's joint role as ruler of Spain and Germany affected taxes in Castile, or the Aragonese feeling that they had an absentee king, is relevant; what the Germans thought mostly isn't. (Elliott is, after all, covering 250 years in about 300 pages.) Elliott discusses economics as well as wars, maneuverings for thrones, and constitutions. There's a very cluttered-looking table of Spanish Habsburgs [sic]; this is partly because the two-dimensionality means some people, such as Mary Queen of Scots, appear two or three times. The phrasing is oddly old-fashioned, both in the matter-of-fact references to heresy as if it were objectively determinable and in the use of the term "Levantine" to refer to the Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Naples, because those territories are eastern relative to Castile and Portugal.

Jan. 6: Anthony Price, Soldier No More. Cold War spy novel, with a thoroughly unlikable, though pitiable, viewpoint character.
Jan. 18: Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare. Does a good job of not mocking the past, as he looks at the changing views of Shakespeare. Fond of the chatty and anecdotal, so I now know who coined "psychoanalytical" well before Freud, and the first Shakespeare play ever filmed (King John).
Jan. 18: Rex Stout, Prisoner's Base. Good, though with more of Goodwin feeling guilty over mistakes.

Feb. 10: Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel. Definitely science fiction, both alt-history and weird new physics. Also tense spy/political/war stuff. I laughed out loud at the end of part 5, and explaining why would be a huge spoiler. Thanks, Ken.

March 1: Atul Gawande, Complications.
March 2: Adrian Tomine, Sleepwalking and Other Stories. Graphic novel style, most not long enough to give me a real feeling of the characters, and in only a couple is that okay. [It sat on the bathroom floor long enough.]
March 8: Sue Grafton, T Is For Trespass. Another Kinsey Millhone, switching between Kinsey's first-person narrative and close third of a sociopath who sets her sights on one of Kinsey's neighbors.
March 15: Gawande, Better
March 29: Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice. [ten] [[numbers in parens don't count re-reads]]

April 6: Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow
April 12: John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
Rex Stout, The Hand in the Glove (not a Nero Wolfe)
April 13: William Tenn, Time in Advance
April 20: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish [fifteen]
April 25, Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
April 29, Knight's Wyrd, Doyle and Macdonald. Good, and easy to read, which I needed just now.

[Rereading while I recuperate: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan; Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase; The Potter's Field (Ellis Peters). Choices influenced by what, of the books I want, is in easy reach.]

May 18: Bujold, Paladin of Souls
May 24, Clarke, The Wind from the Sun
May 25, Yolen and Nielsen Hayden, Year's Best SF and Fantasy Stories for Teens [twenty]
[The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club]

[Gave up on The Worst Journey in the World and took it back to the library]

June 1: Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt, which I don't like as well as the previous two in this series.
[Ford, The Dragon Waiting]
June 4: Robert Parker, Widow's Walk
June 8: Mary Gentle, Cartomancy (anthology)
June 21: Delany, The Einstein Intersection
June 28: Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch [twenty-five]

July 2: [Jhereg, reread]; Rex Stout, Red Threads (not a Nero Wolfe story)
July 3: Robert Goldsborough, Murder in E Minor (a Wolfe/Godwin not by Stout)
July 4: [Yendi] (Yes, I'm in Montreal); Death on Deadline, Goldsborough
July 5: The Last Coincidence & The Bloodied Ivy, Goldsborough (these things are popcorn) [thirty]
July 6: Rex Stout, Death by the Book, a Nero Wolfe I'd overlooked, also from rysmiel's shelf. Two murders, connected by the thinnest of threads, and Wolfe's efforts to pull them together. This morning, rysmiel asked if I'd read anything but Nero Wolfe and the first half of a Joanna Russ since I got there, and I said "yes, one of the Vlad Taltos boos."
July 6: G. A. McKevett, Sour Grapes, random mystery handed me by a used bookshop owner when I asked for something lightweight to read on the plane. Intellectually lightweight, yes, but I don't really care for the sort of mystery that describes the murders of teenage girls from the omniscient-narrator viewpoint, and the confession out of the blue when the detectives have found the apparent killer was old when Tey did it in The Man in the Queue. I finished this just as the A pulled into 207th Street, saving me from deciding whether to abandon it near the end. (I only brought it home because I'm listing everything here, and to make an entry in enough detail to remind myself I don't want more of these.)
July 8: Joanna Russ, The Two of Them. Good, angry, and convincing in what is never explained to, and therefore by, the viewpoint character, but I could do without the metafictional bits at the end. (cf the recently read Delany, though The Einstein Intersection goes a lot further in that direction)

July 11: Rebecca Pawel, Death of a Nationalist. Detective story, yes, and about life in Madrid just after the Spanish Civil War (for values of "just after" in days and weeks). The cover suggests there may be more stories with Tejada as the detective, and I'm not sure how that balance will work: part of what's going on here is that Guardia Civil sergeant's gradual disillusionment about, if not the Falange (at least not yet), many of his fellow guardias. Well-written, plot and character; people become involved in events partly by chance, but the plot isn't coincidence-driven, except to the extent that a child happens to walk down the street at just the wrong time, and the characters' motivations are real and realistic.
July 12: [Phoenix--more Brust, before reading the new one]
July 13: Brust, Jhegaala. It felt a bit flat, but I think that's that I was reading it at the wrong time--while dealing with what feels somewhere between slow recuperation and a relapse on recovering from the gall bladder surgery, so not the right time for a story in which the main character and narrator spends large chunks of time recovering from being attacked. Also, well, Vlad still thinks like an assassin, and that he's now trying to figure out why he might want to find excuses for what he's done for the last n years doesn't change that, or not enough. Also, his not understanding why his marriage has fallen apart is probably realistic, but it's getting annoying. [thirty-five]
July 18: Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth, more detection and weird magic in the early days of the Pathet Lao regime.
July 19: Elizabeth Bear, The Chains that You Refuse, short story collection. Bear is a good writer, but at least in this collection, her work is a bit dark for my taste.
July 25: Elizabeth Bear, Dragon's Treasure
July 31: Allegra Goodman, Intuition. Recommended by mrissa, a good novel about science and scientists, not sf (which she told me, and told me she'd at first thought it would be).

August 1: Elizabeth Ironside, Death in the Garden, an odd detective story set partly in the 1920s and partly in the last 1990s; largely about relationships, and some of the ways they go wrong when people hide things. [forty]
August 6: Hanne Blank, Virgin: the Untouched History
August 12: Anthony Price, Soldier No More
August 16: Cotterill, Disco for the Departed
August 23: Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith, The Cartoon Guide to Statistics

September 3: Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics. Pretty light, especially having just read the cartoon guide, and in the past Edward Tufte; to be fair, Huff published decades before either. He's good on correlation is not causation, as well as misleading ways of drawing graphs. The book also points out that even if we believe that most of what he's complaining about is incompetence rather than dishonesty, the people producing it don't look good, but that when all the errors are in the other person's favor, it's hard to believe they are errors.[45]
Sept. 10: Avram Davidson, Rogue Dragon We found some Avram Davidson we'd never heard of in a used book store in Montreal. This is one of them. Distinctly minor, and doesn't feel like what I expect from Davidson. Connecting to a Farthing party panel, it's possible nobody else could have written precisely this, but if it had been published as by John Doe, I'd not have thought "Avram Davidson" or even "I've read some of this person's other books, I can't quite place it though." (Copyright 1965, which may be relevant.)
[Sept. 14: The Science of Discworld, reread on a whim; the framing bits about Rincewind, Librarian, et al. were still fun, the science content less so, perhaps because none of it was new to me.]
Sept. 19: Robert Reed, An Exaltation of Larks, on Jo's recommendation; I didn't find it quite as weird as she said she had. I did like it.
Sept. 21: Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Tailed a Thief, fluff, number umpteen in a series, from a library book sale, worth more than the 50 cents I paid for it, as train reading.

October 2: Ed McBain, Lullaby
October 4: Jo Walton, Half a Crown [50, and an excellent thing to be the fiftieth, since I do have the 50 books a year thing in the back of my mind.]
Oct. 9: A Time to Prepare
Oct. 11: Le Guin, Powers
October 25: Robert Reed, Marrow. Large, and strange; good world-building, but I had trouble believing the scale (time, not distance) and continuity of characters and personality (though it makes sense as a writing choice to focus on the same people throughout).
Oct. 30: John M. Ford, The Final Reflection. IIRC, I picked this up just after Mike died, and it got buried under other things. I found it in the course of recent tidying. I took it with me at lunchtime today, and two different people asked me about it, a person at the restaurant (who said he'd read a lot of Trek novels) and a coworker. To both, I explained that I don't specifically read Star Trek stuff, but I like Mike's other SF, so I also read this. I described The Dragon Waiting to the coworker, briefly, as "a weird thing set in an alternate Byzantine Empire," and when he said he liked alternate histories, mentioned the name as well.

Nov. 22: Robert Reed, The Well of Stars. I don't think this works as well as Marrow, which it's a sequel to. [fifty-five]
Nov. 29: Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat, a nice YA book about a cat and his person visiting various bits of the past for a little while; Adrian had this, and Cattitude said "oh yes, I remember this" so I read it.

December 14: Avram Davidson, The Island Under the Earth. Weird, in a very Davidson way. I finished this, and rysmiel looked at me and asked if the ending was satisfactory, then looked at my face, and I tried to explain. The ending isn't cheating, but neither is it satisfactory.
Dec. 22: Ruth Stiles Gannet, My Father's Dragon. A children's book recommended by rivka, whose daughter likes it a lot.
Georgette Heyer, A Civil Campaign. From papersky and rysmiel's shelf of things in search of a home, because I wanted something to read on the plane. Read about half of it on the trip home, just finished it. When I asked Jo about it, she said it was a good place to start: if I liked this I might like other Heyer, and if I didn't, I wouldn't. Conclusion: I don't like Heyer. (It would have helped if Jenny had seemed to have any motivation other than making first her father, and then her husband, happy. Or if Heyer didn't, by my standards, seem to be undervaluing friendship: and I realize that most romance novels value it significantly less.
Dec. 31: Ellen Klages, The Green Glass Sea. Good YA (?) about a girl (age 11, I think, at the start) living with her father at Los Alamos during World War II. Fiction about scientists, but not science fiction. Good. [That makes 60 for 2008. In 2009, I may try posting book reviews/discussions again.]

A new year, a new book list

Yes, I will post about Montreal later. For now, this is where I'm going to list new books read in 2008, appending as I go:

Jan. 1: Imperial Spain, 1469-1716, by J. H. Elliott. A good overview. The author assumes a certain knowledge of European history of the period, and this is definitely a book about Spain: the Americas are discussed almost entirely in terms of how Spanish exploration and conquest affected Spain, and the non-Spanish European territories ruled by various of the Spanish kings during that period likewise. That the Holy Roman Emperor's joint role as ruler of Spain and Germany affected taxes in Castile, or the Aragonese feeling that they had an absentee king, is relevant; what the Germans thought mostly isn't. (Elliott is, after all, covering 250 years in about 300 pages.) Elliott discusses economics as well as wars, maneuverings for thrones, and constitutions. There's a very cluttered-looking table of Spanish Habsburgs [sic]; this is partly because the two-dimensionality means some people, such as Mary Queen of Scots, appear two or three times. The phrasing is oddly old-fashioned, both in the matter-of-fact references to heresy as if it were objectively determinable and in the use of the term "Levantine" to refer to the Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Naples, because those territories are eastern relative to Castile and Portugal.

Jan. 6: Anthony Price, Soldier No More. Cold War spy novel, with a thoroughly unlikable, though pitiable, viewpoint character.
Jan. 18: Jack Lynch, Becoming Shakespeare. Does a good job of not mocking the past, as he looks at the changing views of Shakespeare. Fond of the chatty and anecdotal, so I now know who coined "psychoanalytical" well before Freud, and the first Shakespeare play ever filmed (King John).
Jan. 18: Rex Stout, Prisoner's Base. Good, though with more of Goodwin feeling guilty over mistakes.

Feb. 10: Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel. Definitely science fiction, both alt-history and weird new physics. Also tense spy/political/war stuff. I laughed out loud at the end of part 5, and explaining why would be a huge spoiler. Thanks, Ken.

March 1: Atul Gawande, Complications.
March 2: Adrian Tomine, Sleepwalking and Other Stories. Graphic novel style, most not long enough to give me a real feeling of the characters, and in only a couple is that okay. [It sat on the bathroom floor long enough.]
March 8: Sue Grafton, T Is For Trespass. Another Kinsey Millhone, switching between Kinsey's first-person narrative and close third of a sociopath who sets her sights on one of Kinsey's neighbors.
March 15: Gawande, Better
March 29: Valente, In the Cities of Coin and Spice. [ten] [[numbers in parens don't count re-reads]]

April 6: Michael Swanwick, The Dog Said Bow-Wow
April 12: John Scalzi, The Android's Dream
Rex Stout, The Hand in the Glove (not a Nero Wolfe)
April 13: William Tenn, Time in Advance
April 20: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish [fifteen]
April 25, Bujold, The Curse of Chalion
April 29, Knight's Wyrd, Doyle and Macdonald. Good, and easy to read, which I needed just now.

[Rereading while I recuperate: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan; Five Red Herrings, Have His Carcase; The Potter's Field (Ellis Peters). Choices influenced by what, of the books I want, is in easy reach.]

May 18: Bujold, Paladin of Souls
May 24, Clarke, The Wind from the Sun
May 25, Yolen and Nielsen Hayden, Year's Best SF and Fantasy Stories for Teens [twenty]
[The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club]

[Gave up on The Worst Journey in the World and took it back to the library]

June 1: Bujold, The Hallowed Hunt, which I don't like as well as the previous two in this series.
[Ford, The Dragon Waiting]
June 4: Robert Parker, Widow's Walk
June 8: Mary Gentle, Cartomancy (anthology)
June 21: Delany, The Einstein Intersection
June 28: Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch [twenty-five]

July 2: [Jhereg, reread]; Rex Stout, Red Threads (not a Nero Wolfe story)
July 3: Robert Goldsborough, Murder in E Minor (a Wolfe/Godwin not by Stout)
July 4: [Yendi] (Yes, I'm in Montreal); Death on Deadline, Goldsborough
July 5: The Last Coincidence & The Bloodied Ivy, Goldsborough (these things are popcorn) [thirty]
July 6: Rex Stout, Death by the Book, a Nero Wolfe I'd overlooked, also from rysmiel's shelf. Two murders, connected by the thinnest of threads, and Wolfe's efforts to pull them together. This morning, rysmiel asked if I'd read anything but Nero Wolfe and the first half of a Joanna Russ since I got there, and I said "yes, one of the Vlad Taltos boos."
July 6: G. A. McKevett, Sour Grapes, random mystery handed me by a used bookshop owner when I asked for something lightweight to read on the plane. Intellectually lightweight, yes, but I don't really care for the sort of mystery that describes the murders of teenage girls from the omniscient-narrator viewpoint, and the confession out of the blue when the detectives have found the apparent killer was old when Tey did it in The Man in the Queue. I finished this just as the A pulled into 207th Street, saving me from deciding whether to abandon it near the end. (I only brought it home because I'm listing everything here, and to make an entry in enough detail to remind myself I don't want more of these.)
July 8: Joanna Russ, The Two of Them. Good, angry, and convincing in what is never explained to, and therefore by, the viewpoint character, but I could do without the metafictional bits at the end. (cf the recently read Delany, though The Einstein Intersection goes a lot further in that direction)

July 11: Rebecca Pawel, Death of a Nationalist. Detective story, yes, and about life in Madrid just after the Spanish Civil War (for values of "just after" in days and weeks). The cover suggests there may be more stories with Tejada as the detective, and I'm not sure how that balance will work: part of what's going on here is that Guardia Civil sergeant's gradual disillusionment about, if not the Falange (at least not yet), many of his fellow guardias. Well-written, plot and character; people become involved in events partly by chance, but the plot isn't coincidence-driven, except to the extent that a child happens to walk down the street at just the wrong time, and the characters' motivations are real and realistic.
July 12: [Phoenix--more Brust, before reading the new one]
July 13: Brust, Jhegaala. It felt a bit flat, but I think that's that I was reading it at the wrong time--while dealing with what feels somewhere between slow recuperation and a relapse on recovering from the gall bladder surgery, so not the right time for a story in which the main character and narrator spends large chunks of time recovering from being attacked. Also, well, Vlad still thinks like an assassin, and that he's now trying to figure out why he might want to find excuses for what he's done for the last n years doesn't change that, or not enough. Also, his not understanding why his marriage has fallen apart is probably realistic, but it's getting annoying. [thirty-five]
July 18: Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth, more detection and weird magic in the early days of the Pathet Lao regime.
July 19: Elizabeth Bear, The Chains that You Refuse, short story collection. Bear is a good writer, but at least in this collection, her work is a bit dark for my taste.
July 25: Elizabeth Bear, Dragon's Treasure
July 31: Allegra Goodman, Intuition. Recommended by mrissa, a good novel about science and scientists, not sf (which she told me, and told me she'd at first thought it would be).

August 1: Elizabeth Ironside, Death in the Garden, an odd detective story set partly in the 1920s and partly in the last 1990s; largely about relationships, and some of the ways they go wrong when people hide things. [forty]
August 6: Hanne Blank, Virgin: the Untouched History
August 12: Anthony Price, Soldier No More
August 16: Cotterill, Disco for the Departed
August 23: Larry Gonick and Woollcott Smith, The Cartoon Guide to Statistics

September 3: Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics. Pretty light, especially having just read the cartoon guide, and in the past Edward Tufte; to be fair, Huff published decades before either. He's good on correlation is not causation, as well as misleading ways of drawing graphs. The book also points out that even if we believe that most of what he's complaining about is incompetence rather than dishonesty, the people producing it don't look good, but that when all the errors are in the other person's favor, it's hard to believe they are errors.[45]
Sept. 10: Avram Davidson, Rogue Dragon We found some Avram Davidson we'd never heard of in a used book store in Montreal. This is one of them. Distinctly minor, and doesn't feel like what I expect from Davidson. Connecting to a Farthing party panel, it's possible nobody else could have written precisely this, but if it had been published as by John Doe, I'd not have thought "Avram Davidson" or even "I've read some of this person's other books, I can't quite place it though." (Copyright 1965, which may be relevant.)
[Sept. 14: The Science of Discworld, reread on a whim; the framing bits about Rincewind, Librarian, et al. were still fun, the science content less so, perhaps because none of it was new to me.]
Sept. 19: Robert Reed, An Exaltation of Larks, on Jo's recommendation; I didn't find it quite as weird as she said she had. I did like it.
Sept. 21: Lilian Jackson Braun, The Cat Who Tailed a Thief, fluff, number umpteen in a series, from a library book sale, worth more than the 50 cents I paid for it, as train reading.

October 2: Ed McBain, Lullaby
October 4: Jo Walton, Half a Crown [50, and an excellent thing to be the fiftieth, since I do have the 50 books a year thing in the back of my mind.]
Oct. 9: A Time to Prepare
Oct. 11: Le Guin, Powers
October 25: Robert Reed, Marrow. Large, and strange; good world-building, but I had trouble believing the scale (time, not distance) and continuity of characters and personality (though it makes sense as a writing choice to focus on the same people throughout).
Oct. 30: John M. Ford, The Final Reflection. IIRC, I picked this up just after Mike died, and it got buried under other things. I found it in the course of recent tidying. I took it with me at lunchtime today, and two different people asked me about it, a person at the restaurant (who said he'd read a lot of Trek novels) and a coworker. To both, I explained that I don't specifically read Star Trek stuff, but I like Mike's other SF, so I also read this. I described The Dragon Waiting to the coworker, briefly, as "a weird thing set in an alternate Byzantine Empire," and when he said he liked alternate histories, mentioned the name as well.

Nov. 22: Robert Reed, The Well of Stars. I don't think this works as well as Marrow, which it's a sequel to. [fifty-five]
Nov. 29: Lloyd Alexander, Time Cat, a nice YA book about a cat and his person visiting various bits of the past for a little while; Adrian had this, and Cattitude said "oh yes, I remember this" so I read it.

December 14: Avram Davidson, The Island Under the Earth. Weird, in a very Davidson way. I finished this, and rysmiel looked at me and asked if the ending was satisfactory, then looked at my face, and I tried to explain. The ending isn't cheating, but neither is it satisfactory.
Dec. 22: Ruth Stiles Gannet, My Father's Dragon. A children's book recommended by rivka, whose daughter likes it a lot.
Georgette Heyer, A Civil Campaign. From papersky and rysmiel's shelf of things in search of a home, because I wanted something to read on the plane. Read about half of it on the trip home, just finished it. When I asked Jo about it, she said it was a good place to start: if I liked this I might like other Heyer, and if I didn't, I wouldn't. Conclusion: I don't like Heyer. (It would have helped if Jenny had seemed to have any motivation other than making first her father, and then her husband, happy. Or if Heyer didn't, by my standards, seem to be undervaluing friendship: and I realize that most romance novels value it significantly less.
Dec. 31: Ellen Klages, The Green Glass Sea. Good YA (?) about a girl (age 11, I think, at the start) living with her father at Los Alamos during World War II. Fiction about scientists, but not science fiction. Good. [That makes 60 for 2008. In 2009, I may try posting book reviews/discussions again.]