2010 book list

I have a sneaking suspicion I finished at least one book in Montreal (other than the Stross that I have noted for Dec. 30 of last year), in addition to reading about 8/9 of a Peter Dickinson book of rysmiel's that I didn't ask to borrow because it felt as though I'd gotten through all the actual plot and the motives weren't going to be any better explained in the remaining pages. It might be worth looking through the hardcopy journal. I know I got a couple of books from rysmiel and papersky's stack of giveaway books, intending to read them on the train, and instead wrote in my journal, did crossword puzzles, read part of an old issue of Asimov's I'd borrowed from adrian_turtle, and looked out the window at Lake Champlain and upstate New York. I may note rereads, but if I recognize them as such, I won't be counting them. I may or may not note books I stopped partway through, but they won't count either.

And, yes, there are 2009 books I haven't written up and may not.

1/17/10: Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise. I doubt I can add anything to the reams already written about the Aubrey/Maturin books, except to note that I took someone's suggestion of starting with the second volume, after giving up on the first after a few pages, and that I'm enjoying them, not worrying too much about the naval terminology, and that I need to see if there's a reliable way to ask my library specifically to send paperbacks, if I use the online catalog and book ordering system, because hardcovers are awkward on the subway even on days there's room in my bag.

1/22: Tom Holt, Expecting Someone Taller. Reread. This was very odd: I remember liking this, and finding it very funny, years ago. Enough so that I read a bunch more of Holt's play-with-old-myth stuff. This time around, it wasn't funny. This isn't a case of noticing offensive assumptions, or of not finding the word "booger" funny anymore: I mostly couldn't even identify what had been funny. Instead, it's just a mildly interesting story of someone who accidentally kills the then-owner of the Ring of the Nibelungen and has to learn how to deal with owning that, and the tarnhelm. And lots of stuff about his dysfunctional family, and Odin's dysfunctional family, and it just didn't click at all, in part because his background wasn't believable, the parents have no motivation other than "let's create an insecure nebbish."

1/30: Vicious Circle, Mike Carey

2/1: Sue Henry, Degrees of Separation, mystery set in Alaska, viewpoint character and part-time amateur detective is a dog musher; this is clearly at least second in a series.
2/3: Steven Brust, Iorich, number 12 or so in the saga of Vlad Taltos. Good, more world-building, back in Adrilankha, and probably a bad place to start with these.
2/23: O'Brian, The Mauritius Command
[reread part of Heinlein's _Tunnel in the Sky_, but it's disconcerting--I don't exactly have the book memorized, I just keep being a few sentences ahead, word-for-word of the text.]
2/28: Patricia Wrede, Searching for Dragons (again, being read to);
Peter Dickinson, The Last Houseparty

3/7: Jack Weatherford, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How Genghis Khan's Daughters Saved His Empire
3/9: Morpurgo, The Mozard Question [10]
3/11: Ben Goldacre, Bad Science
3/15: Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
3/24: Charles Stross, Halting State
3/28: Mike Carey, Dead Men's Boots (Felix Castor again needs help from some questionable sources, and little is as it seems)
3/31: O'Brian, Desolation Island, a less successful voyage than in the previous books [15]

4/9: Richard Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine--Greenland ice cores and what they say about climate change over time.
4/19: Karl Schroeder, Sun of Suns
4/27: Stephen Shaw, Turning the Tables (nonfiction about the restaurant business)
4/28: Patrick O'Brian, Surgeon's Mate

5/5: Marissa Lingen, Thermionic Nights [20]
5/7: Robert Charles Wilson, Axis
5/8: Ellis Peters, The Will and the Deed
5/11: Lionel Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome (1st-2nd centuries CE, chapters on themes including engineering, the family, slavery, and travel).
[reread, Alice in Wonderland]

6/4: Lisa Sanders, Every Patient Tells a Story
[6/12: reread, Ellis Peters, The Heretic's Apprentice]
[giving up halfway through Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy; I can see where it's intended to be funny, but it's not amusing me.]
6/14: Laurie R. King, To Play the Fool [25]
[reread, Pride and Prejudice]
6/19: Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Modern World, from the Bastille to Baghdad (final volume)
Ellis Peters, The Knocker on Death's Door
6/22: O'Brian, Treason's Harbour
6/26: O'Brian, The Far Side of the World

7/2: O'Brian, The Reverse of the Medal [30] Yes, I am reading other things, but being 3/4 through something doesn't put it on the list. I started the Larry Gonick months ago and read it in bits.
7/3: Eleanor Arnason, Mammoth's of the Great Plains. Chapbook, containing the title story; a revised version of Arnason's 2004 Wiscon GoH speech, "Writing Science Fiction during World War Three," and an interview with Arnason. "Mammoths of the Great Plains" is near-future SF in a slightly alternate history: there were still mammoths on the Plains when the white people showed up, but most of the history is much the same as in our world.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time, reread]
7/6: Jerome Groopman, How Doctors Think
7/9: E. B. White, Here Is New York, how the city (by which he mostly means Manhattan) seemed to one writer in 1948
7/18: O'Brian, The Letter of Marque
7/19: Catherynne Valente, Under in the Mere, odd and nonlinear Arthuriana, California as Avalon but also as the actual Mojave and San Francisco, unfortunately not proofread but only spell-checked [35]
[7/20: Lois McMaster Bujold, Ethan of Athos, reread]
7/21: Nicola Griffith, With Her Body
7/23: Nnedi Okorafor, The Shadow Speaker
Peter Dickinson, Play Dead
7/24: Patrick O'Brian, The Thirteen-Gun Salute
Eleanor Arnason, Ring of Swords [40]
7/26: Patrick O'Brian, The Nutmeg of Consolation
Bob Shaw, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush
[7/28: Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword]

8/6: Patrick O'Brian, The Truelove (aka Clarissa Oakes)
8/13: Sherwood Smith, Inda: swashbuckling fantasy adventure/coming of age thing, with political maneuverings as well as physical fighting, worldbuilding seems good so far (recommended by Adrian)
8/23: Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate. Mainstream novel, entirely in tetrameter, and mostly in present tense. In some technical sense it's not a novel, because not prose fiction, but it feels more like a novel than like an epic poem. (I was nine chapters in before I noticed that it's mostly written in the present tense, because that's a stylistic choice, and effective: it's clear that the narrative voice is describing things that have already happened.) Recommended by papersky, and quite good. It's mostly about relationships between people (romance, friendship, and non-romantic family), and how work and choice of work affects people. San Francisco, 1980, a point at which a gay character can both tell himself it's a bad idea to get involved with a bisexual man, and, having fallen in love with him anyway, try to convince him that they should be companions but not lovers, because of religious inhibitions. From here, that looks odd: not just the attitudes, but the combination of them in one person, and in San Francisco. The past is a foreign country. (And not in that way alone; AIDS isn't in the picture at all, for anyone of the characters. They're arguing and marching about weapons manufacture, and specifically the neutron bomb.) Like Papersky, I recommend it. [45]

9/1: Sherwood Smith, The Fox
9/8: Daniel Pinkwater, Return of the Moose. Sequel to Blue Moose, and probably not worth bothering with if you aren't already fond of Mr. Breton and the moose. But it has a happy ending. (Children's picture book.)
9/9: N. K. Jemison, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
9/16: Karl Schroeder, Queen of Candesce
9/17: Pinkwater, The Yggysey. Fun YA, sequel to the Neddiad but works on its own. Enjoyable, a couple of laugh-out-loud moments, and at least two characters who very obviously have wandered in from other stories (not Pinkwater's); I suspect I overlooked some. [50]

9/18: Pinkwater, Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl, a sequel to the above.

10/3: Patricia Wrede, Calling on Dragons (Adrian has been reading me this in installments)
Janet Kagan, Mirabile, fun, but don't try taking the alleged science too seriously.
10/10: Lev Grossman, The Magicians, a layered secondary world fantasy—the top layer is much like our world, but with a hidden layer of magicians and magical colleges, and then underneath that is Fillory, the fantasy world from a series of made-up children's books, with definite overtones of Narnia, if C. S. Lewis hadn't been Christian or at least hadn't wanted his books to be. Quentin, the protagonist, keeps discovering things that don't make him happy, at least not for long; I think I liked the part at the magicians' college better than the part in Fillory.
10/17: Sherwood Smith, King's Shield, third in a series after Inda and The Fox. [55]
10/20: Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight, good, and quite a bit of laugh-out-loud funny, which the recent Pratchett hasn't always had (or, I think, been aiming for)

11/7: Sherwood Smith, Treason's Shore
11/20: 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula Le Guin
11/23: Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
11/26: Lois McMaster Bujold, Cordelia's Honor (reread of Shards of Honor and Barrayar)
11/27: Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray [60]
[11/28: Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, reread, suffers from being read right after the other because some of the best lines are in both]

(12/3: Ursula Le Guin, Cat Dreams--this is a children's book, ordered from the library, that turned out to be an early reader, rather than something like her Catwings series. Sweet, but very quick, and doesn't quite seem worth counting.)
[12/5: Reread, Le Guin, The Birthday of the World]
[12/6: Bujold, Warrior's Apprentice, reread]
12/8: Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (if I read this before, it was at least 30 years ago)
[12/11: Bujold, Mountains of Mourning, reread; followed by reread of The Vor Game]
12/20: L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
12/22: Carl Hiaasen, Stormy Weather
12/26: O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea
(12/28 Cetaganda reread)
12/28: Wrede, Talking with Dragons [65]