Books I read in 2010, liked a whole lot, and forgot to post about

[cahn]

Finishing up my 2010 posts over the next week or so.

I really liked all these and would have said a lot more about them had I remembered to post about them.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz) - Really a quite remarkable book. Highly recommended. Unfortunately as I read this in half-delirious-sleep-deprivation mode I have forgotten anything I would normally have ranted about. I do remember that Abigail Nussbaum has a a very insightful and brilliant review, even by the rather high standards I expect from her.

In this House of Brede (Rumer Godden) - An odd book I liked quite a lot. Follows a nunnery over the course of several years. If you think reading about nuns, what they feel about their vocation with God, and so on, sounds very interesting, you will probably like this book. (It reminds me a little of L'Engle's adult novels.) If you think reading about nuns sounds like slow torture, you will probably dislike this book quite a bit. I fall in the former category. I got to this from Jo Walton's post at Tor. I've read the other book she talks about and will post about it in another post, since it is 2011 reading.

For the Win (Doctorow) - I'd read short stories by Doctorow and was not particularly impressed. This is my first try at a novel by him, and I quite liked it. Also, it's about gold farming in MMO's -- I mean, seriously, how could you not want to read about that! And he's not afraid to explain things like "what is inflation," which is awesome for a YA novel. It's a little one-note on "The solution is... to unionize!" but for the problem he postulates that is indeed the solution, and I didn't get the sense that he was advocating it strongly for problems for which it's not really the solution.

Also, it is available free, because Doctorow is just so cool that way. I do not understand his business model, however.

The Cardturner (Sachar) - This book is about bridge. I really think Sachar just wanted to write a book where he explained bridge to a YA audience. I loved it, but actually I'm not quite sure whether I should recommend it -- I am not at all the right person to ask, as I rather love bridge myself (though I haven't played in years... it brings back memories of staying up till 3 am in grad school...)

The Dispossessed (LeGuin) - Reread. I actually do have a lot to say about this, and will perhaps make it into its own post. Anyway, I read this in high school, but was blown away by it on this reread. Really very good.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I started FTW, then ran into this post (http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=1473)--which is generally positive--and have paused. I dunno. On balance, I think that his partner (Alice Taylor) has tastier thoughts with less repetition, but then I have read several of his prior novels.

In the massively multiplayer context--have you read Walter Jon Williams's This Is Not a Game? (I thought it was good-to-middling, but I know more about ARGs than Williams seems to.) And Diane Duane has a new(ish) book out, whose title I keep forgetting, which involves online games and which I keep meaning to track down.

(Will reply to your comment elsewhere soon.)

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Ha - I am quite willing to believe that I would be bored by FTW had I read Doctorow's other novels. One of the things I would have talked about had I remembered to post about it when I actually read it was that it reminded me a whole lot of Ayn Rand (well, obviously not in philosophy, diametrically opposed much? but in general smoothly-written-fiction-as-didactic-sermon style, although at least Doctorow doesn't do the 50-page speech thing) -- and, probably for very similar reasons, I very much liked The Fountainhead (red-haired Gary Stu, gorgeous Mary Sue, trashy love triangle, alpha male bonding, what's not to love?), but found Atlas Shrugged all but unreadable.

I have not read the Williams, but shall try to check it out. I am a little wary of Duane trying to do technology -- High Wizardry, while I love it as a book, was in its description of computers a little appalling to me even in high school, but I do like her stuff, so I'll look for that. Thanks!

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Heh, I read High Wizardry when it came out and still had minor issues with Duane's sense of computing, though I think in retrospect that she was trying to mutate things deliberately--just not in a way that quite made sense to me. She is current re: online communities, FWIW (I remember being startled to see her at fandom_wank fairly early on), so Omnitopia Dawn may work out better. The bits of computing extrapolation in Stealing the Elf-king's Roses didn't stick out for me, at least.

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Cory Doctorow's business model seems to involve "being Cory Doctorow". People will pay him to come and blather on about the same things over and over, and so he doesn't really need to make money from the books, except he has enough drooling fans who will buy them anyway that it works out and the publishers keep publishing him.

Um.

Can you tell I"m a little burned out on him? Also, he was pretty rude when I met him, and that kind of spoiled it all for me.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Heh. Actually, that explains a lot -- he just wants lots of people to read the books so they know who he is, and then he makes money for speaking. Well, worked for me! The knowing-who-he-is, anyway. (I mean, I had heard of him before I read FTW, and vaguely connected him with free speech or ninjas or something due to reading too much xkcd, but I didn't really know in detail what his deal was, if you see what I mean.)

I guess your experience with him doesn't totally surprise me -- as I said in the comment above, his writing reminds me a LOT of Ayn Rand, who by all accounts was sometimes charming and often obnoxious.