My favorite reads from 2000-2010

[cahn]

Because julianyap wanted to know! Unfortunately it's hard for me to categorize things based on when they were published rather than when I read them, so... here we are. Books actually published in 2000-2010 are indicated by asterisks.


Dante Alighieri (Ciardi translation), The Divine Comedy - It's hard for me to believe that eleven years ago I had not read the Divine Comedy at all, and that ten years ago I hadn't read the Ciardi translation, which is the best one. If you ever have to or want to read it, this is the one to get.

Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night - Speaking of Dante, I must be the only person in the world who knew Sayers as a Dante translator first, then for her Christian apologetics, and only then for her Lord Peter novels. Of which Gaudy Night is hands down the best.

Lois McMaster Bujold, the Vorkosigan series and Curse of Chalion* - It's also hard to believe that I had barely heard of Bujold when I started grad school (I was vaguely aware she wrote the Cordelia books). D force-fed these to me while we were dating in a medium-distance relationship, bringing one a week when he came to visit. Warrior's Apprentice I was all "eh, whatever." By Mirror Dance I was all, "Hey, you could bring two of these next week if you want." Right in the middle of Memory I realized I desperately loved all these characters. (And almost went insane after reading the first ten chapters of Civil Campaign online while waiting for the weekend and my next fix.)

Now, of course, I love all of the books. Bujold is sneaky -- she's so smooth, and they go down so easily, that you don't even realize how deep the books are, both in terms of science-extrapolation and character/theme, until you go back and look at them.

(And yes, lightgetsin, I know I promised you a discussion of religion in Curse of Chalion. Someday...)

Megan Whalen Turner, The Attolia/Queen's Thief series* - I didn't like Thief much, but I love King of Attolia to lots of little bits and pieces. These books actually grew on me quite a bit -- right after reading I would not have said they would have even made a year best-of, but after I let them grow on me for a while I decided I loved them like anything.

Ted Chiang, especially Stories of Your Life and Others - Yet another one where it is hard for me to imagine a time where I didn't have Ted Chiang's work in my life. I am actually not sure when I read the title story -- it might have been slightly before 2000, but I suspect not. The book, of course, didn't come out until 2002. "Story of Your Life" is one of those stories I think everyone ought to read.

Jhumpa Lahiri* - which I don't have any more to say about than I said here. Amazing stuff.

Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds - another one D force-fed to me while we were dating. Only he didn't have to force this one on me. Everyone needs to go read this right now; it's the most underrated book I know.

Cynthia Voigt, A Solitary Blue -- I had read some of her Kingdom novels, and when I was growing up I saw the Tillerman books everywhere, but I'd never actually read one before 2009. I'm glad I didn't. I would not have gotten them as a kid. Reading A Solitary Blue as an adult blew me away.

Octavia Butler, Xenogenesis trilogy -- A tour-de-force, full of interesting thoughts on gender, race, alienness, ownership, the Other, rationality, emotionality, freedom, and, oh, the list goes on, without EVER becoming preachy. This is how it's done right.

Intuition, Allegra Goodman* -- just squeaked in there. I'm not sure I liked it quite as much as the others on this list, but it kept lurking in the back of my head whenever I thought about making this list, so I threw it in. More here.

Nonfiction:

Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto* -- Changed the way I thought about how large projects are organized. Really interesting.

Huron, Sweet Anticipation* -well, okay, probably no one else but me will like this textbook on cognitive psychology on music, but I loooooved it more than anything.

John Gottman, Why Marriages Succeed or Fail - the only relationship book I have ever found that is actually useful. I bought one for my sister when she was dating T and exhibited every single danger signal he talks about.

Well. I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out, but this is a beginning, anyway. Are there books published in the last ten years that didn't make it on this list and a) you know I've read it and are interested in discussing why it's not on, or b) you think I should read, because if I had read it, it would be on this list, or c) why is this sentence so atrociously convoluted?

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I found "Story of Your Life" so compelling that I taught it. Most of the students were nonplussed (in particular because some of them found it intriguing but had a really hard time building an essay that held their thoughts well). I've taught the mockumentary at the end of the volume, too, but in a deliberately you-need-not-write-about-this way. (These were composition courses, so it mattered.)

I have not read Voigt, Goodman, or the non-fiction. (Nor Ciardi's translation in particular.) Amusingly, I read only the Attolia books and recent Bujolds during that decade; the rest I read earlier. hmm. E.g., stumbled upon The Vor Game in 1990, read Gaudy Night in 1995....

Not sure I have a clear enough sense of your likes/dislikes to attempt (b).

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

What was the background of your students? I wonder how much appreciation depends on understanding the physics -- IIRC he explains it well in the story, but both D and I had an explosion of whoa, that is really cool that I might imagine would be lacking to someone who wasn't familiar with the principle of least action, for example.

The Goodman is the one that isn't a "hey, everyone should read this," which is why it only barely squeaked on. I don't know that I recommend it.

Clearly you have a better reading pedigree than I do :) Until grad school, my reading exposure was mostly in the way of "whatever existed in my local library SF section," which was rather highly variable -- meant I got exposed to Asimov and Harlan Ellison and Connie Willis, and a lot of wonderful old short stories because they happened to have best-of anthologies dating back to the 1950's, but had barely even heard of Bujold or Butler. (Although they did have a couple of Butlers, I was also too young for her at the time.)

Well, do you have books in the way of "Everyone ought to read this!" from the last decade?

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Most of them that term were sci/eng/CS, actually--luck of the draw. They found the linguistics admixture baffling instead. I wonder too whether it's partly being unused to thinking about science in context of literary texts; I tried John M. Ford's "Heat of Fusion" on another class, and the two physics majors blinked at me. Oh well.

hmm, so noted.

Nah, just an accident of sequence; there's other stuff that I think I should've read and still haven't gotten to. Library randomness is how I started, too--hence having read 80% of everything Heinlein published, not so much because I liked his writing when I was 11-14 but because it was there and I had very little spending money. For me it was Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov, Zelazny, McCaffrey, Bradley, Bradbury, Herbert's Dune, a little Silverberg, eventually a bit of Gene Wolfe. I envy you those anthologies, I think, just a bit.

...No? :) I don't know--being an English literature major and teaching lit-based comp classes have led me to think that there are very few texts that everyone would benefit from reading, even in a casual/anecdotal excitement-sharing kind of way. But if pressed, I guess I'd put John M. Ford's Heat of Fusion (story collection) on such a list, and Ian McDonald's River of Gods (despite some who-speaks problems), Catherynne Valente's Orphan's Tales duology, Walker's Secret Service, Elizabeth Wein's sequence starting with The Winter Prince, Murakami's Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and (to lighten things up!) Ellen Kushner's Privilege of the Sword. And I really enjoyed Heaney's District and Circle, and found Paul Park's Roumania tetralogy usefully thinky/baffling. Most of those are linked hence (http://reqfd.net/stack/index-texts/). I wouldn't imagine that everyone would want to read them because most of them are kind of hard reads; spin this list instead as stuff that I enjoyed a great deal and that impressed me (and had nothing to do with my doctoral work).

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Huh. Okay, that makes me sad in relation to my fellow physics majors. I loved "Heat of Fusion," and was rather pleased at actually being able to get the references, whereas usually I feel that at least half his references are going straight over my head.

Oh, right, of your list, Clarke, McCaffrey, a little Bradley (her fantasy, not so much the SF), Bradbury, Dune (which I so did not get the first time). Heinlein I got a bit later from a series of completely random places. Zelazny was another recent acquisition from D. (I think literally -- I believe it was after we were married that I read his (our) copies.)

I adore John M. Ford (uh, if the above didn't clue you in) and have tried to buy everything he ever wrote (I think I'm missing a couple of the short stories but have the two book-length anthologies and all the novels) -- though I had read many of the stories in HoF before, which is probably why it's not on the list. I couldn't get into the Valente although I think everyone I know raves about them; I wonder if I should try harder? I also had problems getting into the Murakami; there I rather suspect he isn't for me. I had some issues with the Kushner, although overall I liked it, and I very much liked the Wein. I have only read the first of the Park but I totally agree with your summation of "usefully thinky/baffling," and keep meaning to pick up the others.

Hm. May look for the McDonald (have enjoyed other things by him) and the Walker and the Heaney. I don't think we overlap completely (I think there's a certain direction of hard read that I don't particularly enjoy), but I do think there's an amount of overlap, as sometimes I really like chewing on something interesting.

On second thought you may like the Goodman (which I often hesitate to recommend because of the same sort of "I'm not sure everyone wants to read this" kind of thought). Also, have you read any Richard Powers? I read Generosity recently (may post about it sometime) and it fits this kind of mold as well. I also found it to be a good paired read to Intuition, in the sense that both are about scientists and scientific discoveries, although in other ways very different. I didn't like the Powers as much as the Goodman, though that's entirely personal taste, and I suspect the former is better written.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Hee, Ford. I have most-not-all of his work, too. Funny: I fell in via his two old-series Trek novels; it was apparent even to kid!me that he, Duane, Hambly, Kagan, and a couple others were writing above the level of the rest of them. (It was fortuitous that one of the library staff liked those novels, too, and not only arranged for the branch to buy them but set them aside for me. After he'd read them himself.)

Valente is a do-or-don't taste for lots of folks--and I suspect you're right that we don't overlap completely re: kinds of hard reads. The only Powers I've tried is Galatea 2.0, which another friend spoke highly of but which I found kind of meh (some fifteen years ago). Still, it's good to have things on one's to-read list.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Hey, I got to him from library TOS novels too! And Duane, Hambly, Kagan, yep, those were the ones where I went and found their other books. I've still got my library book sale copies of Final Reflection and Ishmael, in fact.

Okay, here's a question which maybe you can answer (if you have time, of course, which I'm sure is in short supply). What is going on in "Preflash"? I understand (after a number of readings over a number of years) that Griffin's injury as well as Carrick's and Malaryk's deaths are all ordered by the Nefarious Powers that Be (the ones, presumably, the three of them were trying to expose as war correspondents) and carried out by the same henchman-assassin.

But why do Rain and Suzy have no video? Because they don't care about anything? Have no soul? How does Rain know about Griffin's power? And where the heck did the griffin at the end come from?? What does Rain mean by saying "It can be more fun than anything"? Or by the part where Griffin understands how Carrick did what he did? (p. 121 in HoF)

Anyway. I've just never quite connected all the dots in that story.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I would need to reread, which would be fine if I could figure out where my copy of the book is. Not sure which box. :(

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Ah, no problem. I totally understand the books-in-random-boxes thing :)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

I wasn't a big fan of the first Orphan's Tale book, either. Mostly, it just didn't seem earth-shatteringly wonderful to me the way the people recommending it to me found it.

Then I met her at a con, and I understood why. Any author who dismisses another author's female lead as "a man in a skirt" is far too invested in gender essentialism for me to be in sync with. It wasn't just that bit of conversation, but that's the easiest to repeat / summarize -- basically, the way she views the world is just too incompatible with my worldview, and not in the fun brain-expanding way.

It was kind of like when I read The Left Hand of Darkness, except in that case, I chalked up the lack of mind blowing to the fact that it was several decades old at the time, and my perspective was not that of the original audience. Again, it's not that either one is a bad book, just that I was told each would blow me away, and neither did.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

I could see it going either way -- depends what kind of book it was. For fantasy, where the society is often faux-medieval, yeah, the society itself is going to force a lot of cultural differences between men and women that you can't just ignore when writing your characters. For far-future SF, which I hope is more-or-less gender neutral, it's kind of a horrific comment to make. For most things, I think it's going to be a little in between. Although most of my life I try to live in a gender-neutral or even gender-transcending kind of way, it would be lying to say that there aren't deep parts of me that have been shaped by my environment to be specifically culturally female.

...Who was she talking about? Now I want to go read that book, which sounds like I would probably enjoy it -- which I suspect wasn't her intention :)

Left Hand of Darkness did blow me away, but I read that one in high school, when it was much easier to do :)

[nolly.livejournal.com]

The conversation was about China Mieville in general, and specifically, The Scar, which has a female protagonist. This was in June of 2009. So...modern-ish setting, but not our society or world at all.

I read Left Hand in 10th grade, after a member of a traveling theater troupe enthusiastically recommended it. I liked it, but it didn't blow my mind.