2007 Books 16 - 20

16. The Tenth Man by Graham Greene - A POW draws the lot that marks him for execution and another man agrees to take his place in trade for his family inheriting all of the first man's property. Interesting plot, treated with Greene's gift for sparseness and despair.

17. A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin - Book three of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, and the world of Westros remains caught up in something that is a mix of soap opera and epic. A very well written mix, though, where plot complications stop just short of convolusions, and characters that seem to be archetypes turn into completely believable originals. On the down side, I'm still learning to not get too attached to any character. *sigh*

18. Traitor's Moon by Lynn Flewelling - Well, now I'm going to complain maybe the author should have kept her heroes apart. It's just so sad to discover that it was only UST that kept a story interesting. Flewelling does write pretty good wizards and magic, though.

19. Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson - If Craig Ferguson had no time limit on his monologues, andif there were no such things as CBS Standards and Practices or the FCC, this is what we'd get every night after David Letterman. Funny, irreverent, sometimes crude, sometimes very smart - if you're a Ferguson fan, you'll love this book.

20. Astonishing Flashes Of Colour by Clare Morrall - A book that tells a sad tale but does it with such a delicate touch you don't feel the pain until it's too late to stop reading. Lost parents, lost children, and lost minds all tie together in the end, but no one is better off than when they started.

2007 Books 11 - 15

11. The Hook by Donald E Westlake - If you're a writer (or an aspiring writer) this is a fun and sort of creepy story about a writing partnership. One bestselling author is blocked and facing a deadline, a former bestselling author can't get any interest in his latest book. There's a catch to the collaboration that's a totally unbelievable, but the parts of the novel that deal with the publishing industry and the daily grind of being a working writer make the silly parts ignorable.

12. Luck In The Shadows by Lynn Flewelling - As the first book in a series, there's a lot of groundwork and back story in this novel. Almost too much, with the action spread thin until the very end. Then there's the inconsistent POV storytelling technique which made me grumble more than a few times. However, the characters are intriguing and wonderfully human for the fantasy genre, so I'll give the second book a try. I'm a sucker for men with men with swords and capes.

13. The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox - A young man meets an angel who makes some suggestions on how to live his life. This leads to the man and the angel agreeing to meet every year on the same night, and the chapters follow that fifty-five year relationship. The angel isn't the guardian angel that the young man thinks he is, however, he's an angel that has been granted some special privileges by both God and Lucifer. Ms. Knox's vision of heaven and hell and the creatures that live there are very original and imaginative, and when one of those creatures comes into the very earthy (and very flawed) life of a family of winemakers in the Burgundy region of France, the ground is laid for a book full of spiritual questioning. The answers that the characters arrive at may not suit a reader who prefers the traditional views on God and his fallen angels, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

14. A Clash of Kings by George R.R. Martin - The second book of what is to be the six part A Song of Ice and Fire series, this is where the action really gets going. Intrigues, politics and alliances are the heart of the plot as a war rages on several fronts in a kingdom split apart by accusations of incest. In a distant land another ruler gathers knowledge and power that will make the current wars pointless. This is a story with many, many, many characters and Martin does an amazing job of keeping all of them moving forward through the story. The only negative thing I can say is he has no qualms about killing of major characters, and as much as that adds to the originality of the stories, it's sad when a personal favorite is gone.

15. Stalking Darkness by Lynn Flewelling - This is the second book of the The Nightrunner Series and it's almost as much romance novel as it is fantasy. Sure, the heroes are on a quest to save their world from evil, and there's an army doing battle that arrives just in time to help save the world. But in between, we get angst and pounding hearts and blushes and all the stuff of new love and lust. It's hard to believe these guys can be so brave in the face of ghosts and evil sorcerers, but they can't bring themselves to just reach out and touch each other until it's almost too late.

2007 Books 6 - 10

6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - An amazing story of the strength of love between a father and son in a bleak, dark, truly hopeless world. At face value, this is a very sad story, but the moments when the real story shine through, the positive story of "carrying the fire", those are the part of the book that I will remember for a long time.

7. The Diamond Age; or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson - In the not so distant future of this book, pretty much everything you need can be replicated synthetically through nanotechnology. Information is shared through nanotechnology. People bind together culturally, based on their ability and desire to produce and use that technology. An extremely wealthy "neo-Victorian" has a book created that will allow his daughter to learn to take care of herself, and it is that book that touches the lives of all the characters in this book. It's the characters that kept me reading this story when I became hopelessly lost in what they were all seeking. I may not have understood where they were going, but I wanted to keep following them.

8. What Was She Thinking (Notes On A Scandal) by Zoe Heller - What I enjoyed most about this book is that I know people that are just a few shades short of being these characters. My second favorite thing was that the narrator is an intelligent female villain. There are so few of those, even fewer in books that are as well written as this one is.

9. Music Through The Floor by Eric Puchner - A collection of ten short stories that all show there's humor in the saddest situations, and tragedy in the best of times. My favorite is Essay #3: Leda and the Swan, a story written in the form of an English Lit assignment by a young woman in high school who has a more pressing need to work through her own problems than a Keats poem.

10. A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin - Absolutely amazing! I haven't fallen so deeply into the world of a fantasy novel since I first read Lord of the Rings (and that was a long, long time ago!). I'm so glad there are three more books already published, and more planned. I'm not ready to leave these characters or their world yet.

2007 Books 1 - 5

1. The Echo Maker by Richard Powers - Part medical mystery, part thriller, part (very) contemporary literature, and 100% metaphor for how much 9/11 changed the world means there is a lot going on in this book. A man is in a freak car accident that should have left him dead, instead it leaves him with Capgras Syndrom - the thinks that the people closest to him are imposters and his real loved ones are being kept from him. This includes his only sister, who gives up her attempts to break away from the small town they grew up in to take care of him, and almost loses herself in the process. She convinces a world famous neuroligist to look at her brother's case, and the doctor begins to doubt his own work and the methods he's used to reach his level of fame.

2. I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron - Sure, most of the essays are funny. And those that aren't funny nail the meloncholy note. And I know they're not written to change the world - just give one woman's view of it. What prevented me from evey liking this book (beyond acknowledging that Ms. Ephron is a talented writer) is the shallowness and the snobbery that she embraces as a fact of life. The only piece I would recommend is the one about the role books play in an avid readers life.

3. All The Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy, Audiobook read by Brad Pitt - An incredible sense of place and characters that are so well written you feel every bit of their happiness and their pain, I would recommend this story to anyone. Brad Pitt does an amazing job of putting just the right amount of emotion into the characters, without turning it into a one man play. I am about as far from being a fan of stories about horses and cowboys as a reader can get, but this is a truly excellent book.

4. Suite Francaise by Irene Nermirovsky - I have had so many people recommend this book to me, I was sure I'd be disappointed. I wasn't. A first draft of 2/5 of a fictionalized account of living in occupied France during WWII, written as the author was experiencing through the actual events may mean it is unpolished and unfinished, but it's still a deeply moving and interesting book.


5. The Quiet American by Graham Greene- Written in 1955, this is a story of two men, a British journalist and an American government employee crossing paths in the early days of the Vietnam War. What starts out as a simple story about a love triangle with a civil war as background turns out to a much deeper look about at happens when colonialism and capitalism go wrong. Recent world events make this book as relevant as ever.

2006 books 101-104

101. If I Told You Once by Judy Budnitz- The story of four generations of women, starting with a the first daughter's emigration from a tiny eastern European village to America and ending with her great grand daughter's first attempts to do the very same thing that started the story - break away from her mother.

102. Clouds Eclipses, The Collected Short Stories by Gore Vidal - This is definitely a case of very good things coming in small packages. The book is short (nine stories, 166 pages) but it is not short on quality. These are all early works of Vidal's, including the title piece about a young boy who's aspirations towards spiritual purity are cut short just in time, inspired by a skeleton from the Tennessee Williams family closet.

103. Scott Fitzgerald: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers - F. Scott Fitzgerald packed a lot of life into his 44 years, most of it unhappy. With his need to be loved, appreciated, or simply liked, coupled with alcoholism, a devotion to a fantasy marriage, and his hero worship of other authors (Hemingway especially), there was no way out of his personal hell. If it weren't for Fitzgerald's hunger for validation, I'd feel guilty about reading his stories.

104. Foggy Mountain Breakdown And Other Stories by Sharyn McCrumb - McCrumb's Ballad series is like a vacation to the Appalachians where you stay in the house of the best story teller in the region. She's a master of sense of place, and can write in the voice of that region like nobody's business. Some of these stories are in that vein, others come from her other side, the one that writes for the basic who-done-it fan. There's nothing in this collection that stands out from her longer works, unfortunately.

2006 Books 96 - 100

96. Saturday by Ian McEwan - Covering one eventful day in the life of a London neurosurgeon, this book allows McEwan to do what he does best: leave no thought nor detail unexposed. In a lesser writer's hands, the microfocus would become tedious, but McEwan seems to know just when to pull back and give the reader a chance to see the bigger picture.

97. Artemis Fowl, The Arctic Indident by Eoin Colfer (read half, half on Audio book read by- I read this first book in this series when it was published and liked it quite a bit. Colfer had come up with a way to make dwarves, fairies, sprites, and all the other usual suspects of fantasy fiction original and earthy. In this second book, he's made them too earthy, in my opinion. They've become warriors and soldiers with little of the original personality showing through. Artemis is reduced to reacting and waiting, something he never did in the first book, unless it was a part of some complicated orchestration of evil. I did enjoy hearing the book read, the Irish accents gave some depth to what otherwise was a flat and repetitive story.

98. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton - An excellent read for social customs of the wealthy in early 20th century New York written by someone who knew people just like the characters she created. The plot develops at the same pace those characters lived...slow and self consciously.

99. Reading Like A Writer: A Guide For People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want To Write Them by Francine Prose - At the heart of this book is the author's belief that the most certain way for a writer to become a better writer is to read the works of better writers. Following that theory, she uses examples of published authors to show that there is no one right way to write a good story, and that by using what she calls "close reading" (paying attention to the framework of a story as much as enjoying it for the art that it is), aspiring writers will improve their craft. You have to concede she has a good point when you consider that many of the great authors never took a formal writing class, but instead were tutored by their own reading choices.

100. Eragon by Christopher Paolini - Yes, the author borrows from the great stories of adventure and fantasy. But there's plenty of original work here too, especially with the young hero's attitude towards his destiny. As young adult fantasy fiction written by a young adult, this is a good read.

2006 Books 91 - 95

91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Audiobook read by Ralph Cosham - Not only a fantastic adventure story, also a study of Imperialism gone very, very, bad.

92. The Privilege Of The Sword by Ellen Kushner - Kushner brings back Alec from her first book (Swordspoint) to play a major role in this third visit to Riverside, the fictional Middle Age world where there's nothing too trivial to inspire a sword fight. Alec and his relationships and feuds were all I needed to enjoy this book, but on top of that, the main plot and new characters are pretty darn good.

93. Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster - A collection fo lectures Forster gave in the late 20's on what makes a novel. Although I found some of his examples a little unreachable, and definitely disagreed with some of his opinions on certain authors, Forster's explanations on what a novel is, at it's foundation, are incredibly clear and simple. This small book could replace a lot of "the novel as literature" theory courses.

94. This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers edited by Elizabeth Merrick - Ignore the defensive first half of the title (which really makes no sense at all, when the collection's introduction is titled "Why Chick Lit Matters") and focus on the the subtitle, because that's what this anthology is - well written fiction by some very talented people, who are female. There's a broad range of stories and styles: some coming close to the genre the title says it is not, some so far away that there's barely a female in the story, let alone a relationship issue, and in between, really, really good original short stories.

95. The History of Love by Nicole Krauss - Historical fiction, mystery, coming of age and probably a couple other genres are combined to make this wonderful story, populated with original and interesting characters. Two plots run side by side through most of the book, linked only by a book that carries the same title as this book. The author does a wonderful job of slowly bringing the two stories together, and then adds a twist worthy of the very real characters she's created.

2006 Books 86 - 90

86.Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee - A college professor's midlife crisis puts him into his adult daughter's life and he discovers he's not the center of the universe. The book is dialog heavy, and in Coetzee's hands, that's a very good thing.

87.The Gun Seller by Hugh Laurie - Long on humour and a little short on cognitive plot, this is what a Naked Gun movie would be like if the writers were more literate...and British.

88. Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor - A family in contemporary South Africa discovers that thier emotional wounds go much deeper than Apartheid. It's a very sad story, almost hopeless, but so well written I couldn't put it down.

89. Death Comes For The Archbiship by Willa Cather - Elegant in its simple, antecdotal style, this is a very fast, pleasant read. I'm not quite sure why this book shows up on so many "Best American Fiction" and even "Best English Language Fiction" lists, though. Is it because there aren't a lot of stories about the place and time Cather is writing about? I liked the book, but I’m not seeing it as outstanding in its genre.

90. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - Set in the story of how a man can become what people expect him to be, and how it becomes easier to disappear rather than fight the expectations. This is a story of race (set in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, right after WWI), but it's still a very current theme - how people are judged and feared because they look different or act different, and the distances they will go to be accepted, even to the point of becoming someone they never were.

I should be ashamed.....

This seemed like a pleasant way to kill a few minutes. Who knew it would raise my blood pressure? Really, a B+??? I want to know which ones I missed!

Your Vocabulary Score: B+

You have a zealous love for the English language, and many find your vocabulary edifying. Don't fret that you didn't get every word right, your vocabulary can be easily ameliorated!

How's Your Vocabulary?

Thanks to Karen King's excellent writer's blog, inkthinker for the link. I think.

Books 2006 81 - 85

81. Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders by Neil Gaiman - I liked everything in the book, (including the introduction with bits of background on the writing of each story) but the tale that will stick with me is October In The Chair, one of the best ghost stories I've ever read, even if it is only fifteen pages long.

82. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - I can't come up with a short description of this novel, so I'll borrow something from the flap. This book "...illuminates the consequences of colonialism and global conflicts of religion, race, and nationalism." There's a great deal more going on than all that, there are loves found and lost, families made and broken, and everyone goes on some sort of journey .
83.Masters of Midnight: Erotic Tales of the Vampire by William J Mann, Michael Thomas Ford, Sean Wolfe, and Jeff Mann - Four novellas about gay vampires that are almost as much romance novels as they are erotica. The writers do come up with some original canon for their vampires, but in the end, each story is about the noble vampire willing to give it all up for the man they love.

84.The Secret River by Kate Grenville - An engrossing historical novel about a man that leads his family to become one of the early group of colonists in Australia and their experiences with the Aborigines that tried to hold their land against the homesteaders. The story is deep in characters and details throughout, and on top of that, has one of the best final chapters I've read this year.

85.Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre - A very dark comedy about the fallout from a high school massacre in a small town in Texas. The narrator, a witness and the only friend of the shooter, ends up on trial for the murders, is a natural born cynic who occasionally is very funny. But he's repetitive in his view of the world, and if it weren't for the caricatures of small town life and the media that fill out the story, it would have been a boring story.