book list, October 2006
Nov. 2nd, 2006 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingI made three resolutions this year. First, get a job. (Done!) Second, exercise more regularly and lose weight. (Done!) Third, keep a list of the books I read.
These are the books I read in October, 2006:
New: 20
---First Meetings, Orson Scott Card (science fiction: short story collection, part of the Enderverse)
---The Shape-Changer's Wife, Sharon Shinn (fantasy: well-written, with a nice down-to-earth tone, but it's slight and ultimately forgettable)
---One Good Knight, Mercedes Lackey (fantasy: light, easy, and fun; the first chapter needs a lot of edits, which is unfortunate since the rest of the book had to work twice as hard to overcome the bad first impression)
---Grave Sight, Charlaine Harris (fantasy/modern: a woman who can experience dead people's final moments, and find their bodies, gets involved in a tangled series of murders in a small American town; start of a series)
---The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (fantasy: sequel to Swordspoint; a girl is thrown into complicated family plots and learns to use a sword; in an interesting change of pace, she doesn't want to act like a boy)
---Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett (fantasy: the latest Discworld book, in the Tiffany Aching sequence; has one interesting structural experiment, but is otherwise straightforward narrative. This is Pterry's 'stealth literature' in classic mode.)
---Storm Front, Jim Butcher (fantasy: first in the Dresden Files, in which Harry Dresden, wizard, has to solve a grisly magical murder before both the good guys and the bad guys kill him next)
---Fool Moon, Jim Butcher (fantasy: Dresden Files, book 2, in which Harry learns more about werewolves than he ever wanted to know, up close and personal)
---Grave Peril, Jim Butcher (fantasy: Dresden Files, book 3, in which there are vampires and ghosts and various other Things That Go Bump In The Night, and several pieces of Harry's past come back to bite him. BIG goof on the name of Bianca's dead secretary -- in Storm Front she's Paula, but here she's called Rachel half the time, which is damned confusing and the editor should have caught that!)
---1602, Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, et al (comics: what if the heroes of the Marvel universe appeared in the late 1500s instead of the mid-20th century? You have no idea how badly I want to write fanfic for this.)
---Gundam Wing: Episode Zero, Katsuyuki Sumisawa and Akira Kanbe (manga: I'd read Duo's backstory online, but it's nice to know what the other pilots and Relena were up to. Heero sure gets around, doesn't he? We will not, however, speak of the silliness and logistical improbability that is "Preventer Five.")
---Gundam Wing: Ground Zero, Reku Fuyunagi (manga: potential bridge between the series and Endless Waltz. It reads like horribly OOC bad romance fanfic, and any plot that depends on Duo lying is in trouble from the premise onward. Also, Relena is a high government official; she has a large staff, who can handle things like making corrected copies of a document, and who would be around to notice if she fell off a balcony, for heaven's sake. *headdesk*)
---Gundam Wing: Battlefield of Pacifists, Katsuhiko Chiba and Koichi Tokita (manga: 'official' bridge between the series and Endless Waltz. This one's plausible, aside from the bit where Quatre gets brainwashed so easily; suffers from awkward translation in a few places.)
---Gundam Wing: Blind Target, Akemi Omode and Sakura Asagi (manga: potential bridge between the series and Endless Waltz. I like this one best. Everyone is shown to good effect, everyone is IC, the villains aren't as exaggerated as the ones in Battlefield of Pacifists, and I think Wufei's character arc works better than the one in Battlefield of Pacifists.)
---Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, vols. 10-11, CLAMP (manga: quests across worlds, doomed love, amnesia, self-sacrifice, duplicates in different timelines, inscrutable evil plots, dark pasts, earthshaking secrets... I LIKE this. The race gimmick in this arc is pretty silly, though.)
---Samurai Deeper Kyo, vols. 15-18, Akimine Kamijyo (manga: mangled Japanese history, blatant fanservice, 'two personalities in one body,' and lots and lots of sword fights. Fun! And somebody needs to write twisted Shinrei/Saisei, Saisei/Saishi triangle fic with lemons.)
Old: 15
---Taltos, Steven Brust (fantasy: how Vlad met Morolan, Sethra Lavode, and Aliera, and what happened in the Paths of the Dead)
---Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, Ursula Le Guin (novel: one of my favorite books; I reread this at least once a year; see amazon.com for reviews that sort of explain the story)
---Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card (science fiction: book 2 in the Enderverse, and my personal favorite; in which contact between alien species is treated thoughtfully and respectfully, and in which the characters are allowed to have families, professions, religious beliefs, and various other trappings of real life that don't often make it into 'adventure' stories.)
---Death Note, vols. 1-6, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata (manga: fantasy of the 'insert one impossible element and watch its effects on the world' type; mindgames, moral issues, a very cerebral chase story, and quite a lot of tension. What would you do if you found a notebook that let you kill anybody just by picturing their face and writing their name?)
---Samurai Deeper Kyo, vols. 9-14, Akimine Kamijyo (manga: swordfights! Fun stuff)
October Total = 35 books (plus several magazines, a few newspaper articles, and a whole lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date = 323 books (231 new, 92 old)
These are the books I read in October, 2006:
New: 20
---First Meetings, Orson Scott Card (science fiction: short story collection, part of the Enderverse)
---The Shape-Changer's Wife, Sharon Shinn (fantasy: well-written, with a nice down-to-earth tone, but it's slight and ultimately forgettable)
---One Good Knight, Mercedes Lackey (fantasy: light, easy, and fun; the first chapter needs a lot of edits, which is unfortunate since the rest of the book had to work twice as hard to overcome the bad first impression)
---Grave Sight, Charlaine Harris (fantasy/modern: a woman who can experience dead people's final moments, and find their bodies, gets involved in a tangled series of murders in a small American town; start of a series)
---The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (fantasy: sequel to Swordspoint; a girl is thrown into complicated family plots and learns to use a sword; in an interesting change of pace, she doesn't want to act like a boy)
---Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett (fantasy: the latest Discworld book, in the Tiffany Aching sequence; has one interesting structural experiment, but is otherwise straightforward narrative. This is Pterry's 'stealth literature' in classic mode.)
---Storm Front, Jim Butcher (fantasy: first in the Dresden Files, in which Harry Dresden, wizard, has to solve a grisly magical murder before both the good guys and the bad guys kill him next)
---Fool Moon, Jim Butcher (fantasy: Dresden Files, book 2, in which Harry learns more about werewolves than he ever wanted to know, up close and personal)
---Grave Peril, Jim Butcher (fantasy: Dresden Files, book 3, in which there are vampires and ghosts and various other Things That Go Bump In The Night, and several pieces of Harry's past come back to bite him. BIG goof on the name of Bianca's dead secretary -- in Storm Front she's Paula, but here she's called Rachel half the time, which is damned confusing and the editor should have caught that!)
---1602, Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, et al (comics: what if the heroes of the Marvel universe appeared in the late 1500s instead of the mid-20th century? You have no idea how badly I want to write fanfic for this.)
---Gundam Wing: Episode Zero, Katsuyuki Sumisawa and Akira Kanbe (manga: I'd read Duo's backstory online, but it's nice to know what the other pilots and Relena were up to. Heero sure gets around, doesn't he? We will not, however, speak of the silliness and logistical improbability that is "Preventer Five.")
---Gundam Wing: Ground Zero, Reku Fuyunagi (manga: potential bridge between the series and Endless Waltz. It reads like horribly OOC bad romance fanfic, and any plot that depends on Duo lying is in trouble from the premise onward. Also, Relena is a high government official; she has a large staff, who can handle things like making corrected copies of a document, and who would be around to notice if she fell off a balcony, for heaven's sake. *headdesk*)
---Gundam Wing: Battlefield of Pacifists, Katsuhiko Chiba and Koichi Tokita (manga: 'official' bridge between the series and Endless Waltz. This one's plausible, aside from the bit where Quatre gets brainwashed so easily; suffers from awkward translation in a few places.)
---Gundam Wing: Blind Target, Akemi Omode and Sakura Asagi (manga: potential bridge between the series and Endless Waltz. I like this one best. Everyone is shown to good effect, everyone is IC, the villains aren't as exaggerated as the ones in Battlefield of Pacifists, and I think Wufei's character arc works better than the one in Battlefield of Pacifists.)
---Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, vols. 10-11, CLAMP (manga: quests across worlds, doomed love, amnesia, self-sacrifice, duplicates in different timelines, inscrutable evil plots, dark pasts, earthshaking secrets... I LIKE this. The race gimmick in this arc is pretty silly, though.)
---Samurai Deeper Kyo, vols. 15-18, Akimine Kamijyo (manga: mangled Japanese history, blatant fanservice, 'two personalities in one body,' and lots and lots of sword fights. Fun! And somebody needs to write twisted Shinrei/Saisei, Saisei/Saishi triangle fic with lemons.)
Old: 15
---Taltos, Steven Brust (fantasy: how Vlad met Morolan, Sethra Lavode, and Aliera, and what happened in the Paths of the Dead)
---Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, Ursula Le Guin (novel: one of my favorite books; I reread this at least once a year; see amazon.com for reviews that sort of explain the story)
---Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card (science fiction: book 2 in the Enderverse, and my personal favorite; in which contact between alien species is treated thoughtfully and respectfully, and in which the characters are allowed to have families, professions, religious beliefs, and various other trappings of real life that don't often make it into 'adventure' stories.)
---Death Note, vols. 1-6, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata (manga: fantasy of the 'insert one impossible element and watch its effects on the world' type; mindgames, moral issues, a very cerebral chase story, and quite a lot of tension. What would you do if you found a notebook that let you kill anybody just by picturing their face and writing their name?)
---Samurai Deeper Kyo, vols. 9-14, Akimine Kamijyo (manga: swordfights! Fun stuff)
October Total = 35 books (plus several magazines, a few newspaper articles, and a whole lot of fanfiction)
Year to Date = 323 books (231 new, 92 old)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-02 07:04 pm (UTC)You're making the rest of us look really bad... :D
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-02 07:21 pm (UTC)What's weird to me is that keeping this record has changed my reading habits -- I tend to pull old books out and sort of browse through a few chapters, but I've been doing less of that this year because I'm all about reading 'whole' books instead. I can't add partial books to the list, you see, and that makes me feel like I'm 'wasting' time reading snippets. Which is damn silly, and irrational, but there it is.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-02 09:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-03 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-02 07:53 pm (UTC)Then i catch up to you :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-02 08:11 pm (UTC)I leave fanfiction off mostly because so many stories are published serially, so it's really hard to say when, exactly, you've read enough of any given story to call it a book's length worth of words. Keeping the list accurate under those conditions would drive me nuts, and I just didn't want to deal with that. But I do read the word-count equivalent of 3-15 books of fanfiction per month, so... yeah. It would be a lot longer.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-02 08:39 pm (UTC)---Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, vols. 10-11, CLAMP (manga: quests across worlds, doomed love, amnesia, self-sacrifice, duplicates in different timelines, inscrutable evil plots, dark pasts, earthshaking secrets... I LIKE this. The race gimmick in this arc is pretty silly, though.)
*snerk* It's CLAMP, of course there's gonna be some silly things in it. Hell, try reading CLAMP School Detectives if you haven't already. Silly as hell, and yet, somehow, I still find it cute. *shrugs* In a completely dorky and rather campy way, of course.
You're reading xxxHolic to go with the Tsubasa, aren't you? 'Cause if you aren't, you *really* need to. Dear God, I love that manga. Hell, a friend of mine can't stand most of CLAMP's work and she loves that series.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-03 04:02 pm (UTC)To be fair, a lot of the new books are by authors I'm already familiar with, or series I've come across via fandom/fanfiction, so the 'leap' isn't so great. But it is good to try completely unfamiliar things now and then. A lot of them will suck, but others will be very rewarding. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-03 04:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-04 06:54 am (UTC)Was the Orson Scott Card short story any good? I stopped paying attention to the Ender-verse books after Speaker for the Dead because I thought the ones after that went downhill, but I wouldn't mind checking it out.
-- Guile
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-04 08:09 pm (UTC)He's brilliant at short stories though, when he doesn't have time or space to let anything sag.
First Meetings has two stories about Ender's parents, one about how Ender meets Jane, and the original short story version of Ender's Game. They're a little preachy in places -- I've noticed that a lot of 'idea' writers have occasional trouble fully embodying their thoughts into stories and characters -- but they're quite readable and give a fascinating side perspective into the Wiggin family and the political organization of Earth during the Bugger Wars.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-06 03:25 am (UTC)OTOH, I'll admit that I'm only a detail person when it comes to world-building, so you quite possibly noticed what I missed. ^_^;
Ja, -n
(no subject)
Date: 2006-11-06 08:01 pm (UTC)But Paula's was the death in response to which Bianca sent Harry the note saying, "Regret," so I think she's the relevant woman.