Books for 2006
Jan. 19th, 2006 11:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
senoritafishI've never actually kept track of this, but now that I've started taking the bus I have a bit more time for reading, and I'd like to get an idea of how many I read in a year. Possibly I can get caught up on Mount TBR (doubtful, as one or two new additions appear before I'm done with one, but hey, we can hope)! I'm going to try and get caught up on some of my book group's books that I missed, as well as the current one. This should be good for both the used bookstore and BookCrossing.com. :D I'll just refer back and continue to update this...
1. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince - J.K. Rowling. Technically 2005 since I read it while I was off after Christmas, but since it's in my current spate of reading I'll include it here. Wow, pretty intense. Especially the ending. It all happened so fast, I had to go back and read it again to be sure I’d read it right. I had a fairly good idea all along who the Half-blood Prince was, and I was kind of thinking – hadn’t Harry ever seen that person's handwriting before? I don’t think I write that much different now than I did in high school. I had a hunch someone was going to be killed off, so I wasn't too surprised there, and I don't think it was really a murder. So, now I’ve definitely got a bunch of hypotheses, and I am definitely not in the “that guy-is-evil-and-I-want-him-dead” camp. Harry's been wrong before, and the whole book, while written in the third person, is pretty much from Harry's point of view.
I've had one friend object to how certain relationships developed, and thought they could have been handled better; however, I really had no objection aside from the whole "We can't see each other any more because I've got to do something dangerous!" which I don't buy at all.
2. Blind Lake - Robert Charles Wilson. Loaned to me by Deb, our book group's fearless leader. A not-well-understood technology (even by it's developers) allows scientists to observe other worlds and their inhabitants, by means of a sort of virtual camera. Blind Lake is one of two such observatories in the US, and has become its own community of scientists, staff, and day workers. Shortly after three journalists arrive at the facility it is completely cut off from the outside world with no explanation; supplies are delivered by remote control vehicle and residents discover how serious the situation is when people attempting to escape are killed. An additional difficulty for one scientist is the fact that her ex-husband has also transferred to Blind Lake as an administrator, and is still attempting to control her and her daughter's lives. Her daughter, socially inept and distraction-prone (she may or may not have Asperger's), is struggling with Mirror Girl, a not-reflection who has less to do with her state of mind and more than anyone knows with her mother's work. Some very interesting aliens, although we are only observing them for most of the book, and the concept of some kind of universal overmind, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, make appearances.
The bit with the stolen Ding-Dong made me laugh out loud on the bus, but was cause for a sobering episode later in the book. A lot of the book deals with how people are changed, for better or worse, by isolation. Maybe I missed this myself because I grew up in Southern California, where we don't have extremes of weather, but I noticed a review on Amazon with someone complaining, "What's with all the windows constantly rattling in the blizzard?! Don't they have double-paned glass at a new installation, in the future? Of course they would because we have them now!" I never notice things like this.
3. Red Thunder - John Varley Book group selection for September, which I only just now got to. A quartet of 20-something young people with dreams of space runs into (quite literally) an alcoholic ex-astronaut, Travis, and his semi-autistic Hawkings-level-genius cousin, Jubal. Jubal has unintentionally invented a miraculous power source quite coincidentally with a) a race to Mars between the US and China, b) a predicted (by Jubal) emergency with the US ship. The kids work their butts off building a homemade ship to beat the Chinese to Mars and rescue the US ship, with help of Travis' and the rich girl's trust fund. Very reminiscent of Heinlein in the interaction of characters, and the way the girls defer to their boyfriends dreams and reluctantly wind up being better at it than they are. I quite liked Travis's monologue about what has always been wrong with the US space program. The last John Varley I read was the Titan series of books - this was quite different.
4. The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman. Final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. In progress. I think when I finish this one I may have to update what I wrote about this triology concerning angels awhile ago.
1. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince - J.K. Rowling. Technically 2005 since I read it while I was off after Christmas, but since it's in my current spate of reading I'll include it here. Wow, pretty intense. Especially the ending. It all happened so fast, I had to go back and read it again to be sure I’d read it right. I had a fairly good idea all along who the Half-blood Prince was, and I was kind of thinking – hadn’t Harry ever seen that person's handwriting before? I don’t think I write that much different now than I did in high school. I had a hunch someone was going to be killed off, so I wasn't too surprised there, and I don't think it was really a murder. So, now I’ve definitely got a bunch of hypotheses, and I am definitely not in the “that guy-is-evil-and-I-want-him-dead” camp. Harry's been wrong before, and the whole book, while written in the third person, is pretty much from Harry's point of view.
I've had one friend object to how certain relationships developed, and thought they could have been handled better; however, I really had no objection aside from the whole "We can't see each other any more because I've got to do something dangerous!" which I don't buy at all.
2. Blind Lake - Robert Charles Wilson. Loaned to me by Deb, our book group's fearless leader. A not-well-understood technology (even by it's developers) allows scientists to observe other worlds and their inhabitants, by means of a sort of virtual camera. Blind Lake is one of two such observatories in the US, and has become its own community of scientists, staff, and day workers. Shortly after three journalists arrive at the facility it is completely cut off from the outside world with no explanation; supplies are delivered by remote control vehicle and residents discover how serious the situation is when people attempting to escape are killed. An additional difficulty for one scientist is the fact that her ex-husband has also transferred to Blind Lake as an administrator, and is still attempting to control her and her daughter's lives. Her daughter, socially inept and distraction-prone (she may or may not have Asperger's), is struggling with Mirror Girl, a not-reflection who has less to do with her state of mind and more than anyone knows with her mother's work. Some very interesting aliens, although we are only observing them for most of the book, and the concept of some kind of universal overmind, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, make appearances.
The bit with the stolen Ding-Dong made me laugh out loud on the bus, but was cause for a sobering episode later in the book. A lot of the book deals with how people are changed, for better or worse, by isolation. Maybe I missed this myself because I grew up in Southern California, where we don't have extremes of weather, but I noticed a review on Amazon with someone complaining, "What's with all the windows constantly rattling in the blizzard?! Don't they have double-paned glass at a new installation, in the future? Of course they would because we have them now!" I never notice things like this.
3. Red Thunder - John Varley Book group selection for September, which I only just now got to. A quartet of 20-something young people with dreams of space runs into (quite literally) an alcoholic ex-astronaut, Travis, and his semi-autistic Hawkings-level-genius cousin, Jubal. Jubal has unintentionally invented a miraculous power source quite coincidentally with a) a race to Mars between the US and China, b) a predicted (by Jubal) emergency with the US ship. The kids work their butts off building a homemade ship to beat the Chinese to Mars and rescue the US ship, with help of Travis' and the rich girl's trust fund. Very reminiscent of Heinlein in the interaction of characters, and the way the girls defer to their boyfriends dreams and reluctantly wind up being better at it than they are. I quite liked Travis's monologue about what has always been wrong with the US space program. The last John Varley I read was the Titan series of books - this was quite different.
4. The Amber Spyglass - Phillip Pullman. Final book of the His Dark Materials trilogy. In progress. I think when I finish this one I may have to update what I wrote about this triology concerning angels awhile ago.
