Becky's 2016 Reading

First things first:

Ratings Rationales
* not worth the paper it's printed on
*½ maybe not a waste of paper, but probably a waste of time
** not awful, but not terribly good, either
**½ worth a read, satisfying, but not one for the ages
*** solid, a worthy representative of its genre
***½ really, really good
**** exceptional
****½ practically perfect in every way
***** might as well have been written by the deity of your choice

I rate the books right after reading them. Upon reflection, I sometimes re-rate, either down (usually--I hate grade inflation) or up. So sue me.

This year I'm making a spreadsheet to go along with this diary. Why? Because of this article by Amy McLay Patterson, which I found kind of inspiring. I'm not copying her spreadsheet, but using it as a jumping-off point. Attempting to link to the spreadsheet here. It's a Google doc, so I'm not sure if anyone but me can open it...

++started in 2015, finished in 2016

January
Beatlebone, Kevin Barry ****
The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman ***½
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis ***½
Tithe, Holly Black *** (YA) ++
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie ****
The Dog Stars, Peter Heller ****½
The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud ****
The Great Man, Kate Christensen ****
All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders ****

February
The Little Paris Bookshop, Nina George **½
The Wall,Marlen Haushofer ***½
This Census-Taker, China Mieville ***½

I enter the new year with several books in progress which--when I get back to them to finish (no, really, I fully intend to finish all of them)--I will notate accordingly. But my January 1, 2016 title is Beatlebone by Kevin Barry, whose first novel, City of Bohane was a weird and wonderful near-future/dystopian/violent-criminal-gangs-running-the-city thing. This one certainly starts out splendidly, with a 37-year-old John Lennon, coming off his extended lost weekend in L.A., hitting the west coast of Ireland to visit an island he'd purchased nearly a decade earlier.

Stay tuned.

Started The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, which has been on my TBR list for several years. I read his novel The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, which came out in 2014, and quite liked it. So far so good on this one.

Hi Becky,
Thanks for setting up this group. It's just what I was looking for!
Happy New Reading Year!

Cee

Finished The Imperfectionists. I liked it quite a lot, although I wasn't as enamored as I'd expected to be. Too much hype building up my expectations? Perhaps.

Passed Richard Russo's Straight Man to Pete to read, since it's one of my favorite campus farces of all time and I was shocked to discover he hadn't read it. That inspired me to pick up Lucky Jim, the granddaddy of the campus farce, one I've had on my shelf for thirty years, and have never read. Onward!

Hi, Becky. Enjoyed reading the article in your first post on chronicling your reading w/a spreadsheet. Couldn't access yours unfortunately, but I like the idea.

>6 absurdeist: I'm going to try to figure out how to make the Google spreadsheet accessible to others...I know it's possible, I just don't know how. I've added several elaborate tabs: Books Read (of course), Books to Read, Upcoming Releases, Books Started in 2015 and finished in 2016 (none finished, yet).

Lucky Jim took a while to win me over, but did, indeed, end up being laugh-out-loud funny. I've started Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. Great space opera. I have to--kind of grudgingly--pick up How Green Was My Valley for my book group. Dragging my heels on that one.

Put aside Ancillary Justice last night to begin How Green Was My Valley. It's actually quite charming. I wish I could do more accents in my head, but I just can't seem to muster up a Welsh accent--it's coming out more like Christopher Eccleston's 9th Doctor. Now, when I read Beatlebone it was very easy to hear John Lennon's voice in my head.

Finished Ancillary Justice. It's as good as they say. Great world--or, I guess, universe-building. Leckie's gender-fluid (or perhaps gender-unconcerned would be a better term) conquering race, the Radch, is fascinating, and--even after reading 385 pages--kind of hard to get my head around. That's a good thing.

tldr; great action, unique narrator, SPACE

The Dog Stars: best book I've read in months. Beautiful prose, great story, the absolute best depiction of the man-dog bond I've ever read.

Next up: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud.

The Dog Stars looks great.

>12 absurdeist: It really, really is.

I don't have it listed in my books, but I read How Green Was My Valley many years ago as a teen. I remember loving it then. Now I think I need to read it again...wonder if I still have a copy around here somewhere...

>14 Neverwithoutabook: It's my first read. I'm enjoying it, but finding it somewhat slow going (the friend who suggested it for book group, who is of Welsh heritage, says it's because I don't have a good Welsh accent in my head to read the sing-songy dialect with. That may be true.)

I'm still reading, but am having to read lots of stuff in between.

The Woman Upstairs--a dark study of loneliness and feminine rage. Powerful. Deliberately evokes--but does not try to imitate or steal from or parody or appropriate or any other negative concept you can think of--the rage of Ellison's Invisible Man. Beautiful and disturbing.

Started Kate Christensen's The Great Man. Just 75 or so pages in I'm finding it a beautiful read. A bit of a relief after the last one.

An interesting back-to-back pairing, The Woman Upstairs and The Great Man. Both feature artists as characters and are set, in some way, in the art world. Both feature some pretty glorious descriptions of art and the creative process. Other than that--pretty different from one another.

Picked up Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky today. I like her work as editor-in-chief and columnist at io9, and this, her first novel, has been getting rave reviews.

@15 > BeckyJG: I'm glad you're enjoying How Green Was My Valley. I also do as you do and read stuff in between when a certain book gets me bogged down. I have a couple of them waiting on the sidelines as we speak...and they will simply have to wait until I get back to them.

All the Birds in the Sky--wow. It's sci fi, it's urban fantasy, it's about the war between and the marriage of science and magic, it's beautifully written.

Next up: The Little Paris Bookshop. It's a little buzz-y, but I do love books about books and bookselling.

The Little Paris Bookshop. In a word: meh. The author is just not a good enough writer to know what she wants to do and commit to it. It's a romance, sort of. It flirts with magical realism but refuses to make the commitment. The bookish aspect of it is manufactured and forced. I thought it would be a lighter and sunnier The Shadow of the Wind. Kind of a gothic-lite. Better to just read The Shadow of the Wind if you want a great book about books and bookselling.

Just started The Wall (which isn't presently calling up a touchstone, although there are a hundred other works with the same title) by Marlen Haushofer, based on a citation in the Post-Apocalyptic fiction group here on LT. So far, bleak and beautiful--a breath of fresh air after the cloying sweetness of my last read.

The Wall was lovely. It probably could have been even shorter than it is (a lot of the same happens, which is, of course, a thing, but still...), but even so, lovely.

This Census-Taker was a very effective fairy-tale. China Mieville is a wonderful writer; one of the things I love about him is that he refuses to pigeon-hole himself by genre. I don't even know what to call this one. Horror? Dark Fantasy? Whatever--it was very effective.

Next up a little mainstream litfic I picked up at the library sale, Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston.