Folkstone's 50 book challenge - 2009

I've never really kept track of exactly what I've been reading before. This should be fun.
I've just finished reading two books in the last week.

#1 Interface
#2 A scanner darkly

#3 Old Man's War

#4 Finished reading The Left Hand of Darkness.

#5 Recieved The Road for Christmas. This is a gripping tale, and I couldn't put it down. It's a stunning novel of morality, despair and hope.

#6 The Time Traveller's Wife
I couldn't seem to put this down. Very interesting how the different timelines weave together. Phenomenal.

#7 Lord of the Flies
I've never read this before. An interesting examination of the descent from civilization to savagery.

#8 The Ghost Brigades

With that, Christmas vacation is over. Work and classes start tomorrow. Thankfully, I'm taking a literature course, so I'll get a couple more books read through classes.

#9 Fledgling

Octavia Butler's last novel is very intriguing. It felt very much like the introduction to a greater, unfinished work. I would like to have seen a larger introduction to the vampire-like Ina.

#10 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

A novel with great depth. The narrative form is quite interesting, as the narration is restricted to the thought patterns of the main character as he ages. This goes from an extremely simple stream of consciousness style at the beginning of the novel to a complicated philosophical style at the end.

Good review of #10. I think you hit the nail on the head. Are you going to read more James Joyce?
--BJ

Next on my reading list is actually Ulysses. I'm taking a literature course this term. The main texts are A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and Selected Poems by T. S. Eliot.

Wow, some deep reading in that course. But all interesting I would think. I can't wait to see what you think of Ulysses as I am trying to decide whether to tackle it myself. I haven't read any Virginia Woolf yet either. Nor much T. S. Eliot, but my girls certainly like his poems. (Or I think he is a he, not really sure!)
--BJ

#11 Steampunk

Some really great steampunk stories in this anthology. I especially enjoyed "Seventy-Two Letters" by Ted Chiang, and "Victoria" by Paul Di Filippo.

#12 Blindness

Very interesting style.

#13 Mrs Dalloway

Woolf jumps from one point of view to another constantly by merging the thoughts of one character with another. It is a fairly short book, but dense.

#14 Ulysses
Long, complicated, vulgar. Difficult prose. Compelling.

Did you use any kind of study aid while you read this?
--BJ

I had a number of online lectures provided by the instructor in the related university course. They aided comprehension of the text. I have to admit: This was a very hard book to get through. Usually, I can read a page or two of a book at a time, tiny sips here and there. This book requires prolonged periods of uninterrupted reading to make any kind of forward progress.

It was a rewarding read, but I'm not sure that I would have attempted it if it wasn't part of a course.

#15 The Savage Humanists
An interesting anthology. I enjoyed the introduction, an academic treatment of some of the material created by this group of writers.
Some of the stories were more enjoyable than others. Reading some of these stories, it is easy to see how the authors can be described as bitter with the way humanity has progressed.

#16 Ubik
A fascinating look at reality and regression. Use as directed.

Thank you so much for your comments on Ulysses.
--BJ

#17 I Am Legend
First time that I've read this. A fantastic little story. I can certainly see why it's been adapted into film three separate times. Spectacular post-apocalyptic fiction. Highly recommended.

#18 The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
This started to lose a bit of the momentum near the end, but the ideas are pure Philip K. Dick. A mixture of religion, drugs, social control and science fiction.

#19 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
Once again, Dick mediates on alternate realities, and our perception of reality. It's also been optioned as a film adaptation. There are some interesting breaks in the narrative that I'm still puzzling out. Fascinating read.

#20 Patient Zero
A gripping thriller. I could not put this book down. Finished within 24 hours. Very compelling.

Good to know--I just picked up Patient Zero a few days ago at the store, and it's one of my scheduled vacation reads :)

Don't read it as fast as I did then. It's a fun read, but was over too soon.

#21 The Man in the High Castle
I love this book. So many different layers of reality. The metafiction of a story within a story is extremely compelling. It's very easy to see why this book won the Hugo Award. Reflections on the nature of reality, and the meaning of suffering.

#22 WWW: Wake
Very much like his other novels, Wake focuses on the implications of new science. This novel, first in a new trilogy (Wake, Watch, Wonder), was a fun read. There is considerably less physical conflict in this movie, and could be considered to be YA. If I was to recommend a novel to introduce someone to Sawyer, this would be it.

#23 The Forever War
Fascinating premise, about how interstellar war waged at relativistic speeds would occur. Some of the social ideas in the text are now dated.

#24 Valis
A very different book than Dick's earlier novels. Far more philosophical. I'm still not sure what I think about it exactly.

#25 Steel Whispers
This is the fantastic sequel to Defining Diana, set in a future Calgary. It's a science fiction / mystery story, and is faster paced and more connected than the previous novel. The Borg, humans with cybernetic implants, play an important role in this novel, and can be read as a metaphor for sexual identity. I thought this novel was fantastic.

#26 Birthstones by Phyllis Gotlieb
Despite the slenderness of the volume, Gotlieb's final work weaves a masterful tale of power and exploitation. Feminist and post-colonial themes are in full force in this novel.

#27 The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury is perhaps best known for Farenheight 451, but this collection of short stories from the 1940s and 1950s about a future on Mars is at times whimsical, while at times it is depressing.

#28 The Anubis Gates
What a fantastic tale. I'm not entirely sure if this qualifies as steampunk, or not. It depends, as always, on what definition one uses. Technology doesn't seem to play an important part in the story, certainly not the steam engines, or clockwork devices one normally associates with steampunk. Instead, magical powers play an important role. The pre-Victorian era also misses the mark slightly from what is normally seen. The use of real people in the story, in particular Lord Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge does satisfy parts of the definition.
Setting aside the steampunk status of the story, The Anubis Gates is an excellent story, and is highly recommended.

#29 The Crying of Lot 49
This was my first introduction to the works of Pynchon. Fascinating style. It's confusing though.

#30 Extraordinary Engines
I finally got back to this anthology and finished it off. This is one of the difficulties of my style of reading (many books being read at a time) especially with short story anthologies. In this particular anthology, I greatly enjoyed Petrolpunk by Adam Roberts as well as Fixing Hanover by Jeff VanderMeer.

#31 Whitechapel Gods
A very gritty steampunk. A fun story, gripping.

#32 Escapement
A better novel than Mainspring. Three plots which eventually met, instead of one long narrative following a single character. The time spent aboard the airships was not as fun and cool as the sections in Mainspring.

#33 Federations
Finally got around to finishing this anthology off. Quite interesting. A number of really interesting stories. A worthwhile theme.

#34 Infernal Devices by K.W Jeter.
Finally found a few hours to plow through this early steampunk novel. It was a fun read, and I can see the influences of this novel in some of the other steampunk stories that I've read.

#35 The Stress of Her Regard
Powers is amazing. I loved this novel, which includes as prominent characters Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats to be fascinating. Weaving a supernatural tale of vampiric contagion, adding elements of myth and legend with these literary masters was refreshing.

#36 Boneshaker
A fantastic zombie-airship-brass goggles-steampunk story. Full of adventure. This story perfectly matched my expectations for steampunk, and was an excellent re-imagining of an alternate history.

Filling in some of my course readings for Shakespeare
#37 Taming of the Shrew
#38 Much Ado About Nothing
#39 Love's Labour Lost
#40 Romeo and Juliet
#41 King Richard II
#42 Julius Caesar

#43 Midsummer Night's Dream
Very meta-theatre. Quite enjoyable.

#44 Booklife
This was a very enjoyable read. It's not really a writing book, but rather a book for writers (or would-be writers). Some interesting insights are given to leveraging the internet and social networks for book publicity.

#45 Fast Ships, Black Sails
This is a fun little pirate-themed anthology, put together by Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer. I especially enjoyed "Boojum" by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, as well as "The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth" by Rachel Swirsky.

#46 Distant Early Warnings
A good reprint anthology of short works by award-winning Canadian authors, all originally published in the past decade.
They all seem to explore various moral concepts. Philosophical fiction.

#47 Perdido Street Station
The tension in this novel kept accelerating, well past what I was expecting to be the crisis point. Finally, I came to a section of the book, aptly named "Crisis" which headed off the whole mess. Mieville's prose is very different from what I'm used to, and different from the short stories in Looking for Jake which I'm currently reading. Perdido Street Station is very environmental (a toxic-dump environment. New Crobuzon isn't your ideal vacation spot).

#48 The Postmodern Condition
I realized that I didn't mark this down earlier, as I read it back in July. An interesting view on knowledge.

#49 Looking for Jake
An interesting collection of short stories. Very enjoyable. I especially enjoyed Jake, which continues the tale of Jack Half-a-Prayer from the Bas-Lag series of books. Miéville varies his writing style quite a bit, this was actually a very noticeable change, as I just finished reading his novel Perdido Street Station, which had a much grittier feel.

#50 Everyman
A memento mori to finish off the year. A very thought provoking novel on mortality. I enjoyed it.