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[lenora_rose]

I don't ahve anything like a list of books read last year.

Instead, in no particular order, here's a list of the books in my to-read pile I intend to read sometime soon (As in, this is far from the complete list). Those I strike through are ones I finished. Feel free to particularly recommend or anti-recommend anything on here:

Fiction I own:
Sherwood Smith - Wren's War
Sherwood Smith - A Stranger to Command (Okay, this won't show up in the mail for a week or two.)
Elizabeth Bear - All the Windwracked Stars
Tobias S. Buckell - Ragamuffin
Melissa Marr - Wicked Lovely
Susan Cooper - Victory
Frank Beddon - The Looking Glass Wars
Diana Gabaldon - Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
Elizabeth Hoyt - The Raven Prince
M.T. Anderson - The Astonishing life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation: the Pox Party
Nalo Hopkinson - The New Moon's Arms
Rafael Sabatini - The Sea Hawk
Robin McKinley - Chalice
Georgette Heyer - The Reluctant Widow
Steven Brust - Jhegaala
Marie Brennan - Midnight Never come
Chris Moriarty - Spin Control
Sandor Marai - Embers
C.S. Forester - Midshipman Hornblower
Samuel Schellebarger - Lord Vanity
eta: And I forgot Tamara Siler Jones - Taleisin told me she's sending me one belatedly for Christmas, (Along with Corambis, which I have read) but it hasn't arrived yet.

Non-Fiction I own:
James Shapiro - 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
Roger Spielmann - Anishnaabe World
John Gardner - On Moral Fiction
David Macaulay - Castle
Phillipe Aries - Western Attitudes Towards Death
David Morrell - Lessons from a Life of Writing
Margaret Mead - From the South Seas (Yes, I know some of it's discredited, and more debated.)

Fiction/Nonfiction Muddle:
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen - The Science of Discworld, the Science of Discworld 3: Darwin's Watch. (The first of these is now my backpack emergency book.)

Online Fiction (The first three of these are ongoing reading, not ones I haven't touched, so they can't really be struck out as done):
Various including Bull, Bear, Bobet, Black, and Monette - Shadow Unit (http://www.shadowunit.org/)
Various Unknown - Harry Potter - Alternity (Moved to Dreamwidth: http://alt-player.dreamwidth.org/read . Alas, this doesn't fix the basic format problem that you can't read more then a few entries back, making it pretty much impossible to either reread or point new people to it, since it's been running for a year and a half.)
Freece - Captive Prince (M/M that starts with a scenario that looks like it will be all bodice-ripperish and cheesy, and rapidly gets more complex and fascinating, and contains a lot more politics than romance or sex. And written to a professional level.) Currently on something of a hiatus as the writer recovers from a back injury
Steven Brust - My Own Kind of Freedom - a Firefly Novel (http://dreamcafe.com/firefly.html) (Yes, that's a fanfic by a professional writer I mostly admire for a fandom I mostly share. Which I haven't sampled yet; am I crazy or what?)
Martha Wells - Pretty much all her online short fiction (Seven stories). I absentmindedly bookmarked the link ages ago then forgot it was there. http://www.marthawells.com/excerpts.htm

Books I don't own but mean to Borrow to read:
Guy Gavriel Kay - Ysabel (from mom. Has actually been sitting in my to-read pile a bit)
Terry Pratchett - Unseen Academicals (From mom)
More Heyer (The next time I feel really in need of fluff. Right now top of my list to look for at the library seem to be Cotillion, A Civil Contract, Sprig Muslin and These Old Shades)
More Carol Berg (I'd just finished Flesh and Spirit and Breath and Bone, and rather liked even with some reservations. Since then, I read Transformation, Revelation and Restoration, and while I'm mildly glad I read the whole thing to see where she planned to go, those who said read the first and pretend it's a solo work are pretty close to right. A lot of early-author mistakes in the pacing, some weirdnesses in the plot. Transformation is the only one I might ever reread. I also was gifted the Spirit Lens, which I devoured, and think is going somewhere much more interesting in future books.)
Margaret Mahy - Heriot (She wrote one of my favourite YA books, the Tricksters, and a number of others, but Maddigan's Fantasia, the last one I bought, failed to impress me in any serious way.)
Ekaterina Sedia - The Alchemy of Stone
Minister Faust - From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain
Jo Walton - Half a Crown (Actually got from the library and loaned to mom immediately, since my list of to-reads is so long)


And, I forgot the first time, the two books I'm actually in the middle of:
Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies (Made more progress, then set aside again, and now physically cannot reach the copy to finish. :)
Tomson Highway - Kiss of the Fur Queen

Books I've read since which weren't on this list, oops.
Maureen McHugh - China Mountain Zhang (I see why it got so much good comment. And also, I believe this is the book with the ongoing deliberate grammatical mistake TNH described herself as removing on her first copyedit pass, putting back in on her second, and going through a third time to trace its usage. If so, I see what she meant.)
Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body?, Murder Must Advertise
Jennifer Crusie - Getting Rid of Bradley (not one of her best, but perfectly satisfactory during a need for fluff)
Stephen Hunt - the Court of the Air (Just started)
Whedon and various - Buffy Season 8 - first 4 collections (Looks like it's going someplace interesting. Either the hiatus or the change of format brought new ideas in. Not that it's without some weird bits, and I've heard a few things about later sections.)
Lucifer - Devil in the Gateway (First collection) (Heard good things about the series. Tried it. Not sure I regret trying it, but even less sure I'd continue.)

Comments

[amy34.livejournal.com]

I love "The Raven Prince"!

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Actually, IIRC, it was your mention of it that made me pick it up; I don't read romances often enough to know who's good and who isn't (Besides Jennifer Crusie as long as she avoids mystery subplots and Georgette Heyer), but I have been on the lookout for some good names.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I loathe A Civil Contract, and suggest Frederica in its place, and in place of Sprig Muslin, Venetia, or Friday's Child, or Masqueraders.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I have and love Venetia. (The ones I own are that, The Grand Sophy, The Talisman Ring, and the Unfinished Clue, of which all but the last are MUCH better than the ones I've tried via the library, like the can't-decide-if-it's-gothic-or-regency Cousin Kate, or Lady of Quality. The last is good for characters and seriously weak as a mystery.

A Civil Contract is on the list because one person cites it as a favourite, another as a book they find half her best and half infuriating, but in a way that made me curious. Jo Walton just discussed it at Tor.com, too. It doesn't promise to become a favourite like Venetia.

I'm always looking for lists as to which of hers to read and which to avoid; so far the general agreement seems to be to avoid most of her mysteries, with some possible wiggle room for Duplicate Death, pretty much all of her histories, Lady of Quality, and Penhallow.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Charity Girl is another to avoid as well.

I dislike A Civil Contract because it purports to be realistic, but it's just as melodramatic as the worst ones, with a lot of dreary scenes as she suffers, and she's oh so ugly as well as low born.

For a better job with a plain heroine and hero and a real romance, try THE QUIET GENTLEMAN. Like many, the central mystery is dumb, but the characters are fun. The heroine is a crackup with her phlegmatic competence, and her parents are one of the funniest couples Heyer ever came up with. Or, read both and compare!

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Well, I managed to read Lady of Quality without my brains leaking out my ears (Helped by encountering someone else's regency so bad it made LoQ look good right after). So I guess as long as I use the library and don't spend money, i can afford to risk reading a substandard Heyer.

The Quiet Gentleman is definitely on at least one other recommended list.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

The library is the way to go! This is how I first read them, so I knew which ones to eventually buy and which to avoid.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

The downtown library (The biggest and also the one nearest my place) is actually weirdly uncooperative in which of her books they have in stock. They seem to be better on the mysteries.

[zandoria.livejournal.com]

The Hornblower books are excellent, I have the entire series.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Someone suggested it's better to told me to start with this one, which is chronologically one of the earliest but wasn't written until later.

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

The New Moon's Arms is absolutely lovely, and Ragamuffin is a fun piece of space opera. I found Chalice "meh", which was a sad reaction to have to a McKinley book.

The Reluctant Widow is another "can't-decide-if-it's-gothic-or-regency", but I can't remember if it's one of the better ones.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

McKinley's been up and down; Dragonhaven had the amazing pointless 50-page epilogue. But Sunshine was surprisingly good for a subgenre I wouldn't have expected from her. My wish list comment for Chalice was "Clearly I'm an optimist".

I've liked all of Nalo's prior books, though The Salt Roads was weaker IMHO.

[aryllian]

Alternity has weekly recaps in the alt_fen community (http://community.livejournal.com/alt_fen/tag/recaps), that link to every post in order, if that's helpful? There are also some higher level recaps (http://community.livejournal.com/alt_fen/tag/previously+on+alternity), hitting the high points for people who want to jump in without reading everything. (That seems to be a bit behind, though.)

It is admittedly more work than getting everything on a friends page.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

I've used the weekly recaps sometimes when I've fallen too far behind myself. But grateful as I am to it, I really feel it's just enough stopgap to support an extant reader who fell behind.

I can't imagine using it for even a term's worth of information; and you lose so much not reading it all directly (And like real blogs sometimes the really good comment threads aren't were you'd expect). Which comes right back down to me really not wanting to recommend *new* readers to it now.