Top Ten books you read in 2014

Cafe Society
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I loved those books! I’m now reading his Redshirts, which is a fun, mind-bendingly meta spoof of Star Trek cliches.

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I liked Redshirts a lot, too. That was the first Scalzi novel I read, thanks to one of the Watcha Reading threads!

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  1. Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco. If you like haunted houses, don’t miss this. The writing was dated and I predicted the ending, but I still think this is my favorite book I read all year.

  2. Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta. A thriller by an author who has yet to let me down. That link goes to the *free preview *for Kindle…go and get it now! I read the preview before getting the book and thought I was going to die from wanting to know what happened next.

  3. Bleeding Shadows by Joe R. Lansdale. Kickass short story collection (will also introduce you to a character you will know more of when you read Lansdale’s Black Hat Jack. Both books could be on this list).

  4. The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens. A very interesting premise: college student interviews elderly murderer and comes to believe in his innocence. Credibility is stretched towards the end, but I was past caring at that point…this was really engrossing.

  5. The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. This was the first Tiffany Aching book, and I would nominate the whole series. Hey, Grrlbrarian got to count a whole series too! :slight_smile:

  6. Revival by Stephen King. King still has the magic. Someone here said in another thread that this was a book he hesitated to recommend to his father because his father might be too old for it. Now I understand what he meant…this one is dark and may be better enjoyed by younger readers.

  7. The Brothers Cabal by Jonathan L. Howard. The latest in a series I have loved. Ever notice how people ask you what you’re reading when you least want to tell them? When my husband asked about this book, I was forced to admit that it had vampires and zombies…“but not the lame kind. I swear!” I came >< this close to putting this book in my daughter’s hands and forcing her to read a couple of pages because I know she’d like it if she did.

  8. Hollow City by Ransom Riggs. This is the second in the series that started with Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The gimmick of these books is that they are illustrated with real found photographs, but they would be good without that. Time travel and children with strange abilities, yo.

  9. The Mirror by Marlys Milhiser. Time travel and body switching! This book was uneven, with the first half being utterly absorbing and fascinating, the second half merely interesting.

  10. Bird Box by Josh Malerman. Post-apocalyptic fiction in which the survivors must stay blindfolded outdoors for fear of seeing something that will drive them to murder and suicide. Not without its flaws, but a good time nevertheless.

Honorable mentions: The Martian (Andy Weir); The Winter People (Jennifer McMahon);* Falling Angel* (William Hjortsberg); Rooms (Lauren Oliver); Skin Game (Jim Butcher); and *Horrorstör *(Grady Hendrix).

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I read that a few years ago and really liked it. Quite different from the movie, but both are creepy good fun. Now lemme go dig out my Johnny Favorite albums…

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I didn’t get as much of a chance to read this year as in years past, but in no particular order, my favorites have been:

“Death from the Skies!” by Dr. Phil Plait (a former doper!)

“The Black Company” by Glen Cook

“Shadows Linger” by Glen Cook

“The White Rose” by Glen Cook

“Old Man’s War” by John Scalzi

“The Ghost Brigades” by John Scalzi

“The Last Colony” by John Scalzi

“The Archer’s Tale” by Bernard Cornwell

“Heretic” by Bernard Cornwell

“Vagabond” by Bernard Cornwell

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I read 89 books last year.
The 10 best of the lot were:

What Makes Olga Run? The Mystery of the 90-Somthing Track Star and What She Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Happier Lives, by Bruce Grierson.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, by Marie Kondo. She is a bit goofy and obsessed with tidying, but the book has some good advice that helped me.

Bad Things Happen, by Harry Dolan. Really good mystery. Lean, spare, excellent prose. Story structured to wring out every drop of suspense. It plays with and gently spoofs mystery conventions, while working well within them.

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, by Sara Gran. Contemporary noir mystery crossed with philosophy, intelligent, fun.

The Bullet Catcher’s Daughter, by Rod Duncan. Steampunk adventure. Good world-building. Excellent protagonist, a woman brought up in a traveling show, working as an intelligencer by masquerading as her twin brother.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.

The Magician’s Land, by Lev Grossman. Excellent wrap up to the series.

!0% Happier, by Dan Harris. An overwrought tv newsman discovers meditation. Well-done. Something I could give to my sceptical relatives to explain why I meditate.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale, by Graham Joyce. Literate, solid psychology, and suitably ambiguous.

Redshirts, by John Scalzi. Found out about it on these message boards, and I am grateful.
I laughed out loud.

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Not in any order:
[ul]
[li]Codex Seraphinianus; Luigi Serafini–An engrossing fictional (and illegible) encyclopedia. Densely illustrated.[/li][li]Stranger in the Forest: On Foot across Borneo; Eric Hansen–Not the best written travel narrative, but very enjoyable. [/li][li]Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir; Roz Chast–A memoir of her parents’ decine, in graphic novel format.[/li][li]The Curse of Chalion; Lois McMaster Bujold–My first Bujold. Beautifully constructed, nicely written, with entertaining twists.[/li][li]The Call of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft, For beginning readers; R. J. Ivankovic, DrFaustusAU - Traditional Artist | DeviantArt --A hilarious version of Lovecraft, Dr. Seuss-style.[/li][li]My Own Country; Abraham Verghese–An uneven but engaging personal account of Verghese’s work with HIV+ men earlier in the epidemic.[/li][li]The Journals of Spalding Gray; Nell Casey (Ed.)–Fascinating and upsetting. [/li][li]The Golem and the Jinni; Helene Wecker–This moved along nicely, with good parallelism and sympathetic characters. [/li][li]American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America; Collin Woodard–Not the first of its type, but a well-expressed argument for the influence of initial cultures in the US (and nearby).[/li][li]Around the World in 72 Days; Nellie Bly–I went on a bit of a Nellie Bly kick this year, and found it interesting to compare her primary text with Goodman’s Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World.[/li][/ul]

Others of note:
[ul]
[li]World’s End (Sandman #8), Neil Gaiman et al.–The best of the arc, with plenty of mythology and history underlying a nicely-constructed story.[/li][li]Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language; Katherine Russell Rich–Though it sometimes strays into overly-long discourses on language and linguistics… so do I. [/li][/ul]

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I like Goodreads for tracking my books (I’m here: http://www.goodreads.com/Jamie_Goodreads) but I probably spend too much time reading, so I don’t do their challenges.

I read about 120 books this year, including a few re-reads. My 10 favorites:

[ul]
Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, Leo Marks. Marks was a WWII cryptographer who supervised encoded messages to and from intelligence agents in the field. (Bonus: Marks is the son of one of the owners of the antiquarian bookshop made famous by Helene Hanff’s book 84, Charing Cross Road.)[/ul]

[ul]
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck. I was pleasantly surprised by this classic, it’s riveting.[/ul]

[ul]C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series. I read all 15 books this year. The series starts off very slowly - I barely liked the first one enough to continue - but gradually they improve until I was binge-reading the last few.[/ul]

[ul]Indiscretion, Jude Morgan. An old-fashioned Regency romance from a modern writer. This was delightful - it reads like the best of Georgette Heyer.[/ul]

[ul]The Martian, Andy Weir. A surprise hit book about a NASA astronaut left for dead on Mars.[/ul]

[ul]The Golem and the Jinni, Helene Wecker. A lovely, literary book about two immigrants to New York in 1889: a masterless golem and a jinni trapped in human form.[/ul]

[ul]Ancillary Justice & Ancillary Sword, Ann Leckie. The first book won the Hugo and a bunch of other sci-fi awards this year. The protagonist used to be an AI running a spaceship, but is now trapped in what used to be one of her human “ancillary” bodies.[/ul]

[ul]The Girl With All the Gifts, M.R. Carey (Mike Carey). This is an unusual apocalyptic novel, and I managed to read it without hearing spoilers about the exact subject matter, and I’m glad.[/ul]

[ul]Cuckoo’s Calling & The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling). I didn’t expect much, but these are good. They’re almost old-school British detective novels, not cozy but not particularly gritty, either.[/ul]

[ul]City of Diamond, Jane Emerson (pen name for Doris Egan). Older, out-of-print sci-fi novel about people who have been living for centuries on huge interstellar spaceships. Loosely plotted, character-driven soft sci-fi story.[/ul]

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My top ten of the 55 I read in 2014:

  1. To Say Nothing Of The Dog, by Connie Willis.
    The first book I read by her, and my favorite of hers so far.

  2. New Testament Manuscripts and Texts, by D. C. Parker.
    My daughter calls it a “Big Snooze book”.

  3. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan.
    Imaginative. I look forward to him writing more books.

  4. Lincoln’s Dreams, by Connie Willis.
    It’s actually probably a better book than my #1.

  5. Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament, by Bart Ehrman, et al.
    Challenging essays.

  6. Raising Steam, by Terry Pratchett.
    He’s a little wobbly, but hasn’t lost his touch.

  7. The Text of the New Testament, by Kurt & Barbara Aland.
    A classic in the field.

  8. Introduction to the New Testament, by Werner Georg Kummel.
    I have never seen such a bibliography.

  9. The Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis.
    Another great read.

  10. The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, by Bart Ehrman.
    The work that made his reputation, now at least partly refuted.

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This was my reading disaster of the year … I have had this on my list forever, finally got around to reserving a copy at the library, was really enjoying it … and then I asked my husband to return a library book that I had put on our shelf next to our door where we put our to-be-returned library books, and somehow he picked up Between Silk and Cyanide instead, even though it was on my nighttable. How do you even do that? Then when I tried to take it out again, it no longer appears in the library’s collection. The copy was a little worn, and I am betting the librarian who received it pulled it from circulation.

Now I will never know who won the damn war.

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In no particular order–

1.To Say Nothing Of the Dog–This made me a Connie Willis fan

2.Letters from Yellowstone–Diane Smith–a charming love story out of the National Park’s early days, circa 1898

3.Cosm--Gregory Benford–I know nothing about physics and physicists except what I haeve learned from Big Bang Theory, but I was totally caught up in this book. One of the very best of last year.

4.Kahawa–Donald Westlake–not one of his “caper” books; quite bleak, in fact. Set in Idi Amin’s Uganda and dealing with the theft of the country’s coffee (kahava) crop.

5*.Paris 1919*–Margaret MacMillan–the settling of accounts after the war and how the scene was set for the next war and problems in the middle east we are still dealing with.

6.Salmon Fishing in the Yemen–Paul Torbay–delightful, and all done in the form of correspondence.

7.In the Heart of the Canyon--Elizabeth Hyde–A rafting trip down the Grand Canyon and how the lives of the tourists and guides on the trip are affected.

8.American Caesar–William Manchester–a huge tome about Douglas MacArthur, an amazing, great, terrible, vitally important, heroic, petty, gracious, vindictive, etc. etc. man.

  1. and 10. 11-22-63 and From a Buick Eight--Stephen King–yep,the old master can still write a hell of a book.
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Yep, 100 in a year. I read a lot, and I wondered just how many I would get to (NOT through) in a year, saw the challenge and decided to do it. Thing is, I genuinely didn’t think too much about it, until about March when my husband pointed out that that is pretty much a book every 3 days. Until that moment, I really hadn’t given it any thought! Luckily I spent 2 weeks with my Kindle on a beach, when I read about 18 books - that was the only reason I finished it.

A couple of effects:
[ul]
[li]I decided that I would include only new (to me) books, no books I read to my children, no cookbooks etc. I normally reread both Stephen King’s The Stand and Ken Grimwood’s Replay at least once a year, for the last 20 years or more, and I didn’t do either last year. I’ve missed them both. Last year has just reminded me how much I love re-reading.[/li][li]I read a handful of YA books - primarily because I went through a post-apocalyptic phase and there’s a lot of that in the YA space. I was mostly pleasantly surprised, and pleased to have encountered a whole heap of books I would never have considered.[/li][li]I went through cascading phases - I’d finish something by one author, then immediately start on something else of theirs. That got a bit tired - I’d get really bored of a particular voice - my fault, not theirs.[/li][li] I abandoned things more quickly than I might otherwise - previously I’d stick with something when I was really bogged down, just so I could finish it. This year if I found myself stuck, I’d move on to the next thing. The horror of leaving a book unfinished seems to have passed me this year…[/li][li] Last year was the first time I’ve ever bothered to record when I finished a book, or to make any notes on it. I was diligent about reviewing, although the reviews got shorter and shorter over the year. That’s something I will keep up.[/li][/ul]

I’m sorry, but your judgement and scorn bring me to outright laughter. I am pretty much the least competitive person I’ve ever met - I’m far too damn lazy. I read because it’s pretty much my favourite thing to do in the world. This year I decided to count how many new things I read. Turns out it was 101 books. Gutted I’ve not impressed you though.

Interesting that a couple of people have mentioned they liked this. I hated hated hated it. I thought the idea was wonderful, but really disliked the execution. The ending had me sobbing like a baby girl, though.

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Echoing what Charley said, even though I ultimately didn’t like my “100 book challenge” year enough to repeat it, I took some interesting things away from it. I get that the term sounds a little competitive, but the “book challenge” seems like the common name for it. I didn’t see it as competing with anyone, although a fun aspect was doing it at the same time as some friends, and comparing books and making recommendations in a more organized way led me to some great new titles and authors. It also got me in the habit of making a few quick notes in a book journal, a habit I have continued, and that has been a real positive effect – it’s very handy for making book recommendations, reminding me to look out for new books by authors I liked, and keeping track of common themes or topics. Those are all things I used to do mentally, but I never realized having a written list would be so helpful.

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Same here and worded so much more eloquently than I could.

When I did 100 books it was to push mysel. I wasn’t competing with anyone, I was pushing myself to expand the narrow genre reading rut that I had fallen into… and to attempt to find the floor in a few spots in my room :smiley: (Never works dammit, I read them then go buy MORE books to cover those patches of clean carpet)

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Even before we had kids, I don’t think I ever read more than 75 or so books a year. Reading 100+ boggles my mind - but good on ya that you could do it, and retain what you read!

…which reminds me of this: http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/calvin-on-reading.jpg

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I kept rough track, partly to discipline myself to maybe finish a book or two first before starting on five or six others. I finished maybe seventy-five, depending on what counts as a book. Among the best:

Papa Hemingway, by AE Hotchner. A guy who knew and spent a fair amount of time with him, albeit late-era Hem. I recognized it as the source of a few oft-repeated Hemingway stories.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Lenny Bruce, Albert Goldman and Lawrence Schiller. Exhaustive and exhausting. For personal reasons, I enjoyed Bruce’s impression of a bus-tour guide.

Lennon, by Ray Coleman. Not Pro-John so much as Pro-John and Yoko, as Beatle bios go. Perhaps a bit too harsh on May Pang. Some of its interest to me lay in its extended verbatim quotes from interviews I had not read, even if you want to call that a lazy approach.

The Education of a Poker Player, Herbert Yardley. Both for the stories and the tutorial. I’ll cop to having read a ridiculous number of poker books for one who has played as little as I have.

Murder, Inc., by Burton Turkus and Sid Feder. Another subject I have read about to a perhaps unseemly extent. I will say that gangsters I remember from my own lifetime bore me utterly.

The Joker is Wild, Art Cohn. About the vaudevillian singer/comic Joe E. Lewis. Who knew a lot of gangsters.

Going Down with Janis, Peggy Caserta. Utter trash, man.

Playwriting for Dummies, Angelo Parra. Some useful-seeming advice, as it struck me at the time.

Just Kids, Patti Smith. Her young adulthood, largely with Robert Mapplethorpe. One of just a small handful among the ~75 that were written in the past few years. An appealing personality.

Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, Jill and Leon Uris. I enjoyed the diverse first half more than the second, which concentrated mainly on the Troubles as they appeared in the mid-1970’s. I acknowledge, though, that the book was written for the 1975 audience. There’s something about a well-written well-considered outsider’s account that appeals to me.

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A handful or so were YA books which could be read in a day. The nice part of that was reconnecting with authors I read in my teens and discovering I still enjoyed a few of them.

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In no particular order - here’s my Top Ten New-To-Me Reads of 2014:

  1. The Martian by Andy Weir. Tense, funny and realistic - and the audiobook narrator captured Mark Watney perfectly for me.

  2. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault. Richly written characters and an engrossing plot.

  3. City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer. It’s a tough call between this and his Annihilation *City *is more fantastical, (and I loved its semi-epistolary format); while *Annihilation *has a bit more of the creep factor - especially in audiobook format, IMHO, but both were both engrossing.

  4. Sand Omnibus by Hugh Howey. Compelling post-apocalyptic world-building with engaging characters and an intriguing plot. If you liked Wool, you’ll probably like this as well.

  5. Sleep Donation by Karen Russell. Fascinating premise that falters a bit at the end, but short enough to make the read worthwhile.

  6. Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography - a clever idea for a memoir that doesn’t quite overpower the actual facts - I especially enjoyed the audiobook narrated by NPH himself.

  7. Jim Henson: The Biography. Very in-depth look at the life of a visionary.

  8. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe. I’m a big fan of the XKCD comic; the depth of research Munroe puts into these questions combined with his exceptionally dry humor was a treat!

  9. Still Foolin’ 'Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys by Billy Crystal. A tad cranky at times, but overall a fun memoir with a focus on the process of growing older.

  10. Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik. A “history of stuff” type book that also provides some hard science in an accessible format.

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Tried to post, keyboard jammed. For 2015: “My Little Kafka” Hire self out as babysitter.

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Thanks. I’ve wondered about the Neil Patrick Harris.