This is the year of Discworld. My 15yo reading buddy and son was having too much fun listening to and reading all the Discworld books, so I finally took the plunge. They are filled with dry humor and some laugh out loud humor and often have great characters and compelling stories. I think I’ve read 9 of them:
Lost Continent -- surreal visit to the Discworld version of Australia. Some of the funniest lines.
Going Postal -- perhaps my favorite. The story of the post office in Ankh Morpork
The Truth -- The story of the Newspaper in Ankh Morpork. Not as good as Going Postal
Guards! Guards! -- the beginning reads like a Monty Python skit.
The 5th Elephant -- more Sam Vimes and the Night Watch
Thud -- Where’s My Cow? I loved this book and the previous 2.
Jingo -- rather unmemorable
Reaper Man -- Death takes a holiday. What can I say? It is silly and funny.
Unseen Academicals -- just read this one. Good characters, but not a favorite.
I should have known it was going to be an odd year of reading as my first book of 2010 was
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!
I read some classics this year, too.
Mansfield Park -- a very different Austen book.
Pride and Prejudice -- from cover to cover for the first time since my teen years
Jane Eyre -- I really liked this and it prompted me to read a biography of Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights -- I couldn’t finish. Catherine and Heathcliff annoy me to no end.
Moby Dick -- I didn’t hate it, in fact it was an enjoyable listen. Not always compelling, though.
Heart of Darkness -- it almost seems cliche, but it was the first “evil white colonialist” book
Other older titles that I enjoyed were
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which was an unexpected joy to read and
The Sign of Four, one of the Sherlock Holmes novels. The plot for Sign of Four is now confused in my mind with The Moonstone as both stories deal with stolen goods from India.
My son and I both loved
At Home by Bill Bryson. It really brought so much of 19th century England to life, the details from all that British literature I read now are not something I gloss over but actually describe something tangible. A couple of other titles from same time period was
Remarkable Creatures, a historical fiction about Mary Anning's life and
The Fossil Hunters, a biography -- poorly written -- of Mary Anning. (She is the woman who sold sea shells by the sea shore in Lyme, and discovered the ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils.)
I listened to
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, based on my son’s love of the book. It made for a great car trip as we wound up talking about politics and Heinlein’s libertarian leanings.
Far North was the most evocative book I read, I think. The landscape and situations are still vividly real in my imagination. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series was entertaining fanstasy, but not memorable.
I haven’t read all the books I bought at Comic-con, but I thoroughly enjoyed the one I have read.
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss has a terrific protagonist, someone who is NOT the chosen one, NOT going to fulfill his destiny. That alone is refreshing!! But the setting and the plotting are refreshing too. His second book comes out in March, and my son and I are clearing our calendar for that one.
All in all I read 55 books this last year, though admittedly a few were put down somewhere in the 2nd half and I only skimmed the end. I've got a stack ready to go for next year, including a few more Discworld titles...
Perhaps it is just further proof of what a hopeless nerd I am, but the most compelling book I’ve read in a long time is about the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t think it is just my quirky interests that made The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary a compelling read. Simon Winchester is a brilliant author in telling the story of how the dictionary was compiled and the brief history of dictionaries. There’s wonderful definitions from the OED at the head of every chapter and a detailed defense of the plural “protagonists”. But best of all, and the real focus of Winchester’s story, are the eccentric and, in one case, mad characters who did the actual writing and research for the OED. He is at once straightforward in telling us about their lives and quirks, but it tempered with an warm and genuine affection for them. It is a delightful and fascinating combination.
There is yet another nerdy reading choice to report. I loved Packing for Mars. I had put off reading it because I assumed that with all my hours watching NASA-TV, I knew most everything about astronaut training and space ship design. That was a silly assumption -- I apparently knew nothing! It could have easily been a very dry read, but Mary Roach’s science writing is at once clear, interesting and very, very funny. I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s, reading the section on the research of bodily waste issues in zero-gravity, and got a serious case of the giggles -- not just because I have a scatological sense of humor, but because it was so very funny! It is extraordinary the things people do for a living, researching issues things that are a serious matter in the business of space flight.
Fellow nerd and author AJ Jacobs enjoys poking fun at his own foibles and OCD tendencies, and invites his readers to laugh along with him. His Year of Living Biblically could have tipped over into pure farce, but he was earnest in learning as much as possible and fleshed out his experiment with many interviews with both serious Biblical scholars, rabbis and ministers and with some of the more fringe religious elements. I also enjoyed The Know It All, an account of his reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, in pure alphabetical order, in a year.
