2009 in books
Jan. 11th, 2010 04:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI am sitting in bed with a pile of books and a cup of coffee, and it is an absolutely freezing Sunday afternoon and I have no desire to get out of it again. Clearly, the time has come to talk about the eighty-three novels I read in 2009. Like I said before, this was my New Year's resolution - to read, and in doing so, maybe re-establish the habit so the next year I wouldn't have to resolve it. I think it worked. I now feel a little sad that I didn't read for four years, but mostly happy, because I now have those four years' books to read.
So, eighty-three books. Five of them were non-fiction (two autobiographical books, one biography of someone else, one strictly "non-fiction"). Twenty-two of those were by just two authors (Patrick O'Brian and Lois McMaster Bujold), and another twelve were by two more (Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik). Five were Star Trek tie-ins. I suspect only about fifteen in total had any literary quality, and I had read perhaps (an overlapping) fifteen of them before.
[Note: any links that follow go to my initial reviews of the books, when I first read them.]
So. Let's start with Patrick O'Brian and his epic, epic series of Aubrey-Maturin Age of Sail books. For the uninitiated: they start with Master and Commander, and feature the many and varied adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey, an officer in the Royal Navy, a bluff, cheerful, man with twin aptitudes for warfare and terrible puns, and his dearest friend, Stephen Maturin, a physician, naturalist, and spy. The books are the most unmitigated fun. The Napoleonic Wars are going on in the background, and there are some moments of real poignancy - particular for Stephen, whose profession is not without its dangers, naturally - but all wound up with battles and love affairs and grog and a vast corpus of inexplicable nautical terminology. It's great fun. The books do tend to blur together, especially if you read them in rapid succession as I did, so I am currently stalled at The Far Side of the World, book ten, but this year I have no doubt I'll pick them up again.
Next, Bujold and her Vorkosigan series. These are... hard to describe, but in something of the space opera mould, much as I hate that descriptor. Basically, they're about the sometime-future, in which galactic travel is possible through wormholes in space between planets that happen to have them close by. Earth is one of these, but it's not the focus of the books. Instead, we have the planet Barrayar, an imperial, highly militaristic society with a great deal of technology and very little in the way of social change, and into this we bring Miles Vorkosigan, who is the protagonist of most of them. He's an aristocrat, the scion of an incredibly important family, intelligent and dedicated and energetic and, because of an attack on his mother before he was born, physically disabled in a number of ways. He's a very interesting character, and there are space battles, disruptor guns, mercenary fleets and antics galore for him to be interesting at and around. But I'm not really in it for the spaceships and whatnot; I'm in it for the characters, and that's why my favourite of the books are Memory and A Civil Campaign, in which Miles calms down a bit and we get to see more of Cordelia, his gorgeous and amazing mother (I have a fictional girlcrush, it's embarrassing, but also Cordelia's Honour, her book, is very very good indeed), and Gregor, the emperor (whom I love; he's shy, thoughtful, introverted, probably clinically depressed, and the capable and competent absolute ruler of three worlds) and his cousin Ivan, who also answers to Ivan-you-idiot. They are lovely, and it's with them as well as Miles the whole set-up comes to life, I think. Not that the space-battle novels aren't good in their way, but these are the ones that are out of the ordinary.
(Komarr is also very good, as they go. It's not one of my favourites, though, because its central theme is the breakdown of an abusive relationship, and Ekaterin is a very real character - so the book is correspondingly difficult to read.)
Next, Temeraire, by Naomi Novik. I read the whole series this year, and I loved it. The premise is just fabulous: the Napoleonic Wars, with dragons! Sentient, thoughtful, very talkative dragons with complex relationships with humans. Temeraire, the eponymous dragon, has for a captain a former naval officer called Lawrence, and the first book is all about the two of them getting to know each other and the author and the reader getting to know the world, this alternative universe with so much that's familar (in fact, familiar from Aubrey and Maturin!) and strange (the Royal Aerial Corps!). They're adventure stories, mostly, but they have lovely touches and beautifully realised characters, and they do one spectacular thing: they create a new species of relationship. The bond between Lawrence and Temeraire, which is not, say, like a human and a dog, but more like the best of friends, only not, more like a marriage, only not sexual, and not romantic, but definitely passionate... like I said, it's a new species of love. It works very well.
And there are other books I wanted to mention, too! Also in the sphere of historical fiction, there was the Lord John Grey series by Diana Gabaldon, which are, weirdly, romance-novel spin-offs. Gabaldon's romance novel series is called Outlander and is fun, but too replete with the worse tropes of the genre to stick with - too much perfect specimens of perfect manhood, etc - especially as her books are proper doorstops. But Lord John, who exists in the same universe, is much, much more fun. He is an eighteenth-century aristocrat, soldier and sort-of-detective, he's very funny, very likeable, his family is enormous and slightly unhinged, and he's gay. He really is, in uncomplicated fashion; the mystery of the moment is always entwined with whatever nice young man Grey has his eye on. It's pure delight to read, and so far I think Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade is the best one.
Other books I read this year: oh, The Monsters of Templeton was a silly but unexpectedly fun family story, Julie & Julia is a much better book than it sounds, a cooking-blog-turned-memoir that is light, razor-sharp and very engaging, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay made my heart hurt. Mason & Dixon was baby's first Pynchon and a seven-hundred page delight in eighteenth-century prose, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was very flawed and very charming.
But the best single book I read this year was, undoubtedly, Doomsday Book. I've talked about it at length before, and it's not like I'm not hideously late to the party as it is - it was published in 1992 - but this is really special, that sci-fi kind of enjoyable and textured with humour, but deep, sad and rich beneath all of it. It's set in a future Oxford, where time travel has been discovered and is being administered by the university's history faculty and by Balliol and Brasenose. Oxford in 2057 is, well, shockingly like our Oxford in certain ways, and very much unlike it in others, but I get the likeable sense that the changes are cosmetic and technological (admittedly, a Tube station under Cornmarket is quite a change) and that it really is my Oxford underneath.
And in this lovely backdrop, we have this extraordinary novel. The protagonist, Kivrin, is a history undergrad who's making the first trip to the Middle Ages, and Dunworthy, her tutor, doesn't want her to go but can't stop her, and sits at home and worries. And then somehow or other, they've sent Kivrin into the Black Death, and in modern Oxford there is another plague. Because this is Connie Willis, who can write humanity - really; she can write characters who are so ordinary in some ways, so heroic in others, so very human - the way it all goes to hell is pragmatically, ligthly, realistically, even delightfully depicted. I just... can't explain it, really, why I loved this book so much. Maybe because, in the end, it's a kind of warmly sad book? It's desperate but not despairing. Unlike most of Willis's writing, which tends to critique organised religion, this one just goes for religion. Not in the militant-atheist way, but in the way that says, gently, people believe, and it doesn't save them. In the end it's a book about how only other human beings can save you.
I actually wrote my![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
yuletide story for it this year, and although that's a story about Verity and Ned from To Say Nothing of a Dog, it's really more for Doomsday Book in theme and, I don't know, all-pervasive gloom. But I really do recommend it - my initial review of it is here - and it won the Hugo and Nebula awards for the requisite year, so. You don't have to take my word for it.
So, that was my absolute favourite. The close second, which I actually read in the very last week of the year, was Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. It's sort of the story of three generations of a Greek-American family, written in such a fluid, universal way that I can see the underlying immigrant narrative as at once familiar and entirely new, and it's also sort of the story of Cal, who was born twice - as a girl, and as a teenage boy, and how he finds gender identity, and how it finds him. I really, really liked it, for being a novel with something to say, about who you are and why you are, and also for being full of delights, silly names, unexpected witticisms and rolling comedy. (What I thought at the time.)
In 2010, I have read two books: The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a collection of science-fiction shorts by Ursula Le Guin (some good, some very good, a very few unremarkable) and Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Adele Geras, an atmospheric little young-adult thing which I picked up for £2 in the Last Bookshop, and is entirely worth it. I'm now reading yet more Connie Willis, and just finished The Winds of Marble Arch, a longish short story which is full of despair and longing and also silly jokes, because she's Connie Willis and I love her.
If I ever forget how to read again, remind me.
So, eighty-three books. Five of them were non-fiction (two autobiographical books, one biography of someone else, one strictly "non-fiction"). Twenty-two of those were by just two authors (Patrick O'Brian and Lois McMaster Bujold), and another twelve were by two more (Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik). Five were Star Trek tie-ins. I suspect only about fifteen in total had any literary quality, and I had read perhaps (an overlapping) fifteen of them before.
[Note: any links that follow go to my initial reviews of the books, when I first read them.]
So. Let's start with Patrick O'Brian and his epic, epic series of Aubrey-Maturin Age of Sail books. For the uninitiated: they start with Master and Commander, and feature the many and varied adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey, an officer in the Royal Navy, a bluff, cheerful, man with twin aptitudes for warfare and terrible puns, and his dearest friend, Stephen Maturin, a physician, naturalist, and spy. The books are the most unmitigated fun. The Napoleonic Wars are going on in the background, and there are some moments of real poignancy - particular for Stephen, whose profession is not without its dangers, naturally - but all wound up with battles and love affairs and grog and a vast corpus of inexplicable nautical terminology. It's great fun. The books do tend to blur together, especially if you read them in rapid succession as I did, so I am currently stalled at The Far Side of the World, book ten, but this year I have no doubt I'll pick them up again.
Next, Bujold and her Vorkosigan series. These are... hard to describe, but in something of the space opera mould, much as I hate that descriptor. Basically, they're about the sometime-future, in which galactic travel is possible through wormholes in space between planets that happen to have them close by. Earth is one of these, but it's not the focus of the books. Instead, we have the planet Barrayar, an imperial, highly militaristic society with a great deal of technology and very little in the way of social change, and into this we bring Miles Vorkosigan, who is the protagonist of most of them. He's an aristocrat, the scion of an incredibly important family, intelligent and dedicated and energetic and, because of an attack on his mother before he was born, physically disabled in a number of ways. He's a very interesting character, and there are space battles, disruptor guns, mercenary fleets and antics galore for him to be interesting at and around. But I'm not really in it for the spaceships and whatnot; I'm in it for the characters, and that's why my favourite of the books are Memory and A Civil Campaign, in which Miles calms down a bit and we get to see more of Cordelia, his gorgeous and amazing mother (I have a fictional girlcrush, it's embarrassing, but also Cordelia's Honour, her book, is very very good indeed), and Gregor, the emperor (whom I love; he's shy, thoughtful, introverted, probably clinically depressed, and the capable and competent absolute ruler of three worlds) and his cousin Ivan, who also answers to Ivan-you-idiot. They are lovely, and it's with them as well as Miles the whole set-up comes to life, I think. Not that the space-battle novels aren't good in their way, but these are the ones that are out of the ordinary.
(Komarr is also very good, as they go. It's not one of my favourites, though, because its central theme is the breakdown of an abusive relationship, and Ekaterin is a very real character - so the book is correspondingly difficult to read.)
Next, Temeraire, by Naomi Novik. I read the whole series this year, and I loved it. The premise is just fabulous: the Napoleonic Wars, with dragons! Sentient, thoughtful, very talkative dragons with complex relationships with humans. Temeraire, the eponymous dragon, has for a captain a former naval officer called Lawrence, and the first book is all about the two of them getting to know each other and the author and the reader getting to know the world, this alternative universe with so much that's familar (in fact, familiar from Aubrey and Maturin!) and strange (the Royal Aerial Corps!). They're adventure stories, mostly, but they have lovely touches and beautifully realised characters, and they do one spectacular thing: they create a new species of relationship. The bond between Lawrence and Temeraire, which is not, say, like a human and a dog, but more like the best of friends, only not, more like a marriage, only not sexual, and not romantic, but definitely passionate... like I said, it's a new species of love. It works very well.
And there are other books I wanted to mention, too! Also in the sphere of historical fiction, there was the Lord John Grey series by Diana Gabaldon, which are, weirdly, romance-novel spin-offs. Gabaldon's romance novel series is called Outlander and is fun, but too replete with the worse tropes of the genre to stick with - too much perfect specimens of perfect manhood, etc - especially as her books are proper doorstops. But Lord John, who exists in the same universe, is much, much more fun. He is an eighteenth-century aristocrat, soldier and sort-of-detective, he's very funny, very likeable, his family is enormous and slightly unhinged, and he's gay. He really is, in uncomplicated fashion; the mystery of the moment is always entwined with whatever nice young man Grey has his eye on. It's pure delight to read, and so far I think Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade is the best one.
Other books I read this year: oh, The Monsters of Templeton was a silly but unexpectedly fun family story, Julie & Julia is a much better book than it sounds, a cooking-blog-turned-memoir that is light, razor-sharp and very engaging, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay made my heart hurt. Mason & Dixon was baby's first Pynchon and a seven-hundred page delight in eighteenth-century prose, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society was very flawed and very charming.
But the best single book I read this year was, undoubtedly, Doomsday Book. I've talked about it at length before, and it's not like I'm not hideously late to the party as it is - it was published in 1992 - but this is really special, that sci-fi kind of enjoyable and textured with humour, but deep, sad and rich beneath all of it. It's set in a future Oxford, where time travel has been discovered and is being administered by the university's history faculty and by Balliol and Brasenose. Oxford in 2057 is, well, shockingly like our Oxford in certain ways, and very much unlike it in others, but I get the likeable sense that the changes are cosmetic and technological (admittedly, a Tube station under Cornmarket is quite a change) and that it really is my Oxford underneath.
And in this lovely backdrop, we have this extraordinary novel. The protagonist, Kivrin, is a history undergrad who's making the first trip to the Middle Ages, and Dunworthy, her tutor, doesn't want her to go but can't stop her, and sits at home and worries. And then somehow or other, they've sent Kivrin into the Black Death, and in modern Oxford there is another plague. Because this is Connie Willis, who can write humanity - really; she can write characters who are so ordinary in some ways, so heroic in others, so very human - the way it all goes to hell is pragmatically, ligthly, realistically, even delightfully depicted. I just... can't explain it, really, why I loved this book so much. Maybe because, in the end, it's a kind of warmly sad book? It's desperate but not despairing. Unlike most of Willis's writing, which tends to critique organised religion, this one just goes for religion. Not in the militant-atheist way, but in the way that says, gently, people believe, and it doesn't save them. In the end it's a book about how only other human beings can save you.
I actually wrote my
yuletide story for it this year, and although that's a story about Verity and Ned from To Say Nothing of a Dog, it's really more for Doomsday Book in theme and, I don't know, all-pervasive gloom. But I really do recommend it - my initial review of it is here - and it won the Hugo and Nebula awards for the requisite year, so. You don't have to take my word for it.So, that was my absolute favourite. The close second, which I actually read in the very last week of the year, was Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex. It's sort of the story of three generations of a Greek-American family, written in such a fluid, universal way that I can see the underlying immigrant narrative as at once familiar and entirely new, and it's also sort of the story of Cal, who was born twice - as a girl, and as a teenage boy, and how he finds gender identity, and how it finds him. I really, really liked it, for being a novel with something to say, about who you are and why you are, and also for being full of delights, silly names, unexpected witticisms and rolling comedy. (What I thought at the time.)
In 2010, I have read two books: The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a collection of science-fiction shorts by Ursula Le Guin (some good, some very good, a very few unremarkable) and Silent Snow, Secret Snow, by Adele Geras, an atmospheric little young-adult thing which I picked up for £2 in the Last Bookshop, and is entirely worth it. I'm now reading yet more Connie Willis, and just finished The Winds of Marble Arch, a longish short story which is full of despair and longing and also silly jokes, because she's Connie Willis and I love her.
If I ever forget how to read again, remind me.
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on 2010-01-11 05:09 am (UTC)Re: Middlesex: Have you read a book called Misfortune, by Wesley Stace? It's about a boy raised as a girl in Victorian England, and written in a sort of mock-Dickensian style. I read it a couple years ago and thought it was great.
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on 2010-01-11 05:46 pm (UTC)"Paradises Lost" is great, isn't it? The style reminds me bizarrely of Clarke, but it's got more heart. "Coming of Age in Karhide" is the other story I really love from the collection.
I have not read that! I will note down the rec, thank you!
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on 2010-01-12 03:05 am (UTC)"The Soul Selects Her Own Society" and "A Letter from the Clearys." Exciting times!
You can see the whole reading list if you want.
The style reminds me bizarrely of Clarke, but it's got more heart.
It's been...ten years, my god, since I read 2001, and I remember nothing much beyond not liking it, so I can't speak to that. But it does hae heart, yes.
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on 2010-01-11 05:11 am (UTC)Which ones did you like best? God, I could talk about my love of Le Guin's short fiction FOREVER. I actually cannot, off the top of my head, think of anyone in any genre who writes short stories that more consistently floor me.
Also, I really need to read Doomsday Book.
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on 2010-01-12 02:33 am (UTC)I also read A Fisherman of the Inland Sea when I was up in Edinburgh, and that was wonderful, too! I think the three churten-theory stories were my favourite out of that, but they were all rather wonderful.
YES, you need to read Doomsday Book. It is awesome.
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on 2010-01-12 11:44 am (UTC)I adore your icon, by the way. Who is it?
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on 2010-01-11 05:44 pm (UTC)Also, I gave Doomsday Book to my sister as a Congratulations! You have Swine Flu! present and she seemed happy about that.
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