Books for last quarter of 2010

Time for another quarterly review of my reading plans, picking up from the last one in July:

  1. sf, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue (The Wizard Knight, Visions of Wonder).
    1. Thunderbirds Bumper Storybook by Dave Morris
    2. Analog 6 ed. John W. Campbell
    3. Earth Logic by Laurie J. Marks
    4. The Space Opera Renaissance, ed. David G. Hartwell
    5. Irish Tales of Terror, ed. Peter Haining
  2. sf, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole (Faust, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents).
    1. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
    2. The Book of Lost Tales 1 by J.R.R. Tolkien
    3. A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay
    4. Heart of the Sea by Nora Roberts
    5. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
    6. Kushiel’s Justice by Jacqueline Carey
  3. sf, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by my livejournal f-list (Diaspora, A Wizard Abroad).
    1. Ten Thousand Light Years From Home, by James Tiptree Jr
    2. The Sharing Knife by Lois Mcmaster Bujold
    3. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
    4. Powers by Ursula Le Guin
    5. Ha’penny by Jo Walton
  4. fiction other than sf, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue (A Town Like Alice, The Shell Seekers, The Sun Also Rises).
    1. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
    2. The Onion’s Our Dumb World: 73rd Edition: Atlas of the Planet Earth by The Onion
    3. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
    4. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
    5. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
  5. fiction other than sf, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms, The Dubliners).
    1. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
    2. Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
    3. The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
    4. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
    5. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  6. fiction other than sf, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by my livejournal f-list (Oliver Twist, The Dubliners, Silas Marner, A Farewell To Arms).
    1. A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen
    2. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
    3. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
    4. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
    5. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
  7. non-fiction, in order of entry onto my LibraryThing catalogue (Faith in Europe?).
    1. The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis
    2. The Case for Global Democracy by Graham Watson
    3. The Space Race by Deborah Cadbury
    4. Peeling the Onion by Gunter Grass
    5. Toujours Tingo by Adam Jacot de Boinod
  8. non-fiction, in order of popularity on LibraryThing as a whole (The Stuff of Thought, The Bookseller of Kabul, The Great Transformation).
    1. Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson
    2. Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould
    3. Race of a Lifetime by Mark Halperin
    4. Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
    5. The Bible: The Biography by Karen Armstrong
  9. non-fiction, as owned by me before start of this year and previously read by my livejournal f-list (Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopedia).
    1. The IRA: A History by Tim Pat Coogan
    2. Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North by Stuart Maconie
    3. Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain by Ronald Hutton
    4. Rebus’s Scotland: A Personal Journey by Ian Rankin
    5. The Great Tradition by F.R. Leavis
  10. books I have already read but haven’t reviewed on-line, ranked by LT popularity (Northern Lights, Frankenstein).
    1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
    2. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
    3. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
    4. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
    5. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
  11. Hugo-award winning novels which I haven’t previously reviewed on-line, in order of winning the award (A Fire Upon The Deep, Green Mars, Blue Mars).
    1. Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
    2. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
    3. To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis

      Switch to Nebula winning novels which I haven’t previously reviewed on-line, in order of winning the award

    4. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
    5. Timescape by Gregory Benford
  12. unread New Adventures of Doctor Who in order (Highest Science, The Pit
    1. Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans
    2. Lucifer Rising by Jim Mortimore
    3. White Darkness by David A. McIntee
    4. Shadowmind by Christopher Bulis
    5. Birthright by Nigel Robinson
  13. unread Eighth Doctor Adventures in order (Longest Day, Legacy of the Daleks, Dreamstone Moon
    1. Seeing I by Jonathan Blum
    2. Placebo Effect by Gary Russell
    3. Vanderdeken’s Children by Christopher Bulis
    4. The Scarlet Empress by Paul Magrs
    5. The Janus Conjunction by Trevor Baxendale
  14. other unread New Who books, in order of LibraryThing popularity (list description changed – see list v) (Wishing Well, Martha in the MirrorThe Story of Martha).
    1. The Many Hands by Dale Smith
    2. Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter by Russell T. Davies
    3. Revenge of the Judoon by Terrance Dicks
    4. Doctor Who: Aliens And Enemies by Justin Richards
    5. Judgement Of The Judoon by Colin Brake
  15. Ian Rankin’s Rebus books, in internal chronological order (Dead Souls, Set in Darkness).
    1. The Falls
    2. Resurrection Men
    3. A Question of Blood
    4. Fleshmarket Close
    5. The Naming of the Dead
  16. books by writers of colour, in order of entry into LibraryThing (Soul Mountain, With The Light… #2, Ake: The Years of Childhood).
    1. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
    2. The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
    3. With the Light… Raising an Autistic Child v. 3) by Keiko Tobe
    4. The Mahabharata
    5. RG Veda Volume 3 by Clamp
    6. The Essential Rumi
  17. books on the shelves at end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, going backwards in LT entry order (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander).
    1. For Noble Purposes: The Autobiography of Richard Porter, Surgeon and Evangelist by William Porter
    2. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
    3. A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong
    4. Brave New Kosovo: A World of Transformation and Imagination by Dirk-Jan Visser
    5. The Alexiad by Anna Comnena
  18. books acquired since end 2005, otherwise not accounted for, in LT entry order (Unfinest Hour).
    1. The Cyprus question and the EU : the challenge and the promise by Andreas Theophanous
    2. Democracy and Deep-Rooted Conflict
    3. The Garden Designer by Robin Williams
    4. Science and the Garden
    5. The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter by Colin Tudge
  19. books by women, in reverse order of acquisition (obviously this gets revised every time I acquire a book by a female writer) (The King’s Dragon, Fallen Gods)
    1. Blue Box by Kate Orman
    2. Dear Old Dead by Jane Haddam
    3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
    4. Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett
    5. The Spring of the Ram by Dorothy Dunnett
    6. A Crocodile in the Fernery: An A-Z of Animals in the Garden by Twigs Way
  20. J.R.R. Tolkien’s History of Middle-Earth (not started yet)
    1. The Book of Lost Tales, Part 1
    2. The Book of Lost Tales, Part 2
    3. The Lays of Beleriand
    4. The Shaping of Middle-Earth
    5. The Lost Road and Other Writings
  21. Books relating to sixteenth century Ireland, in order of acquisition (A Viceroy’s Vindication? Sir Henry Sidney’s Memoir of Service in Ireland, 1556-78, Mistress Blanche: Queen Elizabeth I’s Confidante):
    1. Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447-1603: English Expansion and the End of Gaelic Rule by Steven G. Ellis
    2. Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford
    3. Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History by Lytton Strachey
    4. Elizabeth I by C. Haigh
    5. Elizabeth’s Irish Wars by Cyril Falls
    6. Spenser’s The Faerie Queen – A Selection of Critical Essays ed. by Peter C. Bayley
  22. Old Who books not otherwise accounted for, in order of LT popularity (split off from list n) (Festival of Death
    1. The Crystal Bucephalus by Craig Hinton
    2. System Shock by Justin Richards
    3. Matrix by Robert Perry
    4. Short Trips
    5. Short Trips and Side Steps

Plus, as ever, whatever takes my fancy when I glance at the shelves.

One thought on “Books for last quarter of 2010

  1. I believe it was hated by a number of people with autism, and parents of same. Is it a fictional condition? Then why the autism in the title? I think some objected because they saw it as an exploitation of autism to garner sympathy/votes/whatever.

    I was annoyed by the bad science. Glass doesn’t flow. And it’s a science fiction award, for gods sakes. And if I had to give up glass flowing so should everyone else!

    And frankly, aside from Homecoming, everything else was so much better.

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