New Year's Resolution update/Books Read in 2005

[brixtonbrood]

I can combine the two memes of the moment as my resolution for 2005 was not to re-read any books that I had previously read. The theory was that I would thus expand my literary palate and not regress into enormous Georgette Heyer/Terry Pratchett/Harry Potter/LOTR/Austen binges when I was feeling a bit low.
Did it work? Well, yes and no.

In chronological order:
Strange & Norrell - Clarke (which launched my Quest to read more contemporary sf, and specifically the Hugo nominations so I could vote for it with a clear conscience)
Going Postal - Pratchett
The Slippery Slope - Snicket
The Grim Grotto - Snicket
Changing Planes - Le Guin
Imperial Earth - Clarke (Rubbish)
A Dream of Wessex - Priest
Coalescent - Baxter
Singularity Sky - Stross (good in places, but politically deeply slappable (more due to tone than content))
Exultant - Baxter (there's a fantastic 40 page story about the formation of the universe buried in there, but the other 450 pages don't really match up to it)
Bridget Jones 2 - Fielding (From the attendant media buzz I'd always got the impression BJ was plumpish, never realised that in the books she was my size or thinner)
Snake Oil - Diamond
The Algebraist - Banks (I'm with everyone else on this, aliens good, humans meh, final plot twist double meh)
Falling Sideways - Holt
River of Gods - McDonald (undeniably good, but took me so long to read it that I kept losing track of the plots, which I resented)
Murder Mystery - Gaiman
Harry Potter 6 - Rowling
Simon The Coldheart - Heyer (getting a bit desperate I dug out one of the few Heyers I'd never read, a very early late-medieval effort, and found that she was completely right to request its deletion from her oeuvre and her son completely wrong to ignore her wishes after her death - the early fight where the broadsword cleaves a man's torso "as if it were wet cardboard" sets the tone. See my next post for the highlight of this book.)
The Leopard - Lampedusa (token actual highbrow lit to make up for previous error)
The Night Mayor - Newman
The War of the Worlds - Wells
The Jane Austen Book Club - Fowler
The King of Elfland's Daughter - Dunsany (I did get stuff out of this, and it is undeniably beautiful, but really more of a box-ticking exercise than the revelation I'd hoped for)
The Vesuvius Club - Gatiss (I can't complain about a book which actually sdvertises itself as "a bit of fluff")
The Big Over Easy - Fforde (very badly in need of a proper edit, a (slightly) revamped early work dragged out of the cupboard after the success of the Thursday Next books, and by god it shows - if I'd paid money for this I'd have been cross)
The Jungle Book - Kipling
A New Science of Life - Sheldrake (mad as cheesy slippers, but not as interesting as the gloss on it which I'd been given by Him (chiefly as an explanation for why it's easier to do crosswords later on in the week when everyone else has already solved them))
Genevieve Undead - Yeovil
Silver Nails - Yeovil (I wasn't really intending to read either of these, but Clapham Library had placed the collected set in a prominent position and I weakened)
The Separation - Priest (a last desperate grab for literary respectability before the year was up, excellent of course)

So, 29 books. Not a lot, and certainly a way off my late 90s peaks of 60+ but not a trivial number given that I'm not commuting or indeed making any journeys without kids to wrangle, and my only reading time is the ten minutes in bed whilst I fall asleep and the occasional bath. I did succeed in the headline resolution (but only if I ignore the 300 pages of False Colours (Heyer) I read whilst in an emotionally fragile state) but it's not really transformed my literary horizons and there's an awful lot of fluff. However, I did vote for Clarke in the Hugos, and she won, so that's a victory of sorts. Next come the latest Pratchett and Snicket, probably a quick blast through all the Harry Potters to put HP6 in perspective, and all the Culture novels because when that bloke did them on Mastermind I kept remembering how good they were, and I found that Algebraist didn't quite match up to my elderly memories of their quality either.

Comments

Him says

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

I feel somewhat dissed by Her comments about the Sheldrake book. Most of my gloss on it comes from the fact that my initial contact with the book was very much at second hand, via the work of Lyall ("Cheesy slippers? I'll show YOU cheesy slippers!") Watson.

(For those who are familiar with Mr Watson's particular blend of secular pantheism (there's probably a better term for it, but I did metalwork), I would plead two points in my defence - one: Watson is a far better writer than Sheldrake, and two: I was fifteen and was still several years away from getting laid.)

(For those who are unfamiliar with Mr Watson's oeuvre, he replaced Brian Blessed as the voice of Channel 4's sumo coverage - or possibly was replaced by Brian Blessed, my memory is mercifully unclear.)

Oh yes, and, somewhat inspired by Her quest, I also started to only read stuff I'd never read before, in about June this year. In fact, it was me who got that copy of "The Leopard" from the library. (It was a big disappointment, that there were no actual leopards in it - having been brought up on James Herbert, the least you expect from a book entitled "The Whatsit" wherein said whatsit is a big flesh-eating beastie is at least two scenes in which a badly-established character gets rent limb from limb by said whatsit - I don't care if you're the last member of an obscure Italian noble family, try harder.)

I wasn't keeping records (maybe I'll do it this year, so you can see quite what garbage someone who references Lyall Watson and James Herbert in a "literature" post reads), but I am certain(ish) that my last four books were "The Warden" (Anthony Trollope), "Barchester Towers" (Anthony Trollope), "Doctor Thorne" (Anthony Trollope), and "The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists" (Gideon Defoe). Honestly, all four have had me laughing out loud on the underground, but in the case of "The Warden", that was mostly as a result of meaning drift in the phrase "pocket billiards".

I would say I'll try harder, but I know perfectly well that that the first two books I'll finish this year will be "The Pirates! In An Adventure With Whaling" (Gideon Defoe) and "Thud!" (Terry Pratchett). (By the way, it's a lot funnier if you've read "Moby Dick" - number 2 on my list of standard answers to "What should I read?" after "Perfume" by Patrick Suskind.) ("The Pirates!" etc, that is, not "Thud!" - but who knows, maybe Terry has put in a riff on homoerotic sperm squeezing...)

How long do you think I could go only reading books with an exclamation mark in the title? I know there's "Westward Ho!" - does anyone know any others? Or will I need to branch out to question marks? (Trollope's "Can You Forgive Her?" looms, and I've had enough Trollopes for a while...)

Re: Him says

[sparkymark.livejournal.com]

Virgin Dr Who Novel "Sky Pirates!" by Dave Stone.