62 posts tagged “recommendations”
As the year draws to a close, I thought it would be fun to look back at the books I read in 2009 and share a list of my favorites. (Read, but not necessarily published in 2009.) I've finished 110 books to date and will probably read at least one more before New Year's Day. It was tough narrowing the list, but here they are:
FICTION - 5 STARS
City of Thieves by David Benioff
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Serena by Ron Rash
FICTION - 4 STARS
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
The Sparrow by Mary Russell Doria
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins (sequel to The Hunger Games)
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
The Outlander by Gil Adamson
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan
NONFICTION
How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer
Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
Microcosm: E. Coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer
Summers With Juliet by Bill Roorbach
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
What were your favorites this year? I hope you'll share a few in comments.
Favorites: City of Thieves, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden, and If I Stay.
Here are a couple of quotations from the amazing City of Thieves. It's one of the best books I've read this year and I highly recommend it.
"I never understood people who said their greatest fear was public speaking, or spiders, or any of the other minor terrors. How could you fear anything more than death? Everything else offered moments of escape: a paralyzed man could still read Dickens; a man in the grips of dementia might have flashes of the most absurd beauty."
"The days had become a confusion of catastrophes; what seemed impossible in the afternoon was blunt fact by the evening. German corpses fell from the sky; cannibals sold sausage links made from ground human in the Haymarket; apartment blocs collapsed to the ground; dogs became bombs; frozen soldiers became signposts; a partisan with half a face stood swaying in the snow staring sad-eyed at his killers. I had no food in my belly, no fat on my bones, and no energy to reflect on this parade of atrocities. I just kept moving, hoping to find another half slice of bread for myself and a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter."
The Man Booker Prize shortlist has tipped me off to many fine books over the years. I recently read what I consider to be the best of the bunch from 2008: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz.
The story was unpredictable and entertaining, the characters were eccentric but authentic (and sometimes unlikable), and the writing was top-notch. Highly recommended.
A few of the many passages I marked as I went along:
"Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don't have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don't have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend's spine, and afterward you can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won't hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it's probably not the drowning man's size."
"Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal."
"...the girl Brett loved was tall and pale-skinned, with flaming red hair falling down her back, shoulders as smooth as eggs, and legs as long as an underground pipeline. But her dark brown eyes, often hidden behind an unevenly cropped fringe, were her secret weapon: she had a look that could have toppled a government."
"I loathed that job. The good days passed like decades, the so-so days like half centuries, but mostly it felt as if I were frozen in the eye of an everlasting time-storm."
"It's a shame you can't go out and see people for just ten minutes. That's all the human contact I need to carry me through life for three days -- then I need ten minutes more."
"I was so happy I wanted to fold all the people into paper airplanes and fly them into the lidless eye of that big yellow moon."
I've just finished Neil deGrasse Tyson's wonderful Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. Wow. Terrific read, and highly recommended to anyone who'd like to learn more about the birth of the universe, features of galaxies, planetary and stellar life cycles, the history and progress of scientific knowledge, and many other fascinating topics. He is an adept writer and communicator, and his ability to present these concepts with clarity for the non-scientist is unparalleled. (And he has a great sense of humor.)
Here are a few passages that grabbed me:
"FM signals and those of broadcast television, however, have much higher frequencies and pass right through, traveling out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing)."
"...for most of human history, had aliens tried to send radio signals to Earthlings we would have been incapable of receiving them. For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion."
"Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion. ... The claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith. These are irreconcilable approaches to knowing, which ensures an eternity of debate wherever and whenever the two camps meet."
Favorites: Ghostwritten, Interpreter of Maladies, and Outliers.
I'm an avid music fan and although silence can be golden, I can't imagine a day completely bereft of rhythm and melody. I'm also a firm believer in supporting artists by purchasing music. That said, I like to try before I buy. Luckily, there are lots of wonderful music sites that make it possible to do so.
It's easy as pie to sample a wide range of music on artists' official MySpace pages and websites, and at music-oriented websites and blogs. I can't tell you how many times I've visited one of these sites and discovered a great artist or band I was previously unfamiliar with.
The following are a few good places to listen to music online. (I mentioned a few of these sites in a prior post.)
NPR Discover Songs & Song of the Day
AOL Music FullCD Listening Party
Spinner FullCD Listening Party
In addition, there are several sites that offer free and legal MP3 downloads. Here are a few I like:
Fingertips - check out This Week's Finds and also the Select Artist Guide, a directory of artists with free/legal MP3s available online
Daytrotter.com - five featured bands, 20 Daytrotter Session songs each week
Amazon - over 500 free and legal downloads at the MP3 Deals Store
Have fun, and I hope you find some great new tunes. If you know of good resources I didn't mention, please share.
Favorites in December: The Gargoyle, Mudbound, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
I read 122 books in 2008. While it's extremely difficult to pick the best from among so many great choices, I've given my list a glance and decided my three favorites in fiction were The Gargoyle, The Monsters of Templeton, and Speaker for the Dead. In nonfiction, I most enjoyed The Geography of Bliss, Predictably Irrational, and The Zookeeper's Wife.
What are the best books you read in 2008?
I want to share an insightful passage from a book I read recently:
"I have watched painful relationships between parents and children. I have seen parents who control and parents who neglect, parents who make terrible mistakes that hurt their children deeply, and parents who forgive children who have done awful things. I have seen nobility and courage; I have seen dreadful selfishness and utter blindness; and I have seen all these things in the SAME parents, raising the same children.
What I understand now is this: There is no harder job than parenting. There is no human relationship with such potential for great achievement and awful destructiveness, and despite all the experts who write about it, no one has the slightest idea whether any decision will be right or best or even not-horrible for any particular child. It is a job that simply cannot be done right."
-Ender Wiggin
from Ender in Exile
There's a special place in my heart for Ender Wiggin, one of my all-time favorite fictional characters. If you've never read Orson Scott Card's Ender series, you're missing out, even if the sci-fi genre isn't your usual cup of tea. Card's characters are richly drawn and the novels are fast-paced and expansive, incorporating ethical dilemmas, complex relationships, and big ideas: war, power, guilt, redemption, spirituality, philosophy, reconciliation. If you take a chance and get to know Ender, I hope you'll like him as much as I do.
I read the series in this order:
Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Ender in Exile
Ender in Exile is chronologically situated between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, so although it's the last to be published, it could be read second.
Favorites: The Girl with No Shadow, The White Tiger, and The Graveyard Book. For brief reviews, please visit my Shelfari.
