2004 book round up

Sun, Jan. 9th, 2005 02:11 pm
oyceter: teruterubouzu default icon (Calvin and Hobbes comics)
Heh, the ability to do this post was the reason behind why I started book blogging last year, and of course, now it's about a week late and I don't have much energy to write it. But write it I will.

I am shamelessly copying [livejournal.com profile] coffee_and_ink's format (I hope you don't mind, Mely), whose posts are the main reason why I started book blogging at all.

This being the inaugural year, I have no idea how this matches up to my reading habits of previous year. Just off the top of my head, I would say that I feel like I've read a great deal of books this year, and most of them good. A big reason for that is because of LJ, because of all the recs that have come in, and for that, I am eternally grateful. I read many things I wouldn't have touched previously because of that. And now, my ten favorite books of the year, out of all the books I have read this year (excluding rereads), not out of all the books published this year. They may not be the best books I've read this year, or the most technically proficient, or the like, but they are books that grabbed me somehow and will most likely end up being reread very often. I'm cheating quite a bit on this list and including multiple books by authors and such, but hey, it's my list ;).

Listed alphabetically by author. I've blogged each book before, which you can find in my book memories section, if you want to read me blather on even more.


  1. Megan Chance, Fall From Grace

    Both romances on this list are ones that push the boundaries of the genre. I love Megan Chance's romances because she doesn't bother to whitewash history; her characters are rarely the rareified nobility that populate most romances. In this book, they are outlaws, and there is no romance at all in the way Chance portrays their lives. She also inverts the trope and makes the hard-living, hard-hearted character the heroine, with a hero painfully in love with her. This is not a fuzzy romance; it's on the smothering of dreams and hopes, on the choices that life gradually takes away.


  2. Michael Dirda, Readings

    Dirda is a kindred spirit in the book world, although I can only sit back and wish that I have read as broadly and as deeply as he has, as well as wish that I could write about the experience of reading and of books so beautifully as he does. But I can't, so I am incredibly glad that he exists in the world and writes the reviews he does. His book reviews are like recommendations from a close friend.


  3. Dorothy Dunnett, The Lymond Chronicles

    If I had to pick just one book of them, it would be Pawn in Frankincense, where all the build-up of the previous three books comes to head in a tense climax that left me breathless. Dunnett is very often manipulative, I still don't like Lymond as a person, and Checkmate is pretty flawed, especially when you look at how Dunnett throws in every single romance cliche in the book, but the series as a whole is so large and epic and grand that they occupied a very sizeable chunk of my head and heart for a very long period of time. And despite the criticism, nothing I've read this year has swallowed me whole the same way this series did -- I read the first book over a few months, the second in a week, and by the time I had gotten to Checkmate, I had spent an entire week reading till 5 in the morning, and was so sleep-deprived that I went home sick from work and finished the last book at home in a frenzied rush.

    Also, it's hard to beat Dunnett for sheer amount of influence on other authors.

    The Lymond books consist of The Game of Kings, Queen's Play, The Disorderly Knights, Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle, and Checkmate


  4. Kij Johnson, Fudoki

    This book is set in the same universe as Johnson's first book, The Fox Woman, and it has the same delicate touch in bringing Heian Japan to life in a way that feels very authentic to me. Finally, a fantasy set in Asia that doesn't grate on my nerves. The setting, while wonderfully done, is just one of the many beautiful parts of this book. The narrative centered on the dying princess Harueme is elegaic and full of regrets; the one on the cat-turned-warrior-woman is properly sharp around the edges, with charming touches like dreams of rice balls. A very good book that leaves a lingering sense of mono no aware.


  5. Laura Kinsale, Shadowheart

    After I read this, I was nearly incoherent with glee over how it smashes romance genre tropes left and right, with the added bonus of sex scenes that don't just develop the characters, but are also so intrinsic to the plot and the meat of the book that it is unimaginable without them. While the plot in and of itself doesn't make too much sense (though it is much more coherent than many Kinsale plots), the heart of the book is in the character dynamics and the exploration of gender roles and issues of power and control. Also, Kinsale manages to do all this while writing a scorching romance.


  6. Maureen F. McHugh, China Mountain Zhang

    Science fiction set in a world where China has become the one superpower and America has turned socialist. Instead of using the set up to explore overtly political issues in a larger setting, McHugh chooses narrate from the POV of the titular character and a few of the other people in the world whose lives he affects, no matter how obliquely. Because of this, the book has a much more intimate tone, even while it explores the larger issues of race, ethnicity, and cultural authenticity without ever losing sight of its characters, who are always human first.

  7. Patricia A. McKillip, multiple novels

    I discovered Patricia McKillip this year, after many years of never understanding her books, and it has been a joy going through her backlist. It's probably unnecessary praising McKillip to most people who read this LJ, but for anyone who hasn't read her books, the beauty of the prose and the images, the clarity of the visual metaphors and, above all, the underlying humanity in all her characters have completely won me over. My favorite of her books, Winter Rose, is actually a reread, although I don't actually remember my first read of it at all.

    I read her The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, Alphabet of Thorn, The Book of Atrix Wolfe, The Changeling Sea, In the Forests of Serre, Ombria in Shadow, Song for the Basilisk, The Tower at Stony Wood, and Winter Rose this year.


  8. Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

    While I wanted a non-Nafisi POV at times for balance, Nafisi's memoir is still an effective look at not only a woman's life in Iran, but also the importance of reading and imagination. For me, it works better as an investigation into why we read than a chronicle of post-revolution Iran, but that is largely because of the constraints of the memoir format. This book hit some very deep spots in me regarding questions of morality and art and why the great books are always revolutionary in some way. A perfect demonstration of how books at their best can push boundaries and shape the mind.


  9. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

    Like Nafisi's book, Satrapi's Persepolis is a memoir of the Islamic revolution in Iran; however, Persepolis is also a wonderful graphic novel with stark black-and-white art and an often bizarre sense of humor. Satrapi's memoir is much less overtly political than Nafisi's, and it is more effective for me because of that. Satrapi focuses on the commonplace, on the seemingly trifling changes that the revolutions causes, and because of this, the truly horrific things that happen in her country are made that much worse in context of the everyday. Smart, funny, and engaging.


  10. Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot

    An epistolary fantasy Regency novel! This is the book that I've been pushing on all of my friends, to the point of buying a copy and bringing it all the way over to Taiwan just so I could make yet another person read it. There's something incredibly joyful about this book -- one can sense how much fun the authors had writing it, and it makes for a delightful reading experience.



Also recommended: Lloyd Alexander, the Westmark trilogy; Connie Brockway, The Bridal Season; Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa; Jennifer Crusie, Bet Me; Judy Cuevas, Bliss and Dance; Karen Cushman, Catherine, Called Birdy; Pamela Dean, the Secret Country trilogy; Patricia MacLachlan, The Facts and Fictions of Minna Pratt; Margaret Mahy, The Tricksters; Ellen Raskin, The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America; Elizabeth A. Wein, The Winter Prince

ETA: Added more books to the also recced list, because I am hare-brained and forgot a few.

Total read: 167 (8 rereads)

Books finished in 2004 )
oyceter: Stack of books with text "mmm... books!" (mmm books)
I picked this one up after having several people request it in the bookstore and never being able to find it. It's a memoir, literary criticism, and a look at the Islamic Republic of Iran, and very fascinating.

The author had taught literature at an Iranian university and eventually formed a sort of reading group/class of young women. That's the barest of bare bones, but the book made me think about politics and US interference and when it's good and when it's bad, feminism and my shocked amazement at what the women there had to do, the facts of living under a regime that ruled through fear, and in the end, the threat and the importance of literature.

It's strange. The first chapter is on Nabokov's Lolita, and as I was reading the reading group and the author's thoughts on the book and how essentially the author thought Humbert was raping twelve-year-old Lolita, who had no other choices, and I thought to myself: I will probably never read Lolita now because it is morally squicky to me and I just have no desire to read about it.

And yet, the next chapter, some of the more conservative members of Nafisi's literature class in the university rebel against The Great Gatsby and condemn it as something glorifying adultery and immorality and American consumerism and as such, it was immoral. And I caught myself thinking, does it matter? Does the book have to be moral to be good? It's like watching people argue about Jossverse characters (or all characters), and arguing that a certain character is Good or another is Bad, and in the end, does it make us like the character more or less? Would it be more constructive to argue if the character was dynamic or static? And does art have to take a moral stance? It reminds me a little of the kerfuffle sometime last year about this, if an author had a moral responsibility to portray a certain type of thing (ex: to portray murder as bad). When I think about this, my answer is of course not. Literature doesn't have to be constrained to some sense of morality. In fact, a lot of the best literature is stuff that challenges conventional morality, it's the banned books and the obscene ones. And maybe that's what makes it literature? Maybe having a strong sense of morality takes away some of the terrible beauty in literature.

Pretty things are merely pretty, but I think beauty in some way is always terrible because it is not quite of our world.

So, do I get to say I won't read Lolita because I find the premise morally repugnant? I mean, obviously I do, because no one's going to force me to read the book, especially since it's not assigned for a class or anything. And yet, I'm the person I tend to scoff at in these arguments, the person who won't look past something to read something just a little beyond herself.

Nafisi makes the argument that great literature is in essence revolutionary and threatening, especially to a means of government like that in Iran, which is why they must censor it. It's funny. People, esp. people in the sciences, will deride the humanites and say it's just words. It's just pictures. Literary theory is just futzing around and mental masturbation and the like. But it must be important, or why would governments burn books? Why the Cultural Revolution in China? Why ban books? There must be some import to people having that imaginary room of their own, even, or especially, if it's only through words or moving pictures or brushstrokes.

Other things the book made me think about: how much of the oppression of women was oppression, how much was the author's anger? Not that I am saying it was not oppression, because I cannot imagine living in a place in which I could be caned for not wearing a veil because the sight of my hair might drive a man to unseemly lust and somehow it would be my fault. This makes me angry on a very, very basic level. But it was interesting having some of her other, religious students' views, espeically the women, and their ambivalence to the Islamic government. I don't know. I never know with these things. How much can outside countries interfere? Obviously this has very relevant parallels with Iraq and etc. Can the US be a world police force? Should it? Because just reading about it, it feels so wrong to me on so many levels that I want to yell out that it should be changed, that they should not force people, especially the women, to live like that, but who would change it?

And the government made me so angry, made me remember going to school and how strict the rules were and how stupid they seemed -- girl's hair must be so long. Skirts must be so long. Of course, boy's hair had to be so long as well. Of course, it is nothing like the situation there, but I remember how much those stupid arbitrary rules would piss us off, and I cannot imagine living like that every day. The boy will laugh at me and say I am American to the core, no matter how much I go around yelling that sometimes I do not like the nation (well, present leaders, you know, intl. policy and etc). And yet, is it only people exposed to America who would be angry? I doubt it. Most of all it reminded me of the Cultural Revolution, a completely secular but no less scary totalitarian government.

So. Not much of a book overview, but more of what the book provoked in me.

It is a good book, for those who are wondering ;).

Links:
- [livejournal.com profile] tenemet's review
- [livejournal.com profile] keilexandra's review

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