December books

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 14:16:52 GMT

Happy New Year, everyone! I will repeat what I said on twitter: may all your endeavours prosper and your beards never grow grey. ♥ This year I resolve to be a little braver, kinder and happier than I was last year, and also to clean the marzipan off my laptop's touch pad.

Here are the books I read in December! I sort of ran out of steam with writing about them, so some comments are more desultory than others.

1. The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman I enjoyed this a fair bit, but I thought it was a little marred by one aspect of the ending: (skip) Scarlet and her mother (ie half the female characters) getting memory wiped because they "couldn't deal" with the knowledge. NO THANK YOU.

2. Doctor Who: The Janus Conjunction - Trevor Baxendale This was pretty good, very tense and with good Doctor characterisation, but it was also a little more gruesome than I really liked, and pretty macho, too: only one female character (other than Sam) who basically does everything that the one woman does in this sort of book.

3. Have His Carcase - Dorothy L. Sayers I really loved this, especially the tone of the ending (I must admit my eyes glazed over in the codebreaking bit; this is more me than it, though). It's another one I'd heard on the radio but couldn't quite remember the details of, so there were a lot of fun "oh, yes, I remember where this is going!" moments.

4. The Far Side of the World - Patrick O'Brian I feel like I'm hitting a really strong patch with this series; they're all good but this one was really excellent.

5. Delusions of Gender - Cordelia Fine Highly recommended: a fantastic read, if slightly terrifying at times. (I would have liked a little more investigation of the binary idea of gender itself, though.)

6. Bernice Summerfield: Parallel Lives I always feel that I am half a step behind with the Benny series, like there's parts of the puzzle I'm missing. That being said, this was a particularly good one, I thought. The different tones of the three novellas and the linking narrative complemented each other without clashing, which was impressive.

7. The Siege of Krishnapur - J.G. Farrell Rather a grim read for Christmas day, but still a great book.

8. I Shall Wear Midnight - Terry Pratchett ♥! Oh, this was just wonderful: it tied up the threads of the previous Tiffany books beautifully, had some lovely tie-ins to the wider Discworld, and had so many things that made me happy: Preston the trainee guard! (skip) Letitia turning out to be a witch herself and bonding with Tiffany! The fact that witchcraft is something Tiffany's worked at, not something that comes naturally to her! Wise, funny, optimistic, just great.

9. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury [reread] Really great, powerful book, though personally I would have prefered it to be a little less male-centric: not even George Eliot made it into the list of "authors we must preserve", let alone any other women.

10. Murder Must Advertise - Dorothy L. Sayers Quickly became one of my favourites - I really loved all the advertising stuff, and also the ending was really well handled too: (skip) I love that there was no moustache-twirling Bad Guy, that we (and Wimsey) could really sympathise with Tallboy, despite what he'd done.

11. The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall Hugely entertaining! Sets up some great concepts and just romps right through them, taking some great characters along for the ride. I was not entirely pleased with the ending, but I think that's inevitable in this sort of book.

12. Ash - Malinda Lo I've been looking forward to this one for ages, and I was not disappointed: a really lovely retelling of Cinderella, and a great last book of the year.

Total number of books read in 2010: 103, or possibly 106, or 114, depending on how you count A Dance to the Music of Time. (ETA: wait, I read the fourth About Time book this year too! That absolutely counts. So make that 104, 106 or 115 books this year. :D)

Total number of books read so far in 2011: 1. It was Geraldine MacCaughrean's The White Darkness, and I recommended it: a tough, strange, involving, moving, wonderful book.

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a vintage year for scoundrels

December books