The Best Books I Read this Year:
In Camelot’s Shadow by Sarah Zettel
A Sorcerer’s Treason by Sarah Zettel
Sorcery & Cecelia -OR- The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer
Rising Stars by J. Michael Straczynski
The Swan’s War by Sean Russell
The Fencing Master by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn
The Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

These are the books that have stuck in my mind througout the year, that I have given or recommended to others, or that I can’t wait to read again. This list does not include books that I reread, otherwise Swordspoint would have been here.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows I Saw this Year:
Batman Begins
The Corpse Bride
Firefly
Iron Monkey

Favorite Places I Visited:
Newport Aquarium, Newport, KY
National Aquarium, Baltimore, MD

Cookbooks I Use Most Frequently:
How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companion: The Essential Cookie Cookbook by King Arthur Flour
Luscious Lemon Desserts by Lori Longbotham
Cookwise by Shirley O. Corriher
The All New, All Purpose Joy of Cooking by Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker, and Irma S. Rombauer
1000 Vegetarian Recipes by Carol Gelles
Alice Medrich’s Cookies and Brownies by Alice Medrich

ADDENDUM the First:
Excluding any books I read today, I read 150 books this year. The power of Excel tells me that this averages out to 12.5 books a month. This also counts The Great Book of Amber as a single book and not ten separate books.

The Thief’s Gamble (1999) Juliet E. McKenna

In the past, I have refused to pick up a series unless I can get all the books in that series. Because there’s little worse than starting a series and then not being about to find the rest of it. However, because I can now order books on-line, and have them delivered to my door at little or no additional cost, I realized that I can start taking a chance on a single book, with the knowledge that I can order the rest of the series even if I can’t find the books locally. So, I picked up The Thief’s Gamble because it looked interesting (and also because the series is completed).

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Sorcery & Cecelia -OR- The Enchanted Chocolate Pot (1988) Patricia C. Wrede & Caroline Stevermer

After putting down a book that looked promising but I found only annoying after the first several chapters, I picked up Sorcery & Cecelia, which I’d put on my wish list because I thought it looked interesting. I thought that I’d just read a couple of chapters before going to sleep, however at midnight I found myself thinking, “just one more chapter and then I’ll go to sleep” until I’d read half the book.

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Preacher Vol 1 Gone to Texas (1996) Garth Ennis

First, a disclaimer. I’m squeamish. In fact, I will walk out of the room during particularly violent scenes in movies, and haven’t watched a horror movie since I was in high school. (Why? Because graphic violence gives me really unpleasant dreams.) Thing is, it all depends upon how the violence is presented as to whether it bothers me or not. Although I had to turn away a couple times, I didn’t really have a lot of problems with Snatch. Sin City bothered me quite a bit. For the end of The Last Samurai and Braveheart I just got up and left the room. Fight Club bothered me in places, but I still liked it. So it’s hard to tell what is going to bother me, and what isn’t.

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Wizard’s First Rule (1994) Terry Goodkind

Michael has been reading Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series for several years now, and has mentioned repeatedly that he thought I should read it. So, with two weeks off from work, I decided I’d read the first book, just to see.

It’s good, and it’s interesting, but I definitely did not like it as much as Michael did.

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The latest rant over at Smart Bitches Who Read Trashy Books got me thinking.
Their complaint is about a romance publisher who is apparently increasing the font size and the margins of books by decreasing the word count.

On one hand, I can understand precisely where they’re coming from–paperback prices are up to $7 or $8 now, which is getting pretty expensive in my opinion, especially when they’re putting out so many books in hardback and trade paperback first.

However.

As far as fantasy books go, I really wish that someone would put a limit on authors. A major peeve of mine is that only a handful of authors seem to be able to complete a story in only one or even two books. Why? It’s not like it’s physically impossible to write a good fantasy story in one book. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett can do it, Charles de Lint does it–in fact he repeatedly manages to do it in short story format.

So why can’t I find single books when I go to the book store? Why is it that books always seem to be Book One in a series? And why is the series more often than not a trilogy? Is this J.R.R. Tolkein’s fault? He wrote The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy and so that’s what everyone else has to do? This is especially maddening with New Authors whom I have never read before. They’re asking me to invest in an unknown not just one book, but three–at least if I want to know how the story turns out.

Why can’t more fantasy authors do what Charlaine Harris and Steven Brust and Terry Pratchett do? Which is write a complete tale in a single book, and then write another complete tale about the same characters in another book. Mystery authors do it all the time–everything is resolved in a single book, but you get to enjoy all your favorite characters again in the next book. Why are fantasy authors incapable of the same thing? Are they so unsure of the loyalty of their fans that they want to make sure they’ve got you for a minimum of $24?

All I know is that sometimes I don’t want invest the time to read three or five or ten books. I just want to read a single book, and then move on (usually because I’ve got something else I need to be doing). Why do they make this so hard for me?

The Great Book of Amber (1999) Roger Zelazny

If you’re wondering why I haven’t written any reviews recently, The Great Book of Amber is why. A compilation of all ten of Roger Zelazny’s Amber books, The Great Book of Amber comes in at 1258 pages.

This omnibus edition contains the first Amber series: Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon, Sign of the Unicorn, The Hand of Oberon, The Courts of Chaos; and the second Amber series: Trumps of Doom, Blood of Amber, Sign of Chaos, Knight of Shadows, Prince of Chaos.

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For those keeping track, (that would be me) my total number of books read so far this year is 139. That’s up from 115 total last year.

However, I read a lot more comics this year, and I can read most comic compilations in less than an hour. And no year tracks the number of books and journal articles I had to read for school.

So the number of books read may not accurately reflect the volume of reading material for the year.

And now, I must decide what I want to read next.

Watchmen (1987) Alan Moore

So, after so many people recommended it to me, I feel guilty saying it. But. I didn’t like Watchmen. Not at all.

I’m not saying it isn’t good, and it isn’t compelling, because it is, on both counts, I’m just saying I didn’t like it. I kept wishing it was over but I also kept reading till I found out what happened.

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The Innkeeper’s Song (1993) Peter S. Beagle

I read The Innkeeper’s Song several years ago–probably soon after it was published, and I picked it up solely on the strength of it’s cover. I’m a sucker for fantasy books with strong female, and the three women on the cover–especially Lal on the left–look strong. Well, I wasn’t sure about the woman in the middle, but she turned out okay.

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The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (1998) Alexander McCall Smith

My mom got me the first three books in this series for Christmas, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading the first book until now.

This is a rather unusual book for a mystery. It’s almost a collection of short stories tied together by an overall arc. The book tells the story of Mma Ramotswe life and how she came to be the only detective agency in Botswana, as well as her first few cases as she settles into being a detective.

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The Sandman: The Dream Hunters (1999) Neil Gaiman & Yoshitaka Amano

The Dream Hunters is my favorite Sandman story. It’s not a comic proper, but is instead an illustrated story.

And the illustrations are gorgeous. I tend to do little more than glance at illustrations, but the art here is impossible to ignore.

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A Moorland Hanging (1996) Michael Jecks

Okay, I give up. At least for now. Michael Jecks is a good storyteller, I will give him that, but his writing… The Merchant’s Partner was slightly better than The Last Templar as far as his writing style, but A Moorland Hanging is just as frustrating to read as the first book.

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The Merchant’s Partner (1995) Michael Jecks

This is the second Knights Templar Mystery, and I’m still undecided about whether I’ll continue the series.

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