Thursday, January 09, 2014

Favorite Reads of 2013

I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into this post existing.  I still fight with conflicting motivation to write, and to specifically write about books and stories and people telling grand lies for money.  But, I am still reading voraciously and last year I read 126 books and I wanted to acknowledge, somehow, the best of what I read.  Or, more accurately, what I enjoyed the most out of what I read.  There won’t be a Hugo nomination post, because I’m not a supporting member of Worldcon this time around and I don’t plan to be this year or next.  There likely won’t be a post where I list out my top nine books read in 2013 or my top nine books published in 2013, though I did always enjoy writing up those entries in years gone by.

Happily, though, I use Goodreads and so I don’t have go through my list of all the books I read during the year and decide which ones I liked best.  I can just click on what I read that I rated 5 stars, pull out the comic books and voila!  We have list!   

This is in no particular order, so unless I get extra ambitious, don’t expect ranking. 

I will say, though, that if I absolutely had do a ranking, the top of the list would include those books with stars below.  Think of it as a bonus mark of distinction.

The First American: Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, by H. W. Brands
Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel
Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
The Inexplicables, by Cherie Priest
*The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach
Defending Jacob, by William Landay
The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson
Red Country, by Joe Abercrombie
Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to Ever-Ending Earth, by Craig Childs
Legion, by Brandon Sanderson
My Share of the Task, by Stanley McChrystal
*The Round House, by Louise Erdrich
The Human Division, by John Scalzi
*N0S4A2, by Joe Hill
*Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, by Michael Moss
Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King
The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes
The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume Three, by Joseph Gordon Levitt (editor)

3 comments:

Bestpaperboy said...

The Art of Fielding was one of the best books of 2012 should have been nominated for Pulitzer. It was that good.

Anonymous said...

Good to see you posting again. Your blog was one of the first that I added to my rss reader way back and you've turned me onto a load of books by awesome authors like Elizabeth Bear. Hope to see you posting more regularly.

All the best.

Joe said...

I'm starting to find my way back to this, so there is a chance. I wouldn't necessarily expect every day posting, but if I sustain where I'm at this week, I should be back to writing much more often.