feste_sylvain

I read slowly. I read thirteen (13) books by the end of 2008, including two short ones (but they offset the ridiculously long ones). I want to do better than that in 2009. (Should I include things like Electric Velocipede, which are effectively short-story collections?)

Books in italics are the ones I'm currently reading, but have not finished yet. I will switch that to an underline, date when I completed it, and then add a microreview.

1. Twilight, Stephanie Meyer, January. Teen romance. The vampires sparkle in the sun. But Meyer nails the fluttery, obsessive feelings of teen love. This doesn't make up for Bella being a passive wuss.
   
2. Dead Until Dark, Charlaine Harris, 2/28. This is fun vampire stuff. The main character, Sookie Stackhouse, is a bit of a Mary Sue for the author, but mostly in a good way: she fights back, she takes care of herself and her loved ones, and even spots the dangers in her relationship with Bill Compton.
   
3. Living Dead in Dallas, Charlaine Harris, 3/16. Second in the Sookie Stackhouse series, this is actually two distinct stories which should probably have been two novellas. Still, page-turning fun which doesn't blink at the gore.
   
4. Club Dead, Charlaine Harris, 6/24. Third in the Sookie Stackhouse series, this hangs together better than the previous book, and shows some real character development. Oh, and werewolf biker gang.
   
5. The Magician and the Fool, Barth Anderson, 4/6. Wow. This was recommended to me because of its tarot-based themes, but I found the mind-games even more up my alley.
   
6. Ravens in the Library, anthology, 6/12. This was the benefit book for saveours00j, and IMHO, there was only one clunker in it. This left a very large percentage of winners, some amusing, some breath-taking.
   
7. American-Born Chinese, Gene Yang, 4/30. Great graphic novel of three intertwined stories of Jin, Hanuman the Monkey King, and Danny's Chinese cousin Chin-kee (who embodies the worst of the Chinese stereotypes). Strongly recommended.
   
8. Lightbreaker, Mark Teppo, 7/20. First novel, strongly recommended. Caveats include a first-person narrator who sometimes drops into exposition mode between lines of a conversation, and some dense revelatory research into the arcane. But it's an excellent premise, a great story, and some surprises that can leave you whipsawed.
   
9. Dead to the World, Charlaine Harris, 8/23. Again, she wove in enough plot threads that you never knew which elements were from the main plot and which were from the subplot. I consider this a feature, not a bug. For mind-candy like this, it keeps the mind from knowing exactly what's going on. I'm not sure this would stand on its own without being part of a series, tho.
   
10. Dead as a Doornail, Charlaine Harris, 9/27. By now, we're getting too large a cast of supernaturals around Our Heroine, thus starting to fall prey to the Anita Blake Syndrome. Still fun, tho.
    
11. Only Forward, Michael Marshall Smith, 10/24. Wo. Starts out as mind-blowing science-fiction, then takes a substantial hair-pin turn, and then winds up as just plain mind-blowing. Also contains deep food for thought. Not bad for a self-admitted Phillip Marlowe wanna-be.
    
12. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, 11/5. A brilliant autobiography, in graphic novel form (this trade paperback contained both volumes). It shows what it really means to live under a dictatorship, what it means to grow up detached from all of your roots, and it should make you wonder whether it could happen here. Strongly recommended.
    
13. Definitely Dead, Charlaine Harris.