last of the 2006 book list
Jan. 4th, 2007 03:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
geekchick- Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme, Chris Roberts. An impulse purchase at B&N while waiting to meet Chris for dinner after the Jim Webb rally in November. It's billed as "the seamy and quirky stories behind favorite nursery rhymes". Very entertaining read, although I wish there'd been more than one page of references. For the Americans, this edition even has a handy glossary in the back to help translate English to American. =)
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeleine L'Engle. I found a hardback copy of this for 50 cents at the local library book sale, and figured that I'd pick it up to re-read it. The more I read though, the more I'm convinced that I never read this as a kid. *hangs head in shame* I find it hard to believe that I didn't, since I know I read A Wrinkle in Time, but I have no memory of this story at all.
- A Child's Book of True Crime, Chloe Hooper.
- Our Girl in Washington: A Kate Boothe Novel, Michele Mitchell. One of the reviews posted on Amazon calls this "the chick-lit version of Syriana"; I don't think it comes anywhere close to the level of "Syriana", frankly, but it's certainly entertaining enough. Plausible? Eh, I don't think so. I like Kate though, I'll probably hunt down "The Latest Bombshell" (the previous novel) at some point.
- Irresistible Forces, Catherine Asaro (editor). I didn't expect to see Catherine Asaro and Lois McMaster Bujold filed in "romance", but that's where this was. It's an anthology of romantic science fiction and fantasy ("speculative romance", Asaro calls it in the introduction). I kinda like that sort of thing, but you'll want to avoid it if you can't stand to get romance in your science fiction or vice versa.
- Tangled Up In Blue, Joan Vinge. This is set during the time of The Snow Queen, towards the end of Arienrhod's reign, and features BZ Gundhalinu. You can read it as a stand-alone story, although a lot of things that are mentioned in passing will make more (any) sense if you are familiar with the universe already. It was a quick read and I enjoyed it as I have all the other books by Vinge that I've read, but I though The Snow Queen was much more rewarding in terms of character development. It felt short, but maybe that was because there weren't as many subplots to keep track of.
- Love Kills, Ed Gorman (editor). I was reading the next-to-last story when midnight hit on New Year's Eve, but I'm still going to count this as a 2006 book since I was almost done. An anthology of stories about the ways in which love can kill, literally or figuratively. There are stories from Lawrence Block, Ruth Rendell, Donald Westlake, and 28 others. Not terribly cheerful ("Pretty Eyes" by Evan Hunter was particularly depressing I thought), but hopefully you'd not be expecting otherwise just based on the title alone.
Seventy-five for the year, not too bad. Not nearly as much as I used to read before the advent of the Intarwebs, but much better than my count of 45 for last year.
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Date: 2007-01-04 08:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 01:12 pm (UTC)Well, fiction, anyway.
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Date: 2007-01-04 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 02:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 02:36 pm (UTC)I didn't even know about the sequels to AWiT until I was in college, when I read them.
Hell, I didn't even hear about Daniel Pinkwater until I was out of college for 5+ years!
They all would have been stupendous to read back in the day.
CU
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Date: 2007-01-04 04:53 pm (UTC)Indeed!
Hell, I didn't even hear about Daniel Pinkwater until I was out of college for 5+ years!
I am positive I've never read anything by Daniel Pinkwater ever.
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Date: 2007-01-04 05:01 pm (UTC)Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars
The Hoboken Chicken Emergency
The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pinkwater
CU
Hrrm
Date: 2007-01-04 04:10 pm (UTC)I thought Heavy Words was amusing but was hoping for a little more.
There are actually four books about the Murray family by L'Engle:
* A Wrinkle in Time (1962) (Newbery Award Winner) ISBN 0-374-38613-7
* A Wind in the Door (1973) ISBN 0-374-38443-6
* Many Waters (1986) ISBN 0-374-34796-4
* A Swiftly Tilting Planet (1978)[1] ISBN 0-374-37362-0
One of my EXs was an absolute fanatic for her stuff so she introduced me to a ton of her stuff I had never seen before.
Re: Hrrm
Date: 2007-01-04 04:55 pm (UTC)Exactly! It was funny, it was interesting, but it wasn't particularly detailed or, so far as I can tell, research-intensive.
There are actually four books about the Murray family by L'Engle:
Yep, the edition I picked up has a nifty family tree sort of thing showing which of her characters are in which books.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 09:00 pm (UTC)The "Snow Queen" is one of my favorite books of recent years. It is a shame there are only four :)