Books: A Year in Review

No, don't ask me what books published this year were good. I'm lousy with publishing dates.

However, a quick check through my archives revealed that I read around 40+ books for the year 2005, 17 of which I reviewed for this blog:

1. Ignacio Padilla's Shadow Without A Name
2. David Gemmell's Morningstar
3. Liz William's Nine Layers of Sky
4. Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon
5. Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist
6. Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
7. China Miéville's Iron Council
8. Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby
9. Jeff Vandermeer and Forrest Aguirre, eds. Leviathan Three
10. Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade
11. George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails
12. M. John Harrison's Viriconium
13. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
14. Felisa H. Batacan's Smaller and Smaller Circles
15. Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys
16. Peter Straub's lost boy lost girl
17. Bob Shaw's The Ragged Astronauts

And there's 10 books that I never got around to reviewing:

1. Steph Swainton The Year of Our War
2. Steve Aylett Atom
3. Ian McLeod's The Light Ages
4. Graham Joyce The Facts of Life
5. Peter Straub ed. Conjunctions 39, The New Wave Fabulists
6. Howard Waldrop Going Home Again
7. Jeffrey Ford The Physiogonomy
8. Kelly Link Stranger Things Happen
9. Brian Aldiss Malacia Tapestry
10. Michael Chabon ed. McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

I also managed to finish a number of series, reading the last few books:

1. The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix
2. The Dragoncrown War quartology by Michael Stackpole
3. The Chosen of the Waterborn duology by J. Gregory Keyes

There were 10 books that were part of a series I haven't completed (like Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin's works). Add to that four or five books I'm currently reading or stopped halfway, one or two that I didn't bother with because I already reviewed a prior work, and I think...

... damn, my reading speed has slowed down. No wonder my to-be-read pile is killing me.

Interesting enough, I look at the books I've read and the only thing that was published this year were Gaiman's Anansi Boys, Jordan's Knife of Dreams and Martin's A Feast of Crows, all top-scorers at the New York Times Bestseller Lists.

For me though, my best read for this year was hands-down Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen. Despite great reads by Clarke, Mieville, Harrison, Calvino and Joyce, this was definitely no contest, my friends, no contest at all.