Monday, January 07, 2008

Tops of 2007

My reading material for the year 2007 was hodge-podge: genre primarily but with a few historical and literary handfuls. (Which means that I should balance this out with more non-genre readings for the year 2008.) Included in here were some interesting reads, some fascinating concepts, and some books that I couldn't really finish.

The previous years, I had been citing a 'best-read of the year' book of the but in the interest of list-making, I thought I'd expand that list a bit. So my top 10 standalone books of 2007 (which had books published both prior and in 2007) in no particular order:

  1. Ted Chiang: Story of your Life and Other Stories
  2. Steven Pressfield: Gates of Fire
  3. Paul Witcover: Tumbling After
  4. Midori Snyder: The Innamorati
  5. John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, editors: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology
  6. Jay Lake: Trial of Flowers
  7. Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives
  8. Theodora Goss: In the Forest of Forgetting
  9. Richard Garfinkle: Celestial Matters
  10. Patrick o'Leary: The Gift

There were five other books that were part of a series but were still quite impressive enough that I'd recommend the overall series to anyone passing by. These include:

  1. Richard Morgan: Broken Angels
  2. John Wright: Fugitives of Chaos
  3. Sarah Monette: Melusine
  4. Joe Abercrombie: The Blade Itself
  5. Barry Hughart: Bridge of Birds

So, my top 'best-book read' for this year? I'd say the Goss collection but really, none really stuck to my mind like the previous years, hence the top 10 list. The closest was Morgan's entry, the 2nd of his Takeshi Kovac books. It's got enough high-tech weaponry to appeal to the military geek in me but moreover, Morgan also set up enough questions about living and dying in the future that it left me musing long after the last page.

In other reading news, I still can't believe that my reading pace had virtually slowed to nil for the month of December that I only managed to finish one book. But the good news-- if you can regard it as good news-- is the influx of new books I received/bought/ordered for that month (and the previous couple of months due to recent sales).

*sigh* I love having new books but times like these that I realize this may be too much of a good thing.

2 comments:

Sean said...

I hate to sound like an irritating killjoy, but Steven Pressfield's novel is entitled "Gates of Fire", not "The Gates of Fire" as originally reported in your post.

(By the way: Yes, I liked it too. It's good stuff.)

banzai cat said...

Heh you mean your obsessive need to attend to each and every detail? ;-)

(And yes, damn me for taking so long to read it then.)