Wow, it's been a long time since I've made a post on here, hasn't it? Anyway, I'm doing the books meme that I got from incandescent. The idea is to list 10 books you've read that made a huge impression on you and/or stayed in your mind for a long time after you read them. When you're done, tag up to 10 people (including the person who tagged you ( Read more... )

I've always been a fan of horror fiction, and Robert Aickman is a name I'd been hearing about for a while.  He wrote a number of short stories, and I recently picked up the Kindle edition of his collection The Wine-Dark SeaI had really high expectations going into this book, but I felt like it was a pretty mixed bag.  Some of the pieces, like "The ( Read more... )

While not as well-known as The Chronicles of Narnia or Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters has a lot of his trademark wit and philosophy.  It's a very short book--I finished it in a couple of days--but packs a complete story into that space ( Read more... )

While Beauty Slept, by Elizabeth Blackwell, is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale.  Blackwell does a great job of incorporating elements from the original story in skewed or unexpected ways.  She also brings the reader into the complex life of a royal court, with its elaborate courtesies, rigid social hierarchies, and constant jockeying ( Read more... )

The Luminaries is Eleanor Catton's first novel, and it's an ambitious one, with a mix of historical fiction and mystery.  One of the things I liked about it is the unusual choice of setting: it's set in New Zealand in the 1860's, at which time that island was experiencing a gold rush.  It begins with the arrival of a man who, after an arduous ocean ( Read more... )

Karin Tidbeck is a Swedish author who's been publishing short stories in her native language for about ten years.  In 2012, she released her first short story collection in English, called Jagannath.  It's a short book, and most of the stories are fairly brief as well, but she manages to pack a lot into that small space.  At first I assumed that ( Read more... )

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, is considered to be a classic of modern Russian literature.  Bulgakov wrote it during the time of the Soviet Union, and because of its portrayal of the corruption and absurdities of that regime, it actually wasn't published in a non-censored form until many years after Bulgakov's death ( Read more... )

For about the past two years, I've been working my way through an anthology of all the Sherlock Holmes stories, plus all the non-Sherlock Holmes stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published, a little at a time--I'd read a couple of stories at a time in between other books.  Recently, I finished the anthology ( Read more... )

I read 36 books in 2013, and I figured I'd do a little summary:

Favorite: Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follet
Least Favorite: Blindness, by Jose Saramago

Genre Breakdown
General Fiction: 8
Fantasy: 7
Horror: 5
Hybrid/Mixed Genre: 5
Nonfiction: 4
Historical Fiction: 3
Science Fiction: 2
Thriller: 1
Mystery: 1

Michael Ondaatje is well-known for having written The English Patient, which won the Booker Prize and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie.  His most recent novel, The Cat's Table, takes place on board a passenger liner traveling from Sri Lanka to England.  The main character is a young boy named Michael, and this could easily be ( Read more... )