2009 Books
Inspired by drachin8's post along these lines, I thought I'd make a list of the best books I read in 2009. I read a lot last year thanks to studying for comps and doing research for my dissertation (in addition to just wanting to read, of course) and posted reviews of some of them here and probably even more on my goodreads page.
Here, in the order in which I read them, are the books that made the biggest positive impact on me last year (by which I mean I gave them five stars on goodreads):
1. Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley
2. Watchmen by Alan Moore
3. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.
4. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Záfon
5. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad
6. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Teaching with Your Mouth Shut by Donald Finkel
8. How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
9. A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey
10. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
11. Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Despite my general preference for novels, this list includes quite a few other types of books, including short stories, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction (on feminism, science, and education).
And here is a list of all the books I read in 2009 organized by month and accompanied by their star ratings.
January:
Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer (What a book to start the year with!) - 1 star
I Went to Vassar for This?, Naomi Neale - 2 stars
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins - 4 stars
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA - 3 stars
Women Who Love Too Much, Robin Norwood - 2 stars
Games People Play, Eric Berne - 2 stars
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach - 4 stars
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm - 4 stars
The Wall Around Eden, Joan Slonczewski - 4 stars
SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas - 2 stars
Someplace to Be Flying, Charles de Lint - 3 stars
February:
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. Nalo Hopkinson - 4 stars
Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley - 5 stars
Oleanna: A Play, David Mamet - 2 stars
March:
Watchmen, Alan Moore - 5 stars
To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, Joanna Russ - 4 stars
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr. - 5 stars
Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Joan Bolker - 3 stars
Blindness, José Saramago - 4 stars
Has Feminism Changed Science?, Londa Schiebinger - 3 stars
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Záfon - 5 stars
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks - 3 stars
April:
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. - 3 stars
Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation, ed. M. Mayberry - 3 stars
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz - 3 stars
Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, Vicki Kirby - 2 stars
Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Rosi Braidotti - 1 star
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning - 5 stars
Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives, Sandra Harding - 4 stars
Modest@Second Millennium: FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, Donna Haraway - 3 stars
May:
Sundiver, David Brin - 3 stars
Startide Rising, David Brin - 4 stars
The Uplift War, David Brin - 3 stars
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson - 4 stars
City of Pearl, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Crossing the Line, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks - 4 stars
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin - 5 stars
June:
Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree, Jr. - 4 stars
Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin - 4 stars
The World Before, Karen Traviss - 3 stars
Matriarch, Karen Traviss - 3 stars
Ally, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Judge, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Daughter of Elysium, Joan Slonczewski - 4 stars
July:
Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, Donald Finkel - 5 stars
August:
The Children Star, Joan Slonczewski - 3 stars
Brain Plague, Joan Slonzcewski - 3 stars
Little Brother, Cory Doctorow - 4 stars
We Who Are About To, Joanna Russ - 3 stars
How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ - 5 stars
Uglies, Scott Westerfeld - 4 stars
Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, Sally Miller Gearhart - 2 stars
Peeps, Scott Westerfeld - 4 stars
Women of Wonder: SF Stories by Women about Women, ed. Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
Mutagenesis, Helen Collins - 3 stars
Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall - 3 stars
More Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
Other Nature, Stephanie A. Smith - 4 stars
The New Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent - 4 stars
The Shore of Women, Pamela Sargent - 4 stars
A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey - 5 stars
Survival, Julie E. Czerneda - 4 stars
Migration, Julie E. Czerneda - 3 stars
Regeneration, Julie E. Czerneda - 3 stars
Ammonite, Nicola Griffith - 4 stars
The Children of Men, P. D. James - 3 stars
Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison - 2 stars
Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias, Judiath A. Little - 4 stars
Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine, Susan Merrill Squier - 2 stars
The Women Who Walk Through Fire: Women's Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susanna J. Sturgis - 3 stars
Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek - 3 stars
Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction, Jane Donawerth - 4 stars
Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Rachel Blau DuPlessis - 2 stars
Into the Forest, Jean Hegland - 5 stars
Women of Wonder, the Contemporary Years, ed. Pamela Sargent - 4 stars
The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss - 3 stars
Feminism and Science Fiction, Sarah Lefanu - 3 stars
NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, Constance Penley - 4 stars
September:
Life, Gwyneth Jones - 4 stars
Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality, Karen Newman - 3 stars
A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction, Robin Roberts - 2 stars
Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Marleen S. Barr - 1 star
The Clewiston Test, Kate Wilhelm - 4 stars
After the Science Wars, Keith Ashman - 2 stars
The Baby Merchant, Kit Reed - 3 stars
Inventing Women: Science, Technology, and Gender, Laurie Smith Keller - 2 stars
Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda McIntyre - 3 stars
Daughters of a Coral Dawn, Katherine V. Forrest - 4 stars
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone - 4 stars
Floating Worlds, Cecelia Holland - 1 star
Grass, Sheri S. Tepper - 4 stars
Raising the Stones, Sheri S. Tepper - 4 stars
The FIfth Sacred Thing, Starhawk - 2 stars
Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey - 4 stars
October:
Journey, Marta Randall - 2 stars
2666, Roberto Bolaño - 2 stars
W3: Women in Deep Time, Greg Bear - 2 stars
Before the Frost, Henning Mankell - 3 stars
The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, Ariel Gore - 3 stars
Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern - 4 stars
Provoking Feminisms, Judith A. Howard - 3 stars
Refiguring Life, Evelyn Fox Keller - 3 stars
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross - 2 stars
The Flight from Science and Reason, Martin W. Lewis - 3 stars
November:
Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology: An Examination of Gender in Science, Cassandra L. Pinnick - 3 stars
A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women, ed. Connie Willis - 3 stars
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood - 4 stars
The Hidden Side of the Moon, Joanna Russ - 3 stars
Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman - 5 stars
From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western LIterature, Roslynn D. Haynes - 2 stars
Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress - 4 stars
LIfting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science, Linda Jean Shepherd -1 star
Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, Londa Schiebinger - 4 stars
The Golden Space, Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
I, Zombie, Curt Selby - 3 stars
The Color of Distance, Amy Thomson - 3 stars
Carrion Comfort, Dan Simmons - 3 stars
December:
In the Woods, Tana French - 4 stars
Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett - 3 stars
A Gift Upon the Shore, M. K. Wren
Caught in a Still Place, Jonathan Lerner - 3 stars
Dinosaur Planet, Anne McCaffrey - 3 stars
Dinosaur Planet Survivors, Anne McCaffrey - 2 stars
The Far Side of Evil, Sylvia Engdahl - 4 stars
Cloned Lives, Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
The Likeness, Tana French - 4 stars
Barbary, Vonda McIntyre - 3 stars
Mirabile, Janet Kagan - 4 stars
New Eves: Science Fiction about the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow, ed. Janrae Frank - 2 stars
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, Dorothy Bryant - 2 stars
Tesseracts Eleven, ed. Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips - 3 stars
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold - 2 stars
Solution Three, Naomi Mitchison - 3 stars
Light Raid, Connie Willis - 3 stars
Daughters of Earth: Three Novels, Judith Merril - 4 stars
Whew. It's crazy to me that some months I read so many books and then in July I only read one book. Crazy.
Here, in the order in which I read them, are the books that made the biggest positive impact on me last year (by which I mean I gave them five stars on goodreads):
1. Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley
2. Watchmen by Alan Moore
3. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.
4. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Záfon
5. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning by Karen Barad
6. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Teaching with Your Mouth Shut by Donald Finkel
8. How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
9. A Paradigm of Earth by Candas Jane Dorsey
10. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
11. Halfway Human by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Despite my general preference for novels, this list includes quite a few other types of books, including short stories, plays, graphic novels, and nonfiction (on feminism, science, and education).
And here is a list of all the books I read in 2009 organized by month and accompanied by their star ratings.
January:
Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer (What a book to start the year with!) - 1 star
I Went to Vassar for This?, Naomi Neale - 2 stars
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins - 4 stars
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA - 3 stars
Women Who Love Too Much, Robin Norwood - 2 stars
Games People Play, Eric Berne - 2 stars
Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Mary Roach - 4 stars
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm - 4 stars
The Wall Around Eden, Joan Slonczewski - 4 stars
SCUM Manifesto, Valerie Solanas - 2 stars
Someplace to Be Flying, Charles de Lint - 3 stars
February:
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, ed. Nalo Hopkinson - 4 stars
Doubt: A Parable, John Patrick Shanley - 5 stars
Oleanna: A Play, David Mamet - 2 stars
March:
Watchmen, Alan Moore - 5 stars
To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, Joanna Russ - 4 stars
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr. - 5 stars
Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Joan Bolker - 3 stars
Blindness, José Saramago - 4 stars
Has Feminism Changed Science?, Londa Schiebinger - 3 stars
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Záfon - 5 stars
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks - 3 stars
April:
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. - 3 stars
Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation, ed. M. Mayberry - 3 stars
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz - 3 stars
Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, Vicki Kirby - 2 stars
Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Rosi Braidotti - 1 star
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning - 5 stars
Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives, Sandra Harding - 4 stars
Modest@Second Millennium: FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, Donna Haraway - 3 stars
May:
Sundiver, David Brin - 3 stars
Startide Rising, David Brin - 4 stars
The Uplift War, David Brin - 3 stars
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson - 4 stars
City of Pearl, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Crossing the Line, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks - 4 stars
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin - 5 stars
June:
Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree, Jr. - 4 stars
Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin - 4 stars
The World Before, Karen Traviss - 3 stars
Matriarch, Karen Traviss - 3 stars
Ally, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Judge, Karen Traviss - 4 stars
Daughter of Elysium, Joan Slonczewski - 4 stars
July:
Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, Donald Finkel - 5 stars
August:
The Children Star, Joan Slonczewski - 3 stars
Brain Plague, Joan Slonzcewski - 3 stars
Little Brother, Cory Doctorow - 4 stars
We Who Are About To, Joanna Russ - 3 stars
How to Suppress Women's Writing, Joanna Russ - 5 stars
Uglies, Scott Westerfeld - 4 stars
Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, Sally Miller Gearhart - 2 stars
Peeps, Scott Westerfeld - 4 stars
Women of Wonder: SF Stories by Women about Women, ed. Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
Mutagenesis, Helen Collins - 3 stars
Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall - 3 stars
More Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
Other Nature, Stephanie A. Smith - 4 stars
The New Women of Wonder, ed. Pamela Sargent - 4 stars
The Shore of Women, Pamela Sargent - 4 stars
A Paradigm of Earth, Candas Jane Dorsey - 5 stars
Survival, Julie E. Czerneda - 4 stars
Migration, Julie E. Czerneda - 3 stars
Regeneration, Julie E. Czerneda - 3 stars
Ammonite, Nicola Griffith - 4 stars
The Children of Men, P. D. James - 3 stars
Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison - 2 stars
Feminist Philosophy and Science Fiction: Utopias and Dystopias, Judiath A. Little - 4 stars
Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine, Susan Merrill Squier - 2 stars
The Women Who Walk Through Fire: Women's Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susanna J. Sturgis - 3 stars
Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek - 3 stars
Frankenstein's Daughters: Women Writing Science Fiction, Jane Donawerth - 4 stars
Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers, Rachel Blau DuPlessis - 2 stars
Into the Forest, Jean Hegland - 5 stars
Women of Wonder, the Contemporary Years, ed. Pamela Sargent - 4 stars
The Dazzle of Day, Molly Gloss - 3 stars
Feminism and Science Fiction, Sarah Lefanu - 3 stars
NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America, Constance Penley - 4 stars
September:
Life, Gwyneth Jones - 4 stars
Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality, Karen Newman - 3 stars
A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction, Robin Roberts - 2 stars
Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Marleen S. Barr - 1 star
The Clewiston Test, Kate Wilhelm - 4 stars
After the Science Wars, Keith Ashman - 2 stars
The Baby Merchant, Kit Reed - 3 stars
Inventing Women: Science, Technology, and Gender, Laurie Smith Keller - 2 stars
Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. Vonda McIntyre - 3 stars
Daughters of a Coral Dawn, Katherine V. Forrest - 4 stars
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Shulamith Firestone - 4 stars
Floating Worlds, Cecelia Holland - 1 star
Grass, Sheri S. Tepper - 4 stars
Raising the Stones, Sheri S. Tepper - 4 stars
The FIfth Sacred Thing, Starhawk - 2 stars
Black Wine, Candas Jane Dorsey - 4 stars
October:
Journey, Marta Randall - 2 stars
2666, Roberto Bolaño - 2 stars
W3: Women in Deep Time, Greg Bear - 2 stars
Before the Frost, Henning Mankell - 3 stars
The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, Ariel Gore - 3 stars
Making Shapely Fiction, Jerome Stern - 4 stars
Provoking Feminisms, Judith A. Howard - 3 stars
Refiguring Life, Evelyn Fox Keller - 3 stars
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Paul R. Gross - 2 stars
The Flight from Science and Reason, Martin W. Lewis - 3 stars
November:
Scrutinizing Feminist Epistemology: An Examination of Gender in Science, Cassandra L. Pinnick - 3 stars
A Woman's Liberation: A Choice of Futures By and About Women, ed. Connie Willis - 3 stars
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood - 4 stars
The Hidden Side of the Moon, Joanna Russ - 3 stars
Halfway Human, Carolyn Ives Gilman - 5 stars
From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western LIterature, Roslynn D. Haynes - 2 stars
Beggars in Spain, Nancy Kress - 4 stars
LIfting the Veil: The Feminine Face of Science, Linda Jean Shepherd -1 star
Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine, Londa Schiebinger - 4 stars
The Golden Space, Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
I, Zombie, Curt Selby - 3 stars
The Color of Distance, Amy Thomson - 3 stars
Carrion Comfort, Dan Simmons - 3 stars
December:
In the Woods, Tana French - 4 stars
Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett - 3 stars
A Gift Upon the Shore, M. K. Wren
Caught in a Still Place, Jonathan Lerner - 3 stars
Dinosaur Planet, Anne McCaffrey - 3 stars
Dinosaur Planet Survivors, Anne McCaffrey - 2 stars
The Far Side of Evil, Sylvia Engdahl - 4 stars
Cloned Lives, Pamela Sargent - 3 stars
The Likeness, Tana French - 4 stars
Barbary, Vonda McIntyre - 3 stars
Mirabile, Janet Kagan - 4 stars
New Eves: Science Fiction about the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow, ed. Janrae Frank - 2 stars
The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, Dorothy Bryant - 2 stars
Tesseracts Eleven, ed. Cory Doctorow and Holly Phillips - 3 stars
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold - 2 stars
Solution Three, Naomi Mitchison - 3 stars
Light Raid, Connie Willis - 3 stars
Daughters of Earth: Three Novels, Judith Merril - 4 stars
Whew. It's crazy to me that some months I read so many books and then in July I only read one book. Crazy.