2016 Books in Review

[cynic51]

This year I read 59 prose books and 9 graphic novels, for 68 in total. That's the most prose novels since 2010 and the fewest graphic novels since 2011. I didn't finish this year's poetry collection, which led to some ambiguousness about whether I should continue reading the Economist. Since I'm not likely to finish my current book in the next ten hours, here's the full list.

* = graphic novel
Italics = favorites

William Shakespeare - 2 Henry IV - M 1/04
Haruki Murakami - What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - T 1/05
Nate Silver - The Signal & the Noise - M 1/11
Grant Peterson - Just Ride - W 1/13
Alan Schwarz - The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics - M 1/18
J.K. Rowling - The Casual Vacancy - Su 1/24
Patricia C. McKissack & Frederick McKissack, Jr - Black Diamond: The Story of the Negro Baseball Leagues - M 1/25
Whitley Streiber & James Kunetka - Warday - T 1/26
*Brian Azzarello & Lee Bermejo - Joker - Su 1/31
Simon R. Green - Once in a Blue Moon - W 2/03
Margaret Atwood - MaddAddam - F 2/05
John Allen Paulos - Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences - M 2/15
Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) - Crime and Punishment - M 2/29
Lois McMaster Bujold - Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen - S 3/05
William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing - Su 3/06
*Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Javier Rodriguez & Peter Krause - Daredevil (San Fran) - Su 3/06
Dan Epstein - Stars & Strikes: Baseball & America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76 - T 3/08
Helene Wecker - The Golem and the Jinni - T 3/15
Susan Slusser - 100 Things A's Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die - Su 4/10
David Byrne - How Music Works - S 4/16
Bill Bryson - Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language of the United States - F 5/06
Nisid Hajari - Midnight's Furies - Su 5/22
John Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath - T 5/24
Charles Yu - How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe - T 5/24
Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent - S 5/28
Neil Postman - Amusing Ourselves to Death - S 6/11
Charles P. Pierce - Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free - W 6/15
Andrew Cartmel - The Vinyl Detective: Written in Dead Wax - M 6/20
Mickey Bradley & Dan Gordon - Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends, and Erie Events - W 6/22
Ransom Riggs - Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - F 7/01
Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me - S 7/02
Paul M. Barret - Glock: The Rise of America's Gun - Su 7/03
Nicholas Dawidoff - The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg - M 7/11
*Howard Tayler - Schlock Mercenary v.12: Force Multiplication - W 7/13
Robert Caro - The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York - M 7/25
Ransom Riggs - Hollow City - F 8/05
Zane Grey - Robbers' Roost - T 8/09
William Kent Krueger - Windigo Island - W 8/10
Robert M. Edsel & Bret Witter - The Monuments Men - R 8/11
Louis L'Amour - North to the Rails - R 8/11
Richard A Knaak - Black City Saint - S 8/13
Andre Norton - Huon of the Horn - Su 8/14
Peter Wyden - Day One: Before Hiroshima and After - S 8/20
MacKinlay Kantor - If the South Had Won the Civil War - S 8/20
*Zach Weinersmith - Science: Ruining Everything Since 1543 - S 8/20
*Zach Weinersmith - Religion: Ruining Everything Since 4004 BC - Su 8/21
*Zach Weinersmith - Save Yourself, Mammal! - Su 8/21
*Zach Weinersmith - The Most Dangerous Game - Su 8/21
Ransom Riggs - Library of Souls - Su 8/21
*Zach Weinersmith - The Holy Bible Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness - R 8/25
William Shakespeare - Henry V - Su 9/04
Michael Lewis - The Big Short - M 9/05
John Brunner - The Jagged Orbit - S 9/17
James Salter - Burning the Days - M 9/19
William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar - Su 9/25
Ferrett Steinmetz - Fix - M 10/03
John Seabrook - The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory - S 10/22
Sandi Kahn Shelton - Kissing Games of the World - S 10/29
Ransom Riggs - Tales of the Peculiar - M 10/31
Questlove - something to food about: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs - Su 11/06
WP Kinsella - The Thrill of the Grass - Su 11/13
David Sedlak - Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World's Most Vital Resource - R 11/24
Ed Yong - I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life - Su 11/27
Robert Jackson Bennett - City of Stairs - M 11/28
Robert Jackson Bennett - City of Blades - T 12/06
Ron Bergman - Mustache Gang - T 12/13
*Christopher Baldwin - One Way - T 12/13
Isabel Wilkerson - The Warmth of Other Suns - T 12/20

I read a couple of long books on holiday this year. Most notably, I read the Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, which I enjoyed enough that I gave it to my father as a birthday gift. I also read Crime and Punishment, about which was once said: "Dostoyevsky wrote a book, and I read it." I kid, I enjoyed it a great deal.

Way back at the end of 2008 I resolved to read my way through the complete works of William Shakespeare. I made good progress on that front as I read through 2 Henry IV, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V and Julius Caesar. One per quarter is an acceptable rate, even if I do have half the complete works or more remaining. Henry V continues to be a personal favorite of mine.

I read virtually no comics this year, and most of the ones I did read were obtained when I supported kickstarters for various web comics I enjoy. Most notable of these was a little joke book put together by Zach Weinersmith of SMBC called "The Holy Bible Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness" which was very funny, and also brief. This is the first year in some time when I didn't read my way through some series one trade after another.

Other highlights of the year:
- It's a tiny bit of a shame that J.K. Rowling was already a household name. I would have liked to have seen if The Casual Vacancy could have succeeded on its own merits. I suspect that it could have, although most readers probably not take away the plot's dependence on SQL Injection as being a high point.
- Lois McMaster Bujold put out the first new book in the Vorkosigan Saga in four years. I know that some people prefer the earlier space opera character of the series. I loved that stuff, but I also really enjoy the character driven books we've gotten recently, and in that respect Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen was a solid entry in the canon. Also, it's about damn time we got another book about Cordelia, who is only the most interesting female character in all of science fiction.
- The Golem and the Jinni finally bubbled off my slush pile. The magical tale set in turn of the century New York City combined fantasy, Judaism, and historical accuracy into one enjoyable novel. Supposedly Helene Wecker is working on a sequel.
- I've reached the point where every time I finish a Steinbeck novel I'm a little sad, because it means I'm that much closer to having read everything the man wrote. This year I finally tackled his most famous book, The Grapes of Wrath. Perhaps it's not up to the standards of East of Eden or The Moon is Down, but is still a compelling page turner some 70 years after it was released.
- bart_calendar wouldn't shut up about Ransom Riggs' series about magical people called peculiars, so I read the main trilogy and a short story collection. Fantasy lovers will find it worth their time, but I felt that the first book and the short story collection were the best.
- I was waiting for a train in Boston and decided to purchase Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I have read on The Atlantic for years. I'm not it's possible for me as a white man to under racism in the way that Coates does, but this book took me one small step farther toward understanding.
- When I was home I borrowed Day One: Before Hiroshima and After from my father. Peter Wyden wrote this in the early 1980s as a comprehensive history of the road to Hiroshima. It covers the race to build the bomb and then the after effects of its use on Hiroshima. And given current events, it may even be more topical now than it was in the Cold War.
- When theferrett published his first novel, I told him I'd buy the first one to honor his achievement, but any subsequent purchases depended on the prior books not sucking. They have not, and his third book in the 'Mancer series, Fix, most manifestly did not suck. It brought the trilogy to a fine conclusion.
- Anyone interested in the music industry will find John Seabrook's The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory to be a fascinating of the history of top 40 in the late 1990s and early 00s. It covers the death of studio musicians and the rise of super producers and beat makers in a well written, interesting fashion. For an alternate view, David Byrne's How Music Works is a collection of essays on how the music industry, and indeed music itself, works. As with most essay collections, some are great and some aren't. I particularly liked the one about how the space the music was going to be performed in has an impact on the music; e.g., if the most prestigious gig is an arena, then you'll have a lot of albums that will sound great when played live in an arena and not so great in a punk club.
- WP Kinsella is most famous for the book that became the movie Field of Dreams, which led me to Iowa. He also wrote extensively about baseball in his other works. I picked up The Thrill of the Grass because it has a story in it titled "The Last Pennant Before Armageddon", in which a mid-1980s Cubs manager becomes convinced that if the Cubs clinch a World Series berth the world will end in nuclear fire. If you're an honorable man, what do you do in that situation? As we know, the Cubs won it all this year. So far, the world is still intact. Sadly, Kinsella passed away seven weeks before the Cubs took the title. In any event, the stories in the collection were enjoyable. It helps to be a baseball fan, but for most of them you just need to have fallen in love at some point, or wanted to.
- I read the first two books of the Divine Cities trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett. City of Stairs had some of the best fantasy world building I've seen in a long time, and City of Blades was better. I look forward to the release of the third book, City of Miracles, early in 2017. I highly recommend this to everybody who loves fantasy.
- Everybody else in my family had already read The Warmth of Other Suns, which is a critically acclaimed history by Isabel Wilkerson. In it, she follows the lives of three African-Americans as they migrated from the Deep South to Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles. She fills in their stories with plenty of historical context and shallower dives into the lives of other migrants from the first World War to the 1970s. Wilkerson shows how the racism in the Deep South led to the migration, and then how the racism in the North led to many of the current racial problems in America. If Ta-Nehisi Coates's book is all anger and and passion and despair about racism today, Wilkerson's is the matter of fact story of how millions of African-Americans moved north to get away from racism, and despite enormous net improvements to their life, still encountered it in their new homes. I'm not sure which vision is more depressing. In any event, The Warmth of Other Suns is a must read.