Sticky: Books read Samhain 2009-Samhain 2010
Same rules as last year.
- Samuel Turvey, Witness to Extinction: How we failed to save the Yangtze River Dolphin - this book is really angry. But reading it, I can understand why. Just spectacular incompetence and lethargy from almost all concerned.
- Margaret Mittelbach, Michael Crewdson and Alexis Rockman, Carnivorous Nights: On the trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - I think the thylacine's extinct. I wish it wasn't. And I think there's room for hope - as one person in the book pointed out, they know there's foxes in Tasmania, and they're actively looking for those, and they don't find them that often. And Tasmanian Devils clear up any corpses. But still. Seventy-three years, and not one photo or body?
- David Owen and David Pemberton, The Tasmanian Devil: A unique and threatened animal - I don't understand how these are supposed to be ugly. Their faces remind me of bats' faces. They're adorable. Shame about the facial tumours.
- Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood - this is awesome. I was really happy when I realised it was in Oryx and Crake-verse.
- Rich Fulcher, Tiny Acts of Rebellion: 97 almost-legal ways to stick it to the man - get in touch with your inner sociopath.
- Clive Stafford-Smith, Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the secret prisons - horrifying. The author's one of the good guys, though.
- Robert Webb and David Mitchell, This Mitchell and Webb Book - kind of awesome.
- Jamie Delano, Hellblazer: The Fear Machine - okay-written, for Delano. Not too much purple prose.
- Garth Ennis, Hellblazer: Bloodlines - and incredibly polite, for Ennis!
- Mike Carey, Lucifer: Morningstar - neat ending. And I still love Mazikeen a very lot.
- Liz Sayce, From Psychiatric Patient to Citizen - very interesting. About the theory and practice of reducing discrimination against the mentally ill. Focuses on how we might follow the broader disabled rights movement, all social-model and fuck-your-pity.
- Dana Becker, Through the Looking-Glass: Women and Borderline Personality Disorder - obviously I read this one because I needed to argue against a certain new diagnosis. It's very good - emphasises how BPD is used against women who either fight back or become traumatised by their position in a crappy power relationship, and how behaviours suddenly start being labelled borderline after the diagnosis is applied. Essential reading for anyone given this particular label.
- Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression - a re-read. Started it last year, then ignored it for months. Still the best book on depression out there.
- Matthew Johnstone, I Had A Black Dog - it's a picture book about depression. No, stop. It's brilliant.
- Matthew and Ainsley Johnstone, Living With A Black Dog - its sequel, for partners, friends and family-members. Actually better than the first book. The pictures are wonderful - the depressed person is always looking away from their worried partner, towards the black dog, which pretty much sums it up. And the picture of the depressed person walking away, with pawprints instead of footprints, is particularly powerful.
- Neil Gaiman, The Books of Magic - y hello thar, John Constantine!
- Robert Twigger, Angry White Pyjamas - a guy bumming around Japan takes up aikido, and finds himself enrolling on the year-long intensive course favoured by the Japanese riot police. Awesome.
- Murat Kurnaz, Five Years of My Life: An innocent man in Guantanamo - fucking horrifying. Particularly given that they knew he was innocent six months into his imprisonment, and kept torturing him and telling him he was a terrorist anyway. History will not look on us kindly for this shit.
- Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber - I really like retellings of fairy stories. It's an awesome genre. And Carter's a lovely writer.
- Lawrence Miles, Doctor Who: Interference, Book One
- Lawrence Miles, Doctor Who: Interference, Book Two - I think I actually understood what was going on.
- Max Brooks, World War Z: An oral history of the zombie war - Like his survival guide, frighteningly detailed and plausible.
- Max Brooks, The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete protection from the living dead - reread. Still awesome.
- Andy Riley, Great Lies to Tell Small Kids - wonderful.
- Taras Grescoe, Bottomfeeder: How the fish on our plates is killing the planet - this book shocked me. I had no idea things were that bad.
Yeah, I ground to a halt with this post about January. Still getting through a book every couple of days, but never remembering to write them down. Restarting as of mid July...
- Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick 4: Don't Split the Party
- Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick 0: On the Origin of PCs
- Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick -1: Start of Darkness
- Rich Burlew, Order of the Stick 1: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools - several years after everybody else, have got into Order of the Stick.
- Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself
- Joe Abercrombie, Before They Are Hanged
- Joe Abercrombie, The Last Argument of Kings - collectively the First Law Trilogy. Heard good things about it on TV Tropes; always a fan of stuff on the miserable end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism. Ferro, Ardee, Glokta and Dogman are my favourites. Also, when Black Dow thinks you've crossed a line, you've really fucking crossed it.
- Jim Butcher, Summer Knight
- Jim Butcher, Storm Front - giving the Dresden Files a go. I like. Why the hell can't the female-protagonist urban fantasy be more like this? I'm so sick of Mills & Boon with vampires.
- Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Instructions - god I love this book. I even have a quote from it on my wall about my altar.
- Garth Ennis and John McCrae, The Boys: Herogasm - whoa, this is supposed to be a side comic? Didn't they just explain the entire political plot?