Top 10 reads for 2010
I try to do this at the end of every year but I was late with 2010!! Sigh. well, better late than never,
2010 marked yet another year when I failed to read for my age, despite all attempts otherwise. It also marked the year when my favourite YA section was slowly taken over by trashy romance teenage-angst style featuring one supernatural being or another - which only added to my absolute HATE for Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. Admittedly, this is probably also the year in which I read the least - looking around at my bookshelf, I really had a pathetic 2010. (New Year Resolution Number 2: Read more.) I don't know how many books I read this year - I can't even remember when I read what for most part - but here's my top ten list 2010.
10. Coming me up at number ten is Ally Carter's Heist Society - which was a departure from my usual reading material. Kat Bishop, a kick ass female protagonist, had wanted out of her family business, which was quite commendable given that she did come from a family of top class thieves and apparent connoisseurs of fine arts. When a mobster accused her dad of stealing his priceless art collection, Kat found herself back in the merry band, and she had only one thing to do: find the paintings and steal them back before the mobster put out a hit on her father. The book then picked up pace with Kat assembling her teenage team of crooks, travelling across Europe and planning the heist of the century.
Admittedly I picked this up because I was hooked on Leverage and the show was on hiatus. The premise, even the dynamics within the team, reminded me a tad of a less sophisticated and suave version of the drama series, partly because the characters are limited by their age. That said, the characters were well written - Kat is one of the few female protagonists who does not turn me off - and the plot was fast moving and a departure from the run-of-the-mill coming-of-age stories.
9. If I had been as diligent with my reviews as I claimed I would be in 2010, I'd not be stuck now on, wrecking through my brain on what books I actually read in 2010 and what the list of nominees for 2010 Top Reads are. Sigh. At number nine, after some careful deliberation (ie. what came to mind) is Rick Riordan's The Red Pyramid. This is somewhat unexpected I guess, because Riordan usually ranks fairly high up my list, with his ability in keeping his characters intelligent but not old beyond their years, his plot fast paced and logical, and his setting richly described but not meanderingly so. It helps that his books are often times well researched and his world building skills one of the best in the genre these days. With all that weight of expectations, I supposed Red Pyramid fell a little short.
Carter and Sadie Kane are siblings who have spent their lives apart, but when their father, a Egyptologist and archaeologist Dr. Julius Kane, disappeared quite literally in a puff of smoke, they found themselves racing against time to get him back. The journey revealed a mysterious society, House of Life, that had been looking out for the blood of the pharaohs. It is remarkable that, despite how much I love his writing and how I have committed most of Percy Jackson to memory, I struggle to remember the plot in the book. As it is, what stood out for me were the characters, particularly Bast and even then not particularly strongly. Part of the problem may be Riordan's choice to toggle between Sadie and Carter's first person points of view - the plot became disjointed in my mind. What saved the book for me was again Riordan's world building. I can't remember the plot, but I can remember the tapestry - the Egyptian gods still in their ancient roles.
Still better than the lot of books I picked up in 2010. :P
8. This is when I head into grey area. At this point I know what is going into the top 3 but am less certain about the 4-8. Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl sneaks in at number eight. This is a retelling that stayed fairly faithful to the fairytale of the same name (tongue twister of a sentence) - princess betrayed by her servant girl, worked as a goose girl, cried for her beheaded horse, got her prince. In fact it stayed so faithful that the servant girl was eventually punished in the same way as in Grimm's Fairy Tales. No soft cottony gloves.
This was the book that started me on a hunt down of all Shannon Hale's books - it was that well written. I love her books to varying degrees, even though the longer she stayed in the universe of The Goose Girl, the more stale the plot line became. Books suffer from the one-too-many sequel syndrome too. A special mention though: Her graphic novel, Rapunzel's Revenge, is rather like a less intense Fables for younger readers. Good place to start my younger cousins on graphic novels.
7. Edging just past Shannon Hale is E. D. Baker's The Frog Princess, because I am not childish at all. This was the book that preceded Disney's The Frog Prince, and it surpassed Hale, because the retelling of the fairytale was more imaginative and the characters are a tad more multifaceted, with a lot more room to develop. If you have watched The Frog Prince, this story will be fairly familiar - except it has thrown in a few more witches, wizards, dragons and many funny throwaway lines. The princess in question is a clumsy, blundering and completely unprincessy princess, who was suckered into kissing a frog - the rest of the story writes itself as they seek to undo the spell.
Starting from this book, I hunted down the entire collection by Baker, and here is the other reason why she ranked above Hale: her sequels keep surprising and I constantly look forward to the next book. That said, Hale's writing style and story line probably appeal to a wider age range.
To give an indication of just how out of my age range I am reading, I had six year olds asking me about the books. I finished both Hale and Baker's collections in a day or two.
6. At number six, finally a book that is not meant for kids. *coughs* Bill Geerhart's Little Billy's Letters: An Incorrigible Inner Child's Correspondence with the Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Bewildered. Very adult, I know. In this, screenwriter Geerhart was between jobs when he decided to write letters in juvenile handwriting and send them to the famous and infamous asking some of the most incorrigible questions, and lo and behold, they replied! Among my personal favourites are his letters to a convicted murderer on how he can murder his sister, and to a brilliant lawyer, who I think defended OJ, on how he could plead his case regarding his sister's damaged doll. I love this book - a hilarious and easy read. And such a wonderfully smart premise.
5. Coming in at number five, I have Bill Willingham's Peter & Max, a book that I kept putting off buying because of the hefty price tag, but gave in eventually because the lure of Fables was just too great. For the record, I am a huge Fables fan. I always love retellings as the rest of the list will attest to, and Bill Willingham created a wonderful world where characters from well loved fairy tales and fables lived among us (Mundys, because, well, we are mundane and magicless). The series of graphic novels is the best I've read since Sandman and all that Neil Gaiman ever chose to work with and is highly recommended. This installation, however, is a novel that focused on two characters who did not have much of a role to play in the graphic novels: Peter (Piper), Bo Peep and Peter's hardly-known brother, Max.
Peter and Max fell out massively, after Max caused the death of the family and tried to kill Peter in a jealous fit, after their father chose to gift Peter, the younger son, with the family's magic flute, Frost, which gives the flutist the powers to advert danger. The bitter sibling rivalry played out over the course of the story, interjected by the love story between Bo and Peter, and drew in familiar tales and rhymes such as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater and Little Bo Peep.
World creation is a rare skill with authors methinks - worlds that are so complete that you can plain forget where you are, what your reality is and for those few minutes live in that suspended space - and Bill Willingham does that for me.
4. Rounding off the grey area is a yet another retelling because I'm not predictable at all: Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. I read the titular short story for a writing class I took in the summer, which was itself an attempt to prod myself out of my ratty comfort zone where reading is concerned. The richness of her writing, and particularly her fantastic reference to music in that piece caught me and I went on an Angela Carter craze (yesh, there is a pattern here... and goes towards explaining why I do not have a good gauge of how many books I read in a year.) The retellings are refreshing, especially if one is a feminist (which I am most decidedly not), but it was her mastery of the language that really got to me.
What else can one say about Angela Carter?
2. And the countdown to the top three begins. Michael Pryor's The Laws of Magic: Moment of Truth comes in at a joint-second place. I love this series to teensy weeny bits and I think this had made my top 10 list a couple of years in a row. I am extremely upset with Random House for changing the cover design at the FIFTH book of the series, damn editors, but they publish Pryor so I guess I have to live with them. If you are a dork with a love affair with European history (check), have some understanding of the world wars, love snarky and well-developed characters who actually hold intelligent conversations with one another (check), like the occasional spy novels but fine them too much brawn and not enough brains, enjoy a good plot and have hours to spare over a weekend, PICK UP THIS SERIES.
This is a story set in an alternative world rather resembling Europe prior to the First World War, where magic is part of the everyday life, much the same way as any other physical science. Pryor renders all the familiar, from submarines to diplomatic exchanges, unfamiliar with his overlay of magic. Aubrey, the son of the Prime Minister of Albion, finds himself struggling to stay one step ahead of the unravelling politics and his arch enemy, all the while toggling his studies and a budding romance - just so he could avert the war,
Warning: Book Five ends off with a cliffhanger. I really dislike Pryor now. Or his editors. Whoever is responsible.
2. The other book tied for second place is Rick Riordan's The Lost Hero. I love Percy Jackson and it was great revisiting the world Riordan's created. This one was a lot better than the Red Pyramid in that the characters were more memorable, the plot a lot more cogent and well, I am more biased towards Greek and Roman myths. I thought Riordan's decision to play on the similarities and transitions between the Greek and the Roman myths was a stroke of genius. I can't WAIT for the next book.
I am refraining from giving any form of synopsis for this book, largely because once I start I'd give the entire plot away. Suffice to say, a less witty but grittier Percy Jackson.
I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT BOOK!!!!
1. For all the joyfully happy and young books on my list, the book that hit my number one read for 2010 is one of the most depressing reads. It is a complete departure from what I usually read, not least because I do not like apocalyptic or dystopian literature much (reality is sad enough, thank you very much), but also because I dislike minimalist writing. BUT Cormac McCarthy's The Road was so beautifully written, and so very evocative, that I cannot justify putting the book anywhere but at the top. I've reviewed the book extensively elsewhere, but in short, why this book deserved top read status: it created a world that was so jarringly horrific and devoid of humanity, filled with cannibals struggling to survive that it would have been a horror movie, but all that captured me the whole way through was the relationship between the father and his son as he fought against his impending death (from a terminal condition) to equip his son with the best chance of survival. By the end of it, I was still left unsure as to how much of it was real and how much it was the father's paranoia. My favourite scene of the book was the father contemplating whether it would be better to kill his son than to let him fight for survival alone.
And so there you have it- my favourite reads for 2010. Hopefully I'll remember to keep a list for 2011 and save me some grief by the end of the year, ha.
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