All the Books I Finished in 2012
If you want to find out why I'm listing the books I finished this year, I'll direct you to the equivalent post from last year, in which I explained what the rules were and why I started listing books as I finished reading them. I decided to keep it going. It's kind of interesting to keep track
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Three of the books on the list are by Jasper Fforde, my favorite author. I read each of them before their US publication dates. In the case of The Last Dragonslayer and Song of the Quarkbeast, I'll just say that The Song of the Quarkbeast is the second in that series, and The Last Dragonslayer only came out in the US this October. Song of the Quarkbeast is coming out in the US... later this year, maybe? The Woman Who Died A Lot was released in the UK a couple of months or so before its US publication, and I read it a couple of weeks before it was released here, courtesy of a friend who'd bought it when he was in London for the Olympics.
I bought My Name Is Will from the author at Ren Faire. It was written by one of the Reduced Shakespeare Company guys. I saw them do Hamlet at the Ren Faire. It was awesome.
Redshirts is fantastic. Jonathan Coulton wrote the theme song.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic. I was in the middle of it when Ray Bradbury died. He was a curmudgeonly old fart in his old age, but of course people don't talk about that now. His complaints about how we have "too many cell phones and too many internets" are less important than his literary contributions to science fiction.
Red Prophet is the second book in a series. I read the first one, Seventh Son, years ago. It's taking me a long time to track down the individual books in order. (It's not terribly high priority. I've got so much I want to read!)
Time Rogue is a cheap paperback I found at Logos. It's not great, but fun. My copy is between 30-40 years old if memory serves, and was poorly bound. As I read it, pages started falling out in clumps as I reached them. I didn't lose any pages, but I don't think any are still attached to the binding.
Agatha H and the Clockwork Princess is the second volume in the novelizations of Girl Genius. I bought it from the authors at Comic-Con. They signed it for me. I wrote about Girl Genius here shortly after I started reading it.
A Discovery of Witches was recommended by my mother, among other people. I enjoyed it, thought there were some biological discussions that tripped my bullshit science meter. However, I resolved those by considering the main character to be an unreliable narrator who didn't really understand the biology that was being explained to her. I'm borrowing the sequel now, and plan on reading it when I get a chance.
One of my favorite movies, Blade Runner, is based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, so I've wanted to read it for ages. It's really different than the movie, not just in the "they took this out and they changed that" sense, but in the basic message and basic character relationships and plot structure. It's a weird and wonderful book and a classic piece of science fiction.
Bellwether was loaned to me by the same person who loaned me Passage, another Connie Willis book, the previous year. So far these are the only two books I've read by Connie Willis. She's good. Bellwether is about studying trends, and how fads develop from one person doing something to it being the popular thing for everybody to do.
Lots of people have been talking about The Hunger Games lately. I really liked it. I haven't seen the movie, and though I'd like to see it, I'm much more eager to read the other books in the series. It's really good future dystopia science fiction. I love that stuff.
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