Books read in 2007.
I read only 35 37 books last year?!
EDITED on Sunday, 11 May 2008 at 1929 EDT: ..'cause I forgot that play by Willy Snakeshit and that blow-off Lovecraftian pastiche meets cyberpunk thing by Charles Stross. The fact that I only remembered the Stross book -- The Atrocity Archives -- last week should tell you how memorable it was.
OK, granted, I'm not counting re-reading a bunch of essays in Gore Vidal's National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952-1992; noshing through my collections of Pauline Kael's movie reviews; reading up to p. 142 (out of 312 pps.) in John Parker's King of Fools ("The dark truth behind the romantic legend of Edward & Wallis"; HINT: they liked Hitler in particular and the Nazi Party in general, but I knew that already...) -- not sure just why I stopped -- or re-reading up to p. 172 (out of 575 pps.) in Barbara W. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the first fateful month of World War I, The Guns of August (I put this on hiatus because I was increasingly depressed at the parallels between the geo-political situation of 1911 to early 1914 and now); grinding my way through a little over half of the first book in Norma Lorre Goodrich's bull-goose looney, purportedly non-fictional Arthurian series, King Arthur (p. 222 -- and an excruciatingly looooong 222 pages they were, when you're annotating the index [though not for place names] and attempting to do some rudimentary fact-checking -- out of 406 pps.); reading three chapters (47 pps. out of 576 total) in Edward Robb Ellis's A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929-1939 (not really sure why I didn't just start at the beginning and read all of this one either), or the introductory/editorial matter of a couple dozen assorted books that I bought last year, which have to add up, at a conservative estimate, to a hundred pages. I'm also not counting the comic books (98% of which were superhero or horror comic books) that I read for the first time (back issues! gotta love 'em -- mostly 'cause the current stuff SUXXX, dude!) or re-read, or the magazines that I subscribe to (uh, let's see: Harper's Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Smithsonian [this last one was a gift, and I'm not re-upping it -- mostly 'cause money's so tight right now, not because I don't like it], and G-Fan), or the magazines and newspapers that I cherry-pick on the Net or occasionally buy off the rack (The Economist -- whose publishers consider to be a newspaper, even though it is clearly printed and bound in a magazine format -- Rolling Stone, Blender, The Walrus -- apparently Canada's answer to The New Yorker -- and one or two other news mags whose titles escape me at the moment).
And, granted, my job pretty much owned my ass last year, what with the quarterly SOX audits (if you don't know what "SOX" is, consider yourself lucky that you don't have to get directly involved with it) I got to perform; and, granted, my wife's health was unusually dodgy in 2007, even for her, and she went in and out of hospital several times and had a lot of doctor's appointments, even for her (all of the former and the bulk of the latter of which I accompanied her).
But still: only 35 37 books? And 4 of those are re-reads; 5 of those are graphic novels (2 of which are re-reads, but 1 of which is The Black Dossier); 2 of those are graphic texts ('cause they're non-fiction, but they're still comic books); and 1 of which is a photography book, which means "not a whole lot of words to distract from the purty pick-chers."
Anyway, here's the run-down:
The above comes to 9,771 10,151 pages. No, I don't normally keep a running tally of the number of pages I read; I just felt like flagellating myself some more.
Also not included are the two books I've got going: Colin Jones's Paris: The Biography of a City (up to p. 284 out of 566 pps., all of which I read in 2007) and Kenneth Robeson's ("house name" of Lester Dent) Doc Savage: The Annihilist (up to p. 98 out of 138 pps., roughly 60 or 70 pages of which were read in 2007; this is Doc Savage #31, BTW, and you'll never convince me that Stan Lee wasn't thinking of this title when he and Jack Kirby dreamed up Annihilus, the insectile humanoid from the Negative Zone, as the villain for Fantastic Four Annual #6: the one where Reed and Sue's then-unnamed kid is born, and Reed, Ben and Johnny take a roadtrip to the Negative Zone to cop Annihilius's Cosmic Control Rod to save the lives of Sue and the baby; what's a little theft when it's for such a good cause?). I always try to strike a fine balance between culture and cheese. (No guesses as to which I learn more from or enjoy more.)
I'm not putting up links to the books I actually reviewed this time; maybe I'll edit this post and do it, but I'm too damned depressed to do it right now.
EDITED on Sunday, 11 May 2008 at 1929 EDT: ..'cause I forgot that play by Willy Snakeshit and that blow-off Lovecraftian pastiche meets cyberpunk thing by Charles Stross. The fact that I only remembered the Stross book -- The Atrocity Archives -- last week should tell you how memorable it was.
OK, granted, I'm not counting re-reading a bunch of essays in Gore Vidal's National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952-1992; noshing through my collections of Pauline Kael's movie reviews; reading up to p. 142 (out of 312 pps.) in John Parker's King of Fools ("The dark truth behind the romantic legend of Edward & Wallis"; HINT: they liked Hitler in particular and the Nazi Party in general, but I knew that already...) -- not sure just why I stopped -- or re-reading up to p. 172 (out of 575 pps.) in Barbara W. Tuchman's Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the first fateful month of World War I, The Guns of August (I put this on hiatus because I was increasingly depressed at the parallels between the geo-political situation of 1911 to early 1914 and now); grinding my way through a little over half of the first book in Norma Lorre Goodrich's bull-goose looney, purportedly non-fictional Arthurian series, King Arthur (p. 222 -- and an excruciatingly looooong 222 pages they were, when you're annotating the index [though not for place names] and attempting to do some rudimentary fact-checking -- out of 406 pps.); reading three chapters (47 pps. out of 576 total) in Edward Robb Ellis's A Nation in Torment: The Great American Depression, 1929-1939 (not really sure why I didn't just start at the beginning and read all of this one either), or the introductory/editorial matter of a couple dozen assorted books that I bought last year, which have to add up, at a conservative estimate, to a hundred pages. I'm also not counting the comic books (98% of which were superhero or horror comic books) that I read for the first time (back issues! gotta love 'em -- mostly 'cause the current stuff SUXXX, dude!) or re-read, or the magazines that I subscribe to (uh, let's see: Harper's Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, Smithsonian [this last one was a gift, and I'm not re-upping it -- mostly 'cause money's so tight right now, not because I don't like it], and G-Fan), or the magazines and newspapers that I cherry-pick on the Net or occasionally buy off the rack (The Economist -- whose publishers consider to be a newspaper, even though it is clearly printed and bound in a magazine format -- Rolling Stone, Blender, The Walrus -- apparently Canada's answer to The New Yorker -- and one or two other news mags whose titles escape me at the moment).
And, granted, my job pretty much owned my ass last year, what with the quarterly SOX audits (if you don't know what "SOX" is, consider yourself lucky that you don't have to get directly involved with it) I got to perform; and, granted, my wife's health was unusually dodgy in 2007, even for her, and she went in and out of hospital several times and had a lot of doctor's appointments, even for her (all of the former and the bulk of the latter of which I accompanied her).
But still: only 35 37 books? And 4 of those are re-reads; 5 of those are graphic novels (2 of which are re-reads, but 1 of which is The Black Dossier); 2 of those are graphic texts ('cause they're non-fiction, but they're still comic books); and 1 of which is a photography book, which means "not a whole lot of words to distract from the purty pick-chers."
Anyway, here's the run-down:
- B. Traven (translated from German into English by Desmond Vesey) -- General From the Jungle (1940; 1972; 280 pps.)
- Carl Hiaasen -- Hoot (2002; 292 pps.) [YOUNG ADULT]
- Richard Aleas -- Little Girl Lost (2004; 221 pps.)
- Max Allan Collins -- Two For the Money (OMNIBUS edition: 2004; 383 pps. total [w/ an afterword by the author]; consists of: Bait Money [1973; 184 pps.] and Blood Money [1981; 189 pps.])
- Richard Matheson -- Shrinking Man (1956; 188 pps.)
- Anthony Trollope -- The Small House at Allington (1864; Oxford University Press The World's Classics edition, ed. & w/ intro by James R. Kincaid, 1980; 674 pps. +14 pps. prefatory matter)
- Isaac Asimov -- Foundation (1951; 200 pps.)
- Roger Lancelyn Green -- Myths of the Norsemen: Retold From the Old Norse Poems and Tales (ORIGINAL TITLE: The Saga of Asgard (1960); 1970; 208 pps.)
- Steve Vance w/ Dave Stern; various artists -- The Big Book of Vice (1999; 191 pps.) {GRAPHIC TEXT}
- Alan Moore (plot only), Peter Hogan, Yanick Paquette, Karl Story -- Terra Obscura (2004; 148 pps.) [GRAPHIC NOVEL]
- Peter Gethers -- The Norton Trilogy (OMNIBUS edition: 2005; new intro to collection: 4 pps.; consists of: The Cat Who Went to Paris [1991; 194 pps.]; A Cat Abroad [1993; 243 pps.]; and The Cat Who'll Live Forever [2001; 252 pps.]
- Sanche de Gramont -- The Strong Brown God (1975; 350 pps.)
- Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke -- Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryana Myth and Neo-Nazism (1998; 269 pps.)
- Edgar Box (Gore Vidal) -- Death Before Bedtime (1952; 169 pps.)
- Joseph Payne Brennan -- The Shapes of Midnight (1980; 176 pps.; includes a 7-pg'ed intro by Stephen King) [SHORT STORIES]
- Richard Hammer -- The Illustrated History of Organized Crime (1989; 378 pps.)
- Jeph Loeb & Tim Sale -- Batman: The Long Halloween (1998; 304 pps.) [GRAPHIC NOVEL] {RE-READ}
- Peter David & George Perez -- The Incredible Hulk: Future Imperfect (1994; 94 pps.) GRAPHIC NOVEL] {RE-READ}
- Eric Ambler -- The Levanter (1972; 244 pps.)
- Peter M. Lenkov & Frazer Irving -- Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained (2003; 96 pps.) [GRAPHIC NOVEL]
- William Shakespeare -- Coriolanus (c. 1608; 35 pps.: teeny type, double columns)
- Patrick O'Brian -- The Mauritius Command (1977; 348 pps.)
- Peter & Oriel Caine -- Paris Then and Now (2003; 144 pps.) [PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK]
- Charles Stross -- The Atrocity Archives (2004; 345 pps.)
- Marion Zimmer Bradley -- The Heritage of Hastur (1975; 381 pps.)
- Marion Zimmer Bradley -- The Planet Savers (1962; 99 pps.; OMNIBUS: includes the short story "The Waterfall" (13 pps.))
- Larry Gonick -- The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1: From Columbus to the U.S. Constitution (2007; 259 pps.) {GRAPHIC TEXT}
- Sax Rohmer -- The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (U.S. title: The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu) (1913; 220 pps.) {RE-READ}
- Robert E. Howard -- Kull: Exile of Atlantis (2006; 317 pps. [includes 17 pg'ed essay {"Atlantean Genesis"} by Patrice Louinet], +11 pg'ed intro by Steve Tompkins, +½ pg'ed foreword by the illustrator, Justin Sweet) [SHORT STORIES]
- Isaac Asimov -- Foundation and Empire (1952; 224 pps.)
- Zane Grey -- Cabin Gulch (originally published in abridged form as The Border Legion in 1916) (2006; 338 pps., including 5 pg'ed intro by Jon Tuska & 2 pg'ed note about the author)
- Anthony Trollope -- The Last Chronicles of Barset (1867; Oxford University Press's The World's Classics ed. 1986; edited & w/ intro & endnotes by Stephen Gill; 920 pps., +14 pg'ed intro & +1 pg'ed note on publication history)
- Mickey Spillane -- My Gun is Quick (1950; 174 pps.)
- Ian Fleming -- Casino Royale (1953; 1988 reprint: +6 pg'ed intro by Anthony Burgess; 189 pps.) {RE-READ}
- Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill -- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier (2007; 190 pps.) [GRAPHIC NOVEL w/ interpolated textual material]
- Henry Brinton -- Purple-6 (1962; 192 pps.)
- Donald Hamilton -- Line of Fire (1955; 159 pps.)
The above comes to 9,771 10,151 pages. No, I don't normally keep a running tally of the number of pages I read; I just felt like flagellating myself some more.
Also not included are the two books I've got going: Colin Jones's Paris: The Biography of a City (up to p. 284 out of 566 pps., all of which I read in 2007) and Kenneth Robeson's ("house name" of Lester Dent) Doc Savage: The Annihilist (up to p. 98 out of 138 pps., roughly 60 or 70 pages of which were read in 2007; this is Doc Savage #31, BTW, and you'll never convince me that Stan Lee wasn't thinking of this title when he and Jack Kirby dreamed up Annihilus, the insectile humanoid from the Negative Zone, as the villain for Fantastic Four Annual #6: the one where Reed and Sue's then-unnamed kid is born, and Reed, Ben and Johnny take a roadtrip to the Negative Zone to cop Annihilius's Cosmic Control Rod to save the lives of Sue and the baby; what's a little theft when it's for such a good cause?). I always try to strike a fine balance between culture and cheese. (No guesses as to which I learn more from or enjoy more.)
I'm not putting up links to the books I actually reviewed this time; maybe I'll edit this post and do it, but I'm too damned depressed to do it right now.