Sulkyblue's Blog

Every year I intend to read more, and every year I fail. I can't even really claim that I've replaced quantity with quality as looking at the list it is a really quite spectacularly random collection of stuff. I'll make the same resolution again, but this year I'm 'formalising' it in an objective to read 50 pages per day. I'm not sure whether it will be an average, or just a straight pass/fail. It's not a resolution because I firmly expect to fail to meet it, but it's still a worthy aim.

Authors
One of my few successes this year was reading a higher percentage of female authors, 33% up on 27% from last year. The geography of authors however is less good with only English writing authors (65% Brits, 26% American, one from Ireland and one from Canada).
I read considerably more new authors (new to me that is, not necessarily first time authors) than last year (74% vs 50% last year), my favourite of whom was easily Ben Aaronovitch who was also one of only 3 duplicated authors. Returning authors were mostly those who I'm committed to series for (Pratchett, Brust, Atkinson, O'Brian, Fforde) and only Neil Gaiman and Yann Martel were returning authors with no real series.

Genres
Once again, less non-fiction than I'd like, only 18%. Non-fiction takes considerably more time and attention to read and I'm not great at that. I used to try and set aside coffee shop time to read them, but these days that time is eaten up by writing.
Of the fiction, about 50% of it fell into fantasy, science fiction or somewhere in between. I seem to be reading more fantasy these days - plenty of vampires, magic and ghosts on my list, but not a single spaceship! I wonder if it comes down to the attention (and page count) issue again, or the fact that most of my books come from Waterstones' 3-for-2 tables which doesn't feature so much SF.

Years
21% of books were from this year, including plenty that I hadn't even realised were that recent - again mostly thanks to the Waterstones' 3-for-2 (which I'm clearly going to miss terribly). Book of the publishing year for me was actually my favourite book of my overall reading year - Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch.
With 21% of the books I read published this year, 29% from last year and another 32% from the rest of the 2000s, that makes 82% from the latest decade. I usually try to read a bit broader range than that, picking off some of the older classics, but this year I read just 2 from the 90s, and 1 each from 60s, 70s and 80s.

Reviews
I don't tend to rate books, but when I compile these lists I go back over my reviews and pull out the books I hated, the books I adored and whatever is left in the middle. This year 15% I would recommend people not touch with a barge pole.

• Kraken by China Miéville - messy, overstuffed and smug. I know others that love it, but I found it an utter slog.


• Solar by Ian McEwan - purportedly a comedy, not in the slightest bit funny or interesting.


• Doctor Copernicus by John Banville - neither historically accurate nor fictionally enjoyable


• Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis - apparently one of Time Magazine's best 100 English language novels since 1923, utter utter tedious rubbish.


• Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt - painfully slow and dense and weirdly lacking in actual maps.

44% of my reads fall into the not too bad, not too great category. Some of them will have been good books that were somehow flawed, or just middle-of-the-road unremarkable works.

• Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch


• Screen Burn by Charlie Brooker


• Hiccup: How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell


• The Tower Menagerie by Daniel Hahn


• Information is Beautiful by David McCandless


• The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal


• When It Changed by Geoff Ryman


• The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde


• Left Early and Took the Dog by Kate Atkinson


• Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut


• Anita Blake 1: Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton


• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi


• When God Was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman


• Taltos 13: Tiassa by Steven Brust


• Beatrice and Virgil by Yann Martel

41% of books I decided were rather good, which is way up on the 30% from last year. Am I becoming more positive? What a thought!

• The Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford - interesting *and* entertaining, the holy grail. If only there were a partner book 'Backroom Girls' that would make it perfect.


• 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know by Barbee Davis - a compilation, so some were good, some were bad, but all were interesting one way or the other.


• Moon Over Soho and Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch - a wonderfully written series which feels like it's written just for me with jokes, attention to detai, likeable but flawed characters and mystery plots that reveal themselves at just the right pace.


• HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian - another solid entry into this series


• The Help by Kathryn Stockett - I couldn't put this book down, entertaining and moving and also one of my favourite films of the year.


• Vet on Call by Marc Abraham - a new James Herriot! Hilarious and lovely in equal parts.


• Dark Matter: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver - a suitably atmospheric ghost story set in an unusual location, just a bit different to most of what I read.


• American Gods and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman - two Gaiman books, each doing a wonderful job of capturing a time and a place and infusing it with magic and mystery.


• The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins - a brilliant series, right up there with things like Enders Game imho. The first was the best, but the series as a whole is still superb


• Snuff by Terry Pratchett - Pratchett back on form after a previous disappointment. The intricacy of his writing, the elegance of the jokes and the ideas is phenomenal.