Best and Worst Books of 2003?

Thousandstars writes "I saw the article on the best and worst movies of 2003, and, being a literature geek, I thought it would also be appropriate to ask for the best and worst books of 2003. In fiction, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is toward the top of my best list. How about everyone else?"

Comments

Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time) sucked...

[nebaz]

I hate to say this, but the Crossroads of Twilight, the 10th Robert Jordan "Wheel of Time" book, really sucked. No major plot advancement has happened at all. Several pages are spent on one of the main characters taking a bath! It seems like in these books, time goes slower and slower. I think the series has gone downhill, since about the fifth book or so, but this one was really bad. I see no way for him to end the series in my life time, at this pace, with so many dangling plot threads, and a release cycle of one book every two years,

Pratchett is always good

[quantax]

Terry Pratchett's "Nightwatch" wasn't too bad, though it was not IMO as good as the previous 'Nightwatch' books such as "Guards! Guards!" and "Men of Arms", but it is definitely worth checking out if you're a Discworld fan. I haven't read "Monsterous Regiment" yet, anyone have an opinion on how that was?

Re:Pratchett is always good

[elmegil]

I enjoyed Monstrous Regiment quite a bit. I think Pratchett is starting to get less manic and silly as he slows down with age, and whether you like that or not is really going to be a matter of taste. I thought Night Watch was better than a few of his more recent outings (wasn't really hep on Hogfather, and Carpe Jugulum and The Fifth Elephant left me a little flat), as well as really liking The Truth. I think the stories where he mostly is covering new characters give him some more room to stretch, whereas a lot of the old characters are so thoroughly developed it's harder to use them to say something new. Which doesn't mean he can't and doesn't succeed at that, but just that unused characters can seem more fresh.

Isaac Adamson/Hillary Clinton

[Otter]

I tend to be a bit behind on books, as I get them mostly from the library. But since the only posts at this time are some LoTR comments and a particularly inane SCO bit, I'll kick in what I can:

I really enjoyed two books by Isaac Adamson -- Hokkaido Popsicle and the earlier Tokyo Suckerpunch. It's hard to describe them, but they're perfect for Japanophiles and other Asia-pop enthusiasts>

Worst book of 2003 is easy -- Hillary Clinton's memoirs. As much as I detest her, she's obviously an interesting person but her book sounded like it was written by her staff and focus-grouped before publication.

Plenty of tin-foil hat reading material in 2003

[Liselle]

Oryx and Crake was a pretty decent number. Anyone who thinks that bio-engineering is out of control will eat this stuff up. Three cheers for pigoons and wolvogs!

Re:Michael Moore

[shftleft]

Positively Fifth Street was an excellent piece of non-fiction.

One of my favorites of the year...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions - Ben Mezrich

Amazon link

Re:"Literature Geek?"

[Little Brother]

Yes. I've met one of each of those. The sports geeks (if they're good) will know the history of most major sports, and a few minor ones. The history is beyond what would be found in almanics and will include the predesessors of the sport. They will understand one or two sports (like CS geeks will understand one or two programming languages) extensively. They are able to tell you about all the current rules and the progression from earlier rules that brought the current rules into being. They know nearly every current player in their sport of choice (The hockey geek I knew could give me the entire starting roster of every team in the NHL (I had to use google to even find out what the teams were)). Sport geeks often invent their own plays/moves, and these often actualy work on whatever level they are playing at and they can support why such a play/tecnique would work in the majors. (I'm sure some people in the majors ARE sports geeks, but I have no way of knowing.) Although a sports geek may be a fan of a specific team, they are able to list the strong and weak points of any team more-or-less objectively.

As for fasion geek, see fung shui (spelling) masters for more information. (I guess, I know less on this topic)

Re:Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time) sucked..

[TheGreatGraySkwid]

As someone who's been prominently involved in RJ fandom for the last decade, I'd have to say...you're absolutely right.

I'd probably get up to book 7 on the "to read" list, just because of Dumai's Wells, but it's been a cereal-varnished-saucer sled ride from there.

(ObLink: 17 minutes of story after book 10 ends)

Best book published this year that I've read? Probably Brust's The Lord of Castle Black. Most of my reading this year has not been of books written this year, though. Best book I read for the first time this year? Probably either Gaiman's American Gods or Card's Ender's Game.

Re:Some quickies

[Bishop923]

Actually in Book 5 they are 15 years old, each book is one year in the series.

right here...

[garcia]

Oh my personal pet peeve are authors that like to hear themselves talk. There is nothing like reading a book about a professor's life that is compared with the Cold War.

I read My Cold War ahead of time. It was not only unbearably boring I actually felt sorry for the students that this professor lectures to. I am sure he makes them read this novel for a better understanding of him as a person and why he grades them poorly when they tell him that his book sucks.

The rest of his books (listed here on his website) are mostly about music. I am quite confused why he just didn't stick to that genre. He seemed to be putting out quite a few, someone must have been buying them.

He actually mentions in this book that the reason he wrote it was because he couldn't find it in his heart to continue the research/writing for the actual book he was writing and he needed to "find himself" with this one. Great, nothing like reading the book that an author used to fill time in his life.

Two things to be learned from this rant: a) don't take classes with professors that require readings from their own books and b) only you and your family give a flying rat's ass about your life (unless you are famous), don't write about it even if you somehow think you can link it to your line of research.

Just my worthless .02,

Re:Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time) sucked..

[nebaz]

You get to the last book of a dekalogy only to realize that the author sucks.

Fair enough. :-) In fact quite true. It's just that I thought the first few books were really good, and like a good junkie "first hit is free", felt that I had invested too much time to just give up, and hope that there may be some salvagable stuff. And to be fair, there are a few good moments in the later books. Last chapter in book 9 in particular. Dumai Wells, as someone else suggested, is another good point. It just seems as though Jordan thought "there are about 200 Aes Sedai in the tower, and I will not stop writing until I name them all." There are some web references (google Encyclopedia WOT) that name all the characters, and there are like 1500 NAMED characters in the book. It's hard to keep track.

Probably I'm biased

[Glenn R-P]

But I've got to vote for my mother's books. She discovered POD (Print On Demand) publishing this year and published 5 novels, three of them being a trilogy starting with "Stones for a Crumbling Wall".
http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_de tail.asp ?isbn=0-595-26582-0

Iuniverse is quite generous with their "browse before you buy" which allows you to read the entire book.

Re:2 cents.

[Anonymous Coward]

although a link would have been nice on the part of the OP, it is well documented that Bowling For Columbine is ripe with inaccuracy and pure propaganda:

http://www.hardylaw.net/Truth_About_Bowling.html

Da Vinci code, TOTAL DRIVEL

[Ars-Fartsica]

The fact that so many people lauded this airport-bookstore drivel tells me just how low-brow the reading audience has become. From the mindless cliff hangers (resolved in three pages for the idiots who can't track a plot) to the impossibly silly puzzles to the hocus-pocus Templar BS plot (which has been around for decades)...I kept looking for the "Nancy Drew" logo on the side of this "young readers" crap.

Re:Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time) sucked..

[goodviking]

I'm re-reading them again right now actually, just because I got bored and wanted something to read. It's really, really sad, knowing what they are going to come to, since the first few books are just awesome. He's managed to create this incredibly intricate and believable world, and then proceeds to run all the characters into the ground ...

I would recommend "The Internet Top 100 SF/Fantasy List" as a good reference for finding alternatives. It's really a fantastic resource (it's where I found "A Song of Fire and Ice"). I stopped reading the WOT when it seemed to cross from "great series" to "author's pension plan".

Life of Pi and Middlesex

[wazzzup]

Although they came out in 2002 the paperback versions debuted in 2003.

Life of Pi by Yann Martel. My favorite this year. What a fantastic book. It's no wonder many colleges and universities are incorporating it into their required reading cirriculum. An Indian boy becomes lost at sea after a ship he was riding on sinks. His only passenger in the lifeboat - a Bengal tiger.

Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. Written by the same author of The Virgin Suicides. It's a story about a Greek girl (boy) born as a hermaphrodite in a Greek family and her experiences growing up in that environment and that condition. Won the Pulitzer I believe.

Books rock. They are soooooo much better than the tripe offered on t.v. BTW, is anybody else offended that TLC stands for The Learning Channel? There's nothing learning about that channel anymore. Just Trading Spaces and the umpteen variations on that theme.

Re:All political pundit books

[Sebastopol]

Thanks for not modding me a troll, despite the fact it was a huge troll! ;-)

I frequently read "spinsanity.com" and they covered all of these books. They try to be fair and objective, and what I've concluded is that the wave of books from the left, which followed the wave from the right, tend to more factually supported and less fanciful. Moore is a bit flamboyant and admittedly exaggerates, but Al Franken does mix in good satire with his solid facts, and Joe Conason was really sincere in his attempt to shed light. Compare those three to the rants of O'Reilly, Coulter, et al, that serve no other purpose than to revv folks up for war.

2 Books

[blackmonday]

I highly recommend 2 books: Fast Food Nation and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. As Greg Palast of the former book says, buy it from Amazon.com, a non-profit company (unintentionally).

Fast Food Nation might make you think twice about that Big Mac, and Best Democracy shows you the access and power of campaign donations.

Re:2 cents.

[Arthur Dent]

I would have. But it got such terrible reviews that I passed.

Review 1

As I say, it's easy to explain why this book is bad. What is much, much harder to explain is why so many people think this book is good, or at least why so many people are buying it. After all, if you want to read a book about why the left was wrong and Sen. McCarthy was right, far better ones are out there. Making use of Soviet archives, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have teamed up to write several excellent books about the American Communist Party over the past several years. Even if you prefer to get your history from a female conservative columnist, Mona Charen published a far more thoughtful attack on the post-war left last fall. In Useful Idiots, Charen covered some of the same ground as Coulter, but she did it logically, chronologically and without failing to notice that there were some important differences between Robert Kennedy and, say, Abbie Hoffman.

For that matter, even if you want to read a conservative rant, there are better ones -- Tammy Bruce's The Death of Right and Wrong, for example. If Coulter's shtick is that she's a right-wing blonde, Bruce's shtick is that she's a right-wing lesbian. The formula is the same: quotes picked out from newspaper articles, research that consists largely of extensive Internet surfing. But because Bruce is writing about pop culture, and not accusing the entire post-war Democratic Party of high treason, the end result is somehow less irritating.

Another Review

In short, Ann Coulter has once again revealed herself as one of the most destructive forces in American politics, repeatedly making outrageously irrational arguments and demonstrably false claims. Treason is the culmination of a dismaying trend toward factually misleading and inflammatory books from pundits such as Michael Moore, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage (Salon Premium subscription or viewing of ad required for Savage column). These authors may delight partisans and make their publishers rich, but their work impoverishes our political discourse.

BTW, that's also a reason why I don't Stupid White Men or Dude, Where's my Country.

Re:Quicksilver?

[Pius II.]

Googled for the quote, and it seems that a whole lot of people said that.
Pascal, Goethe, Cicero...

Re:Quicksilver?

[topologist]

Bartleby (channeling the Columbia Encyclopaedia) claims that Pascal did indeed say that, which agrees with my recollection.

Or alternatively,

[gonerill]

There's always the Top 10 Books I Did Not Read This Year.

Re:Some quickies

[Little Brother]

Well, I'm sure some of them are 16. But you're right, I miscounted. Thanks for the correction. And my point still stands, they arn't 12.

Re:Some quickies

[ePhil_One]

"Potter" is not really a childrens book the way other children's books are.

The first books really were kids books. Simple stories, lots of "don't jump to conclusions" moral lessons.

But the later books are becoming more complex, and I just don't see how anyone can call a 900 page tome a "children's book" What amazes me is that kids are still reading it. 12 year olds are going out and reading a 900 page novel.

That is an accomplishment.

Re:2 cents.

[shadowmatter]

Why is the knee-jerk reaction always to make a cute and snappy comeback, as opposed to spending five seconds Googling for some exmaples, and enlightening oneself (and everybody else) in a follow-up?

So I Googled, and found this . Personally, I like how Michael Moore fights for the little guy, and when I watched Bowling for Columbine, I didn't know about these inaccuracies and I enjoyed the film. I thought it was really well done. But then I heard of these inaccuracies later, and it kinda leaves a sour taste in my mouth that he got the Academy Award for the film.

Anyways, on to books. I don't really pay attention to when books come out, but the good books I read this year are:

The Code Book by Simon Singh (brilliant)
Euclid's Window by Leonard Mlodinow (non-technical, enjoyable)
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Cities, Ants, and Software by Steven Johnson (enlightening, but too biased at times)
The Night Is Large by Martin Gardner (this man knows about EVERYTHING)
Lies and The Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken (hilarious, although obviously partial)
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance by Noam Chomsky (if you can't tolerate Franken, don't try this)

Note I prefer non-fiction ;) I think, of the books above, only Euclid's Window, Lies and the Lying Liars..., and Hegemony or Survival came out this year. They're all fairly recent, however, and worth a look.

- sm

Re:Quicksilver

[asmdsr]

This may not change your mind, but here's some info you might have missed:

I probably couldn't be bothered to keep this bland cast straight in my head even if they only had one name each, but giving them all half a dozen names just made the problem exponentially worse

I'm not sure if you noticed, but the 'Dramatis Personae' section at the back of the book explains exactly this issue, and includes an index of the characters and titles.

I put it down around page 300 and haven't picked it back up in some months...

...he drops it all and starts over from the whole sodding beginning with an entirely unrelated set of characters

Maybe you should read the rest of the book before you make claims about which plots have been dropped and which characters are 'entirely unrelated'.

cheers
Tim

Re:ESR's book

[kjd]

I agree. I picked this book up planning to skip through and read the interesting parts, but ended up digesting the whole thing from front to back in a couple days.

Good reading for aspiring Unix hackers, or the experienced who enjoy reading insight from old-school Unix guys (Thompson, Ritchie, and several others pepper the book with their opinions throughout).

Re:No kidding; GREAT BOOK!

[Lord_Dweomer]

"Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! "

Because we all know dwarves are great at archery.

P.S.
I think you meant Legolas, Gimli is the dwarf.

It Must Be Beautiful

[thelizman]

It's actually a 2002 book, but I believe it's first US printing is 2003, so here goes: "It Must Be Beautiful, Great Equations of Modern Science". Edited by Graham Farmelo, this book is a collection of essays by 11 of todays best and brightest. The readings aren't dry at all, and science/mathematics buffs will be struck by how palatable this book is. For me, it drove home one thing I always knew to be factual, but never considered in philisophical terms, that formulae aren't just tools for calculations, they're expressions of ideas. That point is well made in chapter one when Einstein is compared to Planck, especially in that they both came up with the same E=hf formula, but applied to nearly unrelated areas of physics (cavity radiation vs quantum radiation). Then the point is further illustrated in talking about the Drake equation, a formula well blasted for its uselessness, but highly lauded for it's ability to provoke deep scientific discussion on topics from astrophysics to cosmology to sociology and philosophy.

I'm about half way through this book right now, and I find myself going back to dwell on previous chapters I've already read. While I don't exactly have a hard-on for this book, it is interesting enough that I'd recommend it to anyone with a menial mathematics and physics background who is interested in a new insight into the mundane triviality of text-book errata.

Amazon's best of 2003

[marcel-jan.nl]

Amazon has a best of 2003 booklist.

All as may be, but I still have often problems selecting my next book to read. Even books appraised by awards of site aren't always up my alley. Because I'm a bit of a slow reader, I want to make sure that the book I select is good.

Therefor I'd like to see a site for books like what allmusic.com does for music. (Allbooks.com brings you to Amazon.) Amazon is not exactly the same. It's ways to search for books are too limited.

Also I would like to choose my next book to read a bit like I select a recipe to cook on some recipe sites: I want a recipe with ingredient A and B, what recipes do you got with those.

Does any of this exist? (Maybe I should start such a site?)

Here's your apology

[layingMantis]

my God but you are an arrogant, self-righteous, hypocritical little prick. The guy's original comment was perfectly valid and you presume to take it and figure out his life view? Logical inconsistency?? That's the funniest shit I've heard in a while. I have a feeling rational argument with you isn't even possible, and I'd end up just kicking your dumb ass. Oh and your .sig is lame too. cheers,

~mantis