Slashdot Mirror
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?"
In the non-fiction category, Eric S. Raymond's "The Art of Unix Programming" gets my vote. It's simply excellent.
anything by him..
author of "Perdido street station"..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Movies have a definitive time they are out and you usually go see them during that period.
Books are much more flexible, you don't need to constrain yourself to a rigid schedule or anything. I usually go out a few times a year a pick several interesting books that I'll read as time allows me to. When deciding what to get, release date (that is, the 2003 books for example) is not even considered; I just search for interesting stuff or previously unknown stuff from interesting authors.
But it may just be me.
They're boring, predictable, and are big ego trips for the authors:
Ann Coulter : Treason : Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
Al Franken : Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right
Michael Moore : Dude, Where's My Country?
Bill O'Reilly : Who's Looking Out for You?
Eric Alterman : What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News
Sean Hannity : Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty over Liberalism
Alan Colmes : Red, White & Liberal : How Left Is Right & Right Is Wrong
And a lot more. Surprisingly, lots of these books sell a lot, preaching to the choir of the converted, yet contributing no new ideas or being slightly interesting.
- sigs are for wimps.
it's probably an example of the "I'm going to run for President so I need to appear intellectual by writing a book" thing. It probably was focus-grouped before publication - that way she doesn't have anything in writing to embarrass her later. Since the books written by future/current Presidential candidates seem to have had anything interesting strained out of them to avoid conflicts with future political positions, they're probably best avoided anyway. For politics, there are probably better places to go for informed commentary on their plans, and as personal background it probably isn't very useful.
The more interesting version of her book should come out about thirty years from now.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon. This book blew my mind. It's the story of a kid with Asperger's Syndrome written from his perspective. You get so lost in his head, the amazing complexity of his world and the techniques he's developed to cope with the people and situations around him, and then you are with him as he is forced out into the raw real world. Perdito Street Station by China Mieville was a strong runner up for me. I think both books are particularly well suited for geeks.
Worst book? I'm past the point where I waste my time with books that suck. I used to push through just to finish the book but now that I'm realizing that life is short I just close the book and move on.
Of course, Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco covers similar ground. Its definitely a better book, not as accessable as Da Vinci Code, but Eco's writing is always joyous and laden with fascinating information.
"the starry sky above and the moral law within"-Kant
"Potter" is not really a childrens book the way other children's books are.
One of the reasons Potter books are so popular is that it is hard to find any other book for children that would deal with issues that exist in the real world but conviniently avoided by the mass literature, such as social injustice, poverty, bullies, racial tension, etc.
The irony is that the book about wizards is actually more down to earth and more realistic than some other books.
When I was growing up, I had a teacher who looked like, dressed like and behaived like Dolores Umbridge. I was freaked out when I read the Order of Phoenix.
Some of them (the kids didn't really go bowling that day!) are silly, but the cut and paste jobs on the Willie Horton ad, and particularly the shredding of Charlton Heston's words are utterly, flagrantly outside anything acceptable in documentaries. It is appalling that the documentary community and the Academy tolerated it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
All of the above posts are spot on, except they leave out the most excruciating part of the books: the "love scenes," wherin the female main character gets it on with every single male in a position of power over her. Offensive in the extreme, uninteresting, and thrown in every few hundred pages to keep the lowest of lowbrow interested in the plot. Awful. I just stopped a few hundred pages from the end because I was tired of enduring that shit.
Cthulhu loves you.
Oh my god, there are kids who have watched the movie and don't know about the books! Oh no! That's so awful! Maybe you should assault them - that would teach them, right? It's disgusting that you're taking this elitist view. If you pass some kids who don't know about the books or who haven't been following the development of the movie and who wrote the screenplay and whatnot, why not just give them a friendly tap on the shoulder and tell them? Why be an arrogant asshole about it?
Arrogance like yours astounds me. The books are good but they're not some sort of holy tome that a person must have read in order to be considered even somewhat a functioning member of society. Remember there are probably plenty of classic pieces of literature that you've never read and are not familiar with. If someone made a movie based on one of these works, would you want some guy directing bitterness at you rather than just saying simple like, "If you liked that, you should check out the movie."
Grow up for fuck's sake. And yes, they sell plastic swords. Kids like plastic swords. I'm sorry if that's horrifying to you but you should probably based your religion on a piece of work that hasn't become so embedded in pop culture.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Eco's description of the church door near the beginning of _The Name of the Rose_ is one of my all-time favorite pieces of descriptive writing. It simultaneously serves to describe a door, comment on the state of theology at the time of the story, create the atmosphere and character of the monestary and demonstrait the character of the observer.
Tom Clancy used to be a master of the "techno thriller," a genre he arguably created (if you ignore Forsyth, Ludlum, etc.). His characters were a bit wooden but the plots crackled with action and authenticity, and his morality was predictable but not preachy. His character Jack Ryan started out as a pretty regular, commonsense guy, but his importance became increasingly inflated as Clancy's fame and fortune grew. In recent tomes Clancy's become increasingly verbose and much more willing to espouse his extremist political agenda.
Now the Ryan character is the former U.S. president, and "The Teeth of the Tiger" attempts to catapult Ryan's teenage son Jack Jr. to do the world's work. Sad to report that this is Clancy's worst book yet, and it's a shadow of the brilliance he showed with "The Hunt for Red October."
Too bad Clancy suffers from "successful writer syndrome" (he's too powerful for editors to get through to him) and it now appears that he's relying on ghostwriters to finish his works. It seems he's so rich that nowadays he's got better things to do with his time and money than do what he's best at.
If you want a really good belly laugh, go read the often hilarious reviews of The Teeth of the Tiger on Amazon. They're a lot more enjoyable than the book itself.
"Folks just call him Buckethead." -- Les Claypool