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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.
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.
"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.
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.
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