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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?"
My worst reading for 2003 was: The Last Goodbye
.02,
I received the book to review ahead of time... It was absolutely terrible. I don't know about the rest of the world but I am not into reading books written as if I was reading at a third grade level (ie Stephen King's latest works). Trying to be bio-tech and computer savvy when you aren't just does not work.
I was also irked by the author's apparent need to mention the race of the characters in the novel. It was almost as if he was trying to point out that it is possible for those of color to become lawyers and famous musicians (duh). Let the read imagine whatever they like about the characters don't shove it in their face.
Just my worthless
Quicksilver was a cool book. However, IMHO it wasn't nearly as good as Cryptonomicon. Here's why:
* The characters feel similar to those in Cryptonomicon (another crazy Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse is akin to the main character from Crypto).
* One of the hardest things to do right when there are parallel plotlines is connect them in a flowing and lucid manner. Cryptonomicon did an excellent job of weaving the past and present together. In Quicksilver, we get large chunks of uninterrupted narration, but there's very little context switching. This left me a little bored at times.
It really felt rushed, like there was a great book in there that needed more time to be distilled.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to read the next two volumes, I was just a little disappointed that Quicksilver didn't live up to the high standards Stephenson has set himself in previous books.
Some books that were "a hell of a lot better than I expected".
"Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" was pretty good - some "duh" moments with the characters that made you want to smack them all in the head and shout "Stop acting like you're 12!", but overall, pretty damned good.
"Wolves of Callah". Go figure - I thought this would suck, since Mr. King seams to have lost something after his accident. But the story, even when I had pretty much figured things out, was still pretty good.
On the "not great but not bad" area I'd put "The Da Vinci Code". Clever as hell idea, some interesting observations that had me going to my art books to check it out - great from that point of view. Great book to get people interested in art and the symbols used in literature, paintings, music, and so on.
But why did the main characters Sophie and Robert suffer such massive brain farts at times? They'd talk about huge ideas in symbology - then 50 pages later, be stumped by a puzzle they had talked about earlier! (Well, and there was the incredible coincidence that a Harvard professor and a cryptologist both happen to be hot - how did that work out?)
I think for my most enjoyed book so far this year was "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" by Al Franken. I don't agree with all of his politics, thought he had some good points, some bad points, and some so-so points - but damn if it wasn't funny and at least thought provoking at times.
Worst book? "Chosen", the novelization for the last season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". I mean - punctuation mistakes all over the place, and somebody used "find and replace" in a bad way. Amazing how the word First and Chosen are always capitzlized, even when "Buffy was First into the room"? Remember, kids - even after you use Command-F, Command-V, Enter, you still need to proof read the damned thing.
Just my opinions, of course. I still have to read Stephenson's "Quicksilver", but it's not out on peanutpress.com yet, and I'm not sure I have space in my backpack for another meatspace book.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I've loved me some Stephenson in the past but this thing was just ridiculous. Bought it the day it came out and still haven't finished it.
It was the long, long history-lesson-style monologue by Shaftoe's brother immediately followed by a second chapter of Waterhouse presented as a period-style drama that did me in.
I've only got like 120 pages left (out of what felt like several thousand when reading) so maybe I'll finish it. But reading novels shouldn't feel like an uphill battle, you know?
Personally, I'm interested in politics, so I found Dude, Where's My Country? to be a very interesting work. Moore improves on Stupid White Men a lot by incorporating many more references to works cited, and elaborating his position better. For that matter, one of my textbooks made interesting reading: Gov't and Business.
Worst book? Anything by Ann Coulter. She claims in her latest book, Treason, that being liberal is a sin worse than terrorism. If that isn't hateful and just plain wacked, I don't know what is.
#define DRM chmod 000
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was a lot of fun, even if the Priory of Sion has turned out to be a fraud.
I'm looking forward to his next book which will be about Freemasonry.
After _Cryptonomicon_ my expectations were high. Early on in _Quicksilver_ I realized that there was no way this book could be as good as the earlier one, so I adjusted my hopes downward accordingly...and even then, I was disappointed.
The flaws are numerous.
The one thing that everyone knows about the book is that it contains a frantic pile of trivia. I was actually looking forward to this aspect of the book, given that I enjoy random learning opportunities as much as the next geek, and given that this is one part of _Cryptonomicon_ that I was enthused about. _QS_ disappoints in this regard. To my mind there are two main bins that trivia are sorted in to: (1) those random items that are capable of clicking in an interesting way into the knowledge structure I already have; and (2) utterly random tidbits. NS delivered a few of the former, and a few truck-loads of the latter. In so far as the trivia was interesting, I already knew it (Germanic witch trials, etymology of the word "dollar", the broad outlines and purposes of the various 16th century political structures), and in so far as the trivia was not something I already knew, I found it dreadfully boring (hail-storms of random names of royalty, many of them playing minimal roles in the plot, etc.).
Ah. I used the word "plot", so I've segued onto the next region of disappointment. _QS_ does not have a plot, in the conventional sense. Sure, in a 900 page novel (or a 2,700 page novel, really), one wouldn't expect the broad sweep of the action to be clear by page 50, or 100...but by page 500 or so, one would hope to have an idea of where things might be going. The book has Theme aplenty.
The Theme, however ("Things Really Changed a Whole Lot, Religiously, Economically, Politically, and Scientifically"), is big, but too insubstantial and too vague to construct a huge novel like this on. _A Winter's Tale_ managed to work very well with out a real plot - it could hang off of the Theme that "New York changes a lot, and is magical through the ages". Then again, _A Winter's Tale_ was about 1/9th the length of Stephenson's Inflated Series.
Speaking of inflation, this book needed an editor, badly. Dialogue and exposition are clunky in many many places. For that matter, dialogue and exposition are poorly differentiated. There's a joke about 1950's science fiction that 3/4 of the plot and background information are revealed in "As you know, Bob" asides. The same is true of _QS_. There's some minor variation on a theme: there's "As you know", there is "I need not mention the fact that X ...< 1,000 words
elided >...because you already know that", and there is "as everyone in
the town knew...".
There's a persistent and pernicious meme in the art world that to truly convey some situations you need to recreate those situations for the audience. Thus, the only way to convey tedium is through a four hour movie, etc. NS seemed to be held by this meme: to convey the intellectual ferment and vast scope of the 17th century he felt the need write a book that was adrift in a ferment and vast in scope. Certainly he could not have conveyed these things in a novella, but that does not mean that he could not have pruned perhaps a third of what he wrote.
The book is large enough that there's a Dramatis Personae at the end, which was somewhat useful...but it didn't work wonderfully well for me, because the entries were fairly short and defined the characters (well, historical figures) mostly in terms of descriptors and events that did not take place inside the book. If I come across a character who I know was present 500 pages earlier, but I'm trying to remember whether that character was a alchemist or a merchant, it helps little to learn that the character was a friend of the Duke of Wessex (or what have you). This is not a huge departure from how Dramatis Personae are usu
And I have to agree with those bashing Robert Jordan, even though I haven't read his latest pile of crap. WoT is a series that started out so amazingly good, then was ruined by its author. It's his maddeningly slow pace, and more importantly, the fact that every single one of his female characters (except perhaps Min) is an arrogant b!tch. They're all extremely annoying, some more so than others.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
I've read this series several times (generally right before a new book is about to come out, so I can have the full plot in mind) and I have to agree. It seems like all the Jordan fans I know agree as well. We all wait now until the new books hit the used shelf at the book store, and grab it at half price.
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 (SPOILER:Morgase as a fraidy-cat servant?!:SPOILER) and spawn so many plot threads that he ignores entire major characters per book. And yeah, the several pages about a bath, or a bank of fog, or.... that gets kinda annoying too.
The sucker that I am though, I'm gonna finish reading the series as it comes out just because I want to know what happens. I can make some guesses, but he always seems to have a rabbit to pull out of the hat when you least expect it. :)
That's one thing I'll say about the series that is cool, I read over the WoT FAQ recently before starting reading again, and from the discussions in there and having read the later books already, it was truly amazing to me how early he had started laying down the plots that happen 8000 pages later.
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
by Cory Doctorrow.
First there was Neuromancer.
Then Snow Crash took the reins.
"Down and Out..." is the next in the logical procession of futurist novels.
The world is run by ad-hocracies (basically, large groups of fans), everyone has computers in their brains, collaberation happens in the cerebellum, and crygenics is de rigeur.
Awesome, awesome book.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
I'm about as enthusiastic a Stephenson fan as they come; I have a hand-xerox'd copy of The Big U, _and_ actually enjoyed reading it. I set my alarm to wake up early and pick up a copy of Quicksilver on my way to work the day it was released.
And I found it to be the most pitiful drek I've picked up in years. I never officially gave up on it, but I put it down around page 300 and haven't picked it back up in some months.
Dozens of completely interchangeable and personality-free "characters" would be problematic enough if they weren't all referred to variously by their given names, their surnames, their titles, their ranks, their relationships to other faceless characters, and various ribald nicknames. 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.
Having historical characters make predictions about the future which are either ironically accurate or comically inaccurate has no place outside horrid sitcoms. ("This 'tay' is fascinating, but I cannot imagine the English ever being interested in something so strange.")
The story was clearly intended to be tiered between the obvious, surface-level events, and the occluded, mysterious events driving them, which needed to be inferred by subtle cues. But the supposedly-obvious events were so dependant on endless tiny details of this moment and place in history that they were _also_ occluded, mysterious, and needed to be inferred by subtle details. It's possible that a specialist in post-Cromwell London wouldn't find this troublesome, but my slightly-better-than-average knowledge of the period was quite insufficient for the task.
And, most damningly, just when there was starting to be the vaguest hint that there might actually turn out to be the possibility of an actual plot somewhere on the horizon--that your effort slogging through hundreds of pages of drivel might be rewarded with something actually _happening_--he drops it all and starts over from the whole sodding beginning with an entirely unrelated set of characters.
My wife started listening to King's Gunsliger Series in the car. Due to her talking about it I took the first four books(paper since I see audio books as something for after I have actaully read the books, for car drives and going to sleep), which us on Vaca as fluff reading(paperback = fluff reading, hardcover = Non-fluff due to weight of book). I had figured that a story bascially boiling down to a western wouldn't apeal to me (That and I have never read a king book before so I wasn't sure I'd like his style)...I was toally surprised, these are damn good books, and it actually makes me interested to read them (something few books do lately, perhaps I am tireing of Sci-Fi Fantasy)...I am in the middle of Wizard and Glass nw, and its shaping up to be as good as the rest, and I am hurriedly trying to get through it so I can red Wolves of Callah(sp?) the next book which my wife has promised (but is getting itchy) to not start on audiobook till I catchup.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
As an unabashed and yet notoriously picky (read: pain in the ass to buy for) sci-fi fan, here are a few of my favorite books of 2003.
I just finished China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and I am flabbergasted. Mieville's city-state of New Crobuzon is utterly fantastic and his clarity of vision for his world, in my opinion, is the kind you only come across once in a great while. I will most certainly be picking up his newest novel, The Scar , as soon as I finish a couple of books curently in my queue.
I was delighted that in the last year (or perhaps a little bit more), the great Samuel R. Delany's books have begun coming back into print. Three of his novels, Dhalgren , Nova and the duplex Babel-17/Empire Star , along with his short story collection Aye, and Gomorrah... and other stories are all truly wonderful sci-fi. If you decide to read him, start with Aye, and Gomorrah..., Babel-17/Empire Star and then Nova; when you think you have a handle on him, tackle Dhalgren. Tackling Dhalgren is no easy task, but the journey is completely worth it.
Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow now has two books in print ( Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and A Place So Foregin and Eight Mor e) and a third on the way. Both books (a novel and a short story collection respectively) showcase a writer I am quite sure we'll be seeing a whole lot more of in the future. Doctorow's writing reads very much like the first writer of the next generation of sci-fi writers; you won't be disappointed.
Cyberpunk poster boy William Gibson also had a new book this year, Pattern Recognition . As his writing pressed forward, Gibson has slipped further and further from futurity into today, creating science fiction that happens in today's world. His latest work is an interesting story of Cayce Pollard, a cool-hunter with a severe allergy to brands. The story is, as with all things Gibson, tightly written and as focused as a laser beam on its subject. A great read for all.
I sure hope this helps. I know not all the books came out specifically in 2003, but I read them all in 2003 (along with countless others) and I think that's close enough for me to sneak them in.