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A little while since my last stack, though reading continues as always. Really, really enjoying The Finder Library: Volume 1 right now a stunning comic book, reminding me of Castle Waiting which is a wonderful thing to find a sister of! Also had a good read of Dust by Elizabeth Bear, a very fantasy science-fiction generational ship with lots of good social/sexual exploration. So far so good...

Oh, my stack is sad incomplete because all my ebooks are in the very same phone that took this picture. Broken Slate by Kelly Jennings is the start of a multi-volume story a slave culture on a future planet that was a harrowing, exciting, driving read. Can't recommend it highly enough for those who don't mind squirming as well. (Some very rough, non-consensual gay sex, which makes sense for a book about slavery.)

Airedale Attacks! I've read all the library books here. Room was a well deserving prize winner with a non-annoying/non-precocious/non-HaleyJoelOsment kid as the main character, which is doubly impressive. At the moment I'm actually still edging my way along Proust Volume 5, Part II: The Fugitive (no one armed men involved sorry) and I have yet more library books winging their way. I would make a juggling metaphor here but Haley stole my ball!

Talk about late. It took me till April to get this done! The X-Men was a bit of nostalgia that didn't really hold up. Nile Shadows was a great library read which I then found on the discard pile for a buck! Awesome for me, not so great for anyone else on the island who might have wanted to get it out. But that is the rough and tumble world of library shelf space...

Finally got to read The Jewish Messiah which was as uncomfortable and odd as it was brilliant. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varnasi was another stand out in the year's reading.

I'm sort of shocked how short this pile is (partially cause it is very half-assed) but that is probably because of how complicated and varied life got. Some of it for ill, but at least I'm trying to pay attention and trying to deal with it.

I'll try and get my recent reading stack up soon.

Oooooh it's a tall one. Lots of Christmas books, the Proust project continues, five library books (I guess those ones come first) and some Spengler, just cause I've been meaning to try it for the last ten or fifteen years.... This one will probably keep me busy for a little while.

Looking a little sheepishly at my photoshop nightmare. Over twenty of the books I read this year were from the library so weren't available for my year end picture. The result was a good hunk of my book stack being stand-ins which I pasted pics of spines over. I gave up trying to do a convincing job. Roughly speaking it's probably this high. I have no idea why this is a fun thing for me to do...

Now the actual books.

Favourite Fiction:

A tie between 2666 and Berlin Alexanderplatz (this excludes the Proust project, cause In Search of Lost Time is on a level all its own). Also mentions for Never Let Me Go, South of the Border, West of the Sun, and The Kindly Ones.

Favourite Non-Fiction (which there is precious little of):

The Selfish Gene - cause that Mr. Dawkins can write entertainingly about a subject, and clearly.

Book I was glad to finally give up on:

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I'm allergic to this guy. I accept this and have gratefully moved on.

Most Disappointing Book:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I really loved her last novel Beyond Black, but WH felt like a step back, more of a historical argument than a fully realized novel. Not a horrible book, but I was expecting more.

Author I'm most happy to have discovered:

Paul Di Filippo, who was chatting on the starship sofa, sofanauts.com podcast. I picked up one of his books, then another, and then another. That's a good sign in an author, and, man, he is odd in a very satisfy, 18th century kind of way, but in sf.

Though there is only one Proust here I'm over half way through Sodom and Gomorrah but I'll save that for next year's stack.