andrewreads 75 books in 2016

A new year, a new book readin' challenge. Last year was the first year in quite awhile I failed to reach the 75 book plateau. (I fell woefully short at just 55 books. For shame!) Hopefully this year will be better.

*Denotes a BOMB (book of my bookshelf)

January 2016
1. Dragondrums by Anne McCaffrey - finished January 6th, 256 pages
2. The White Dragon* by Anne McCaffrey - finished January 13th, 468 pages
3. The Amount to Carry* by Carter Scholz - finished January 22nd, 208 pages

February 2016
4. Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey - finished February 4th, 384 pages
5. Nerilka's Story* by Anne McCaffrey - finished February 7th, 208 pages
6. The Child Garden* by Geoff Ryman - finished February 9th, 388 pages
7. Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie - finished February 13th, 386 pages
8. Dragonsdawn* by Anne McCaffrey - finished February 16th, 384 pages
9. Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie - finished February 19th, 368 pages
10. Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie - finished February 22nd, 330 pages
11. The Renegades of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey - finished February 23rd, 352 pages
12. The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty - finished February 28th, 226 pages

March 2016
13. Glaciers* by Alexis M. Smith - finished March 1st, 174 pages
14. The Togakushi Legend Murders* by Yasuo Uchida - finished March 5th, 311 pages
15. Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn - finished March 8th, 305 pages
16. All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey - finished March 11th, 448 pages
17. To the Spring Equinox and Beyond* by Natsume Soseki - finished March 17th, 331 pages
18. The Dolphins of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey - finished March 23rd, 371 pages
19. Hyperion by Dan Simmons - finished March 25th, 481 pages
20. What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours by Helen Oyeyemi - finished March 31st, 325 pages

April 2016
21. Dragonseye* by Anne McCaffrey - finished April 6th, 416 pages
22. Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons - finished April 10th, 528 pages
23. The Masterharper of Pern* by Anne McCaffrey - finished April 14th, 432 pages
24. Viral: Stories by Emily Mitchell - finished April 15th, 208 pages
25. A Gift of Dragons by Anne McCaffrey - finished April 21st, 304 pages
26. The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal - finished April 23rd, 242 pages

May 2016
27. The Skies of Pern by Anne McCaffrey - finished May 3rd, 480 pages
28. Endymion by Dan Simmons - finished May 4th, 576 pages
29. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Bailey - finished May 6th, 190 pages
30. Gut Symmetries* by Jeanette Winterson - finished May 15th, 223 pages
31. Wizard's First Rule* by Terry Goodkind - finished May 22nd, 836 pages

June 2016
32. Blasphemy by Sherman Alexie - finished June 6th, 480 pages
33. What is Left the Daughter* by Howard Norman - finished June 7th, 264 pages
34. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami - finished June 15th, 480 pages
35. The Stone of Tears* by Terry Goodkind - finished June 24th, 979 pages
36. Difficult Loves* by Italo Calvino - finished June 26th, 290 pages
37. Arcadia by Lauren Groff - finished June 29th, 298 pages

July 2016
38. Before the Feast by Saša Stanišic - finished July 2nd, 353 pages
39. Kinshu: Autumn Brocade by Teru Miyamoto - finished July 4th, 196 pages
40. The Blood of the Fold* by Terry Goodkind - finished July 7th, 640 pages
41. Yokohama, California* by Toshio Mori - finished July 10th, 166 pages
42. Isle of Dreams by Keizo Hino - finished July 15th, 156 pages
43. The Bamboo Sword and Other Samurai Tales by Shuhei Fujisawa - finished July 17th, 253 pages
44. Shame in the Blood by Tetsuo Miura - finished July 24th, 216 pages

August 2016
45. The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons - finished August 3rd, 710 pages
46. Temple of the Winds by Terry Goodkind - finished August 7th, 992 pages
47. One Wild Bird at a Time: Portraits of Individual Lives by Bernd Heinrich - finished August 8th, 210 pages
48. Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings - finished August 17th, 262 pages
49. Phantom Lights by Miyamoto Teru - finished August 18th, 180 pages
50. The Mountain Lion* by Jean Stafford - finished August 24th, 248 pages
51. Queen of Sorcery by David Eddings - finished August 27th, 336 pages

September 2016
52. The Budding Tree by Aiko Kitahara - finished September 4th, 170 pages
53. Magician's Gambit by David Eddings - finished September 14th, 320 pages
54. Varieties of Disturbance* by Lydia Davis - finished September 18th, 219 pages
55. Castle of Wizardry by David Eddings - finished September 28th, 384 pages

October 2016
56. Rivers by Teru Miyamoto - finished October 6th, 257 pages
57. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl - finished October 11th, 272 pages
58. Ox Tales: Earth* edited by Mark Ellingham - finished October 14th, 208 pages
59. All I Asking for Is My Body* by Milton Murayama - finished October 17th, 110 pages
60. Gateway by Frederik Pohl - finished October 20th, 278 pages
61. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories* by Hisaye Yamamoto - finished October 25th, 134 pages
62. Enchanter's End Game* by David Eddings - finished October 28th, 384 pages
63. A Complicated Kindness* by Miriam Toews - finished October 31st, 246 pages

November 2016
64. Rivalry: A Geisha's Tale* by Nagai Kafu - finished November 6th, 165 pages
65. The Call of the Toad* by Günter Grass - finished November 13th, 248 pages
66. On a Pale Horse* by Piers Anthony - finished November 17th, 336 pages
67. Cora Sandel: Selected Short Stories* by Cora Sandel - finished November 18th, 204 pages
68. Beyond the Blue Event Horizon* by Frederik Pohl, finished November 24th, 327 pages
69. Serve the People!* by Yan Lianke - finished November 27th, 217 pages
70. The Madonna and the Starship* by James Morrow - finished November 29th, 179 pages

December 2016
71. Self-Help* by Lorrie Moore - finished December 4th, 163 pages
72. Bearing an Hourglass by Piers Anthony - finished December 10th, 372 pages
73. Heechee Rendezvous* by Frederik Pohl - finished December 13th, 331 pages
74. Towing Jehovah* by James Morrow - finished December 30th, 384 pages
75. With a Tangled Skein by Piers Anthony - finished December 31st, 404 pages

37 BOMBs in 2016

Hi Andrew,

Happy New Year!

I was just thinking of you since, not only did I just finish a most amazing book of Japanese fiction (Kokoru by Natsume Soseki), but my older son just returned from a two-week trip to Japan (Tokyo and Kyoto). He attended Comiket in Tokyo and basically played around in arcades and shopping centers during his time there. He's ready to go back soon!

I read 58 books in 2015. I'll admit that quite a few of them were toddler books! :)

Better luck to both of us in reaching our 75-book goal this year.

Welcome back! Here's hoping 2016 lets you read more. :)

I found you!

>14 SqueakyChu: Hello! And a (very belated) Happy New Year to you, too. Or maybe a not so belated Happy Chinese New Year? Either way, I hope you're doing well!

I'm glad that you enjoyed Kokoro. That is maaaaybe my favorite Japanese novel. (It's very hard to pick one.) It's so lovely. Also, I'm super jealous of your son. My girlfriend and I have been planning a trip to Japan for about a year now, but it hasn't happened yet. Hopefully this autumn.

>16 kgodey: Here I am! I set this thread up and then I kinda forgot about it... whoops. Also, I finalllllllly started reading Ancillary Justice. I'm excited.

>17 andrewreads: My son is going back to Japan in March. He already booked his ticket! Again he is just going there to play around with arcades and music (he's trying to win a lottery to be able to buy tickets to the last concert of Love Live), and do a bit of traveling...mostly in Tokyo where he'll be renting an apartment for 10 days. This time he'll be traveling alone, but he does have a friend who'll be there part of the time.

It's funny that he won't read any Japanese literature, but I guess he learns what he needs to know in manga, anime, and his travels. I'm impressed that he has learned to read a bit of Japanese, but he cannot speak it at all. I'm having fun learning the Japanese characters in the names of the novels I'm reading. I hope you and your girlfriend get to make the trip to Japan this year.

I loved Koroko. What a great novel! I hated Soseki's I Am a Cat, but liked The Gate...although not as much as Koroko. I plan to continue reading as much contemporary Japanese as I can for the sheer beauty of the writing.

I am so bad at keeping up with this, but I reckon I should at least try.

So far this year I've been reading mostly sci-fi. Towards the end of 2015, in an attempt to pad my woeful book reading total, I decided to start re-reading The Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey. This was something that I'd read way back in middle school, and I've always meant to revisit it. I'm not sure what the target demographic for this series was when McCaffrey started it almost 50 years ago (it'd probably be popular with the YA/teen crowd if it were released today), but I think that it's held up pretty well. It can feel a little overly-simplistic sometimes, but the storytelling is fun, the world building is consistent/detailed, and the ideas are interesting. I'll probably continue interspersing these ~shorter/quicker Pern books with the other things that I read as the year progresses.

As for the other things I've read so far in 2016...



The Amount to Carry: For Father's day last year, I bought my dad a subscription to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He's a big reader and those are the genres he typically gravitates towards and man did that turn out to be a good present. ~Every time I talk to him on the phone, he tells me about some wonderful new author or story he's just discovered. Anyway, one of those authors was Carter Scholz, who had a story (Gypsy) in one of the latest issues. When I was home for Christmas, my dad had me read this story and I really liked it. When I returned to Boulder after the holidays, I was hanging out in my library and I realized that I'd bought a collection of Scholz's short stories several years ago at a library sale. And I didn't even know it! Serendipity. Unfortunately, most of these stories felt very... unapproachable? The collection is definitely well-written but most of the stories were very slow/difficult and I was unable to understand/identify with many of the references. I did enjoy a few of the stories, though. My favorite was probably Travels, which details a philosophical conversation between a wavefront that contain's Marco Polo's consciousness (after it has traveled 10,000 light years from Earth, presumably after Polo has died) and a planet-sized super computer.

2.5 stars (out of 5)



The Child Garden: What a strange read. This book is set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic world where infants are inundated with viruses that teach them everything from philosophy to mathematics to literature (essentially destroying the concept of childhood), the average lifespan of a human is only 35 years, and there's a big hive-brain called the Consensus that is based on the brain waves of billions of children and serves as the major governing body on Earth. This story follows a young woman's quest to put together an opera (based on The Divine Comedy) that was written by her genetically-engineered polar bear lover. Those two sentences that I just wrote are ridiculous, but boy do they accurately reflect the content of this book. On the one hand, a lot of the characters/imagery/ideas/concepts in The Child Garden were very cool, but its wonky pacing and supremely non-linear story line made it a challenging read. I wouldn't say that I'm unhappy that I persevered and finished this (it seems like it would be a book that'd benefit greatly from a re-read), but the overall experience wasn't particularly enjoyable.

3 stars (out of 5)

>19 SqueakyChu: I didn't like I Am a Cat very much, either (I still haven't gotten around to reading the third volume). My other favorite by Soseki is Kusamakura. I haven't read any Japanese novels for a few months, but I plan on changing that soon...

I was so lost when I visited Tokyo a long time ago. It was my first time travelling overseas by myself, and even then I was met at the airport by the people I was working for...but a few of us took the train to Tokyo for a few nights and I got so lost! I have since found out how to read maps and am grateful to my workmates for stipulating that I mustn't be left alone while we were ther :)
I hope you get to go, I would like to visit again now, as an adult.

>21 andrewreads: Looking forward to when you start reading Japanese novels again! I have no intention of reading more volumes of I Have a Cat. That was supposed to be humorous, but it didn't at all appeal to my sense of humor. The cat's narrative was great, but when the humans took over, it became really boring. In places, I almost fell asleep reading it! :)

I'll add Kusamakura to my wish list.

How did you get interested in reading Japanese fiction, Andrew?

>18 andrewreads: I hope you like it so far! I think that was supposed to be one of the first "book club" book so you're supposed to give me a book to read, too.

>22 LovingLit: I've heard that Tokyo is definitely one of the easiest places to get lost because, even if you have a map, their streets signs are pretty hit and miss. But getting lost is part of the fun! (Sometimes.)

>23 SqueakyChu: I'm actually a quarter Japanese and I've always been interested in finding different ways to ~connect with that part of my ancestry. My grandmother's parents immigrated to Hawaii from Japan right before she was born (in the late 10s/early 20s). She married my grandfather (who was in the navy and stationed in Hawaii) and moved to Seattle shortly after WWII. Unfortunately, with all of the backlash/negative feelings directed at people of Japanese descent at that time, she didn't end up passing anything culturally Japanese down to her kids (my dad); her decision to do this is ~understandable, but it's also such a bummer. About four years ago I stumbled across a copy of No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai in the bargain bin at a used book store. Since then, I've read/enjoyed a ton of Japanese authors, and I'm always looking forward to more.

>24 kgodey: I just finished it! It was a little confusing at first, with the multiple perspectives/identities for a single entity and the formal naming schemes for the characters, but I enjoyed it. And it was so quick to read! Thankfully, I was able to get the second book at the library earlier today. I haven't decided if I want to just read the trilogy through or alternate with other books... As for your first assignment for our "book club", I think you should read The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier. I just checked and it looks like they have it at Mudd.

>27 andrewreads: I'm glad you liked it! The sequel is a change of pace from the first book, but I liked it quite a bit. I bought a copy of The Truth About Celia on Amazon (they have used hardcovers for $4.00 including shipping) but it's not sold by Amazon, so I'm not sure when it will get here. I probably won't get to it before my Vorkosigan reread is complete, but I'll read it soon.

At the suggestion/behest of my good friend Kriti (kgodey on LT), I read Ancillary Justice earlier this month. And then, because that was the first part of a trilogy, I was obligated to read the following two books as well (Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy). Fortunately, this obligation was not tedious in the least—I really enjoyed all three books!

I've seen this trilogy referred to as a "space opera", but (assuming I understand the definition) I disagree with that designation. These stories avoid heavy-handed melodrama and, although there is some fighting, the warship/shoot 'em up scenes are hardly the focal point. Instead, these focus on character development and world building and political intrigue. Also, each book in this series benefits from a fairly small and focused story arc; the universe that Leckie has built is soooo big and interesting, but she doesn't let that distract from the plot.

Also, in classic science fiction fashion, Leckie does a good job of asking "big questions" like "WHY DOES GENDER MATTER" and "WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN TO BE HUMAN", but does so in a way that isn't heavy-handed. These books are fun and fast and very enjoyable. Seeing how she left things, I wouldn't be surprised if she dipped back into this universe in the future to write more novels; I really hope she does.

Overall, I'd give this trilogy somewhere between 4 and 4.5 stars (out of 5).

Yay! I'm so glad you read them and liked all of them.

I don't think "space opera" necessarily refers to melodrama, I think it just means more character-focused stories that just happen to be set against a somewhat epic background in space (as opposed to hard-SF idea-focused stories).

And Leckie is returning to the universe in 2017! http://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/two-new-ann-leckie-novels-comi...

>30 kgodey: Ah. Okay. I was using Wikipedia's description of "space opera", but I imagine it's far from a rigid definition. Regardless, it was a good series and I'm happy to know that more stories set in that universe are forthcoming. Hooray! Thanks a bunch for the recommendation.

I decided to take a break from science fiction to read a more literature-y book and I'm very glad that I did. The White Boy Shuffle tells the story of Gunnar Kaufman—a young black man growing up in LA in the early 1990's. In middle school, he moves from an ~affluent (read: white) area of Santa Monica to the gritter, more ethnically-diverse neighborhood of Hillside. Unsurprisingly, adjusting to the social norms of his new environment proves to be... challenging. This story is wonderfully satirical and irreverent but also has a ton of heart. I enjoyed it a lot. Reading Beatty's words, it's easy to understand why/how he's a successful poet; his prose are lyrical and moving and incredibly readable. I'm definitely interested in checking out his other work.

4 stars! (out of 5)

>29 andrewreads: Science-fiction is not really my thing, Andrew, but your review of this trilogy almost made me want to read this one/three.

Andrew, my older son had so much fun in Japan that he's leaving for Tokyo again this week. Beside Japanese literature, have you read any manga? I'm trying some now and looking for some good recommendations. Have you any to recommend? I'll be back reading contemporary Japanese literature later, but my son has no interest in that. Go figure!

>33 PaulCranswick: I used to read a ton, ton, ton of sci-fi back in middle school and high school, but I haven't been reading as much of it lately. That Imperial Radch trilogy was really good, though, and has kinda spurred me to start reading more of it again. I may be wrong, but it seems like the kind of story/storytelling that might appeal to a non-sci-fi fan.

>34 SqueakyChu: Oh man! I hope he had a good time. I've watched a lot of anime, but I haven't read toooooo much manga. The stuff I've read has mostly been the lighter slice of life stuff. Yotsubato is probably my favorite series. Wandering Son is also quite good. I'm not sure if you've read much/any Osamu Dazai, but there's a three-part manga series of his novel No Longer Human that is fairly disturbing (but good!).

EDIT: I just noticed that you started a second thread for your book challenge and that you've already read some Yotsubato! It appears as though you liked it, so that's good. As another suggestion, I'd also recommend checking out Twin Spica.

>36 andrewreads: Reading the manga has been so much fun! I've tried to read a variety of them and found some I really liked and some I didn't like much or at all. I love the Yotsuba&! series. My son has the whole series so I'm going to borrow the ones I haven't read yet from him. I'll make a note of those manga you did like and look for them. I also liked very much two other series. One was Tale of the Waning of the Moon and the other was ES: Eternal Sabbath. I'm still reading the latter.

My son had a fabulous time. He attended three concerts - one live and two that were live movies of the event (the Love Live! final concerts). He spent the whole time in Tokyo, met up with a Japanese friend who showed him around a little, visited a huge garden and one shrine. He was there at the peak of cherry blossom so that was an added bonus. He wants to go back next year again for the winter Komiket.

Andrew, we haven't seen you here for awhile. Hope everything is well with you.

Hey Andrew, are you going to make a 2017 thread?