Lists of Lists for 2011

We are embroiled in final exams right now, and I'm also transitioning into an added position at work, so I haven't been posting much.  I've been reading a lot though, and soon I'll post more reviews as well as my end of the year reflection.  That is always my favorite part of the end of the year.  Holidays?  Well, okay.  I'd rather read best of [insert year] lists!

Random House has pulled together an amazing list of lists: Best of Book Lists 2011.  I got it from my co-worker Robyn, who always knows everything about books before anyone else.  She's amazing, and one of my best reading resources.  Maybe I'll get to some of these books in 2012;  I know I've made it to some already!  Pretty soon I'll be asking for your favorite reads of 2011, and maybe your favorite album.  Get ready!

House of Holes by Nicholson Baker

House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I've read a lot by Nicholson Baker, and the man can be incredibly maddening when he wants to be (for instance when he strings librarians up by their toenails in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper). He can also turn a lunchtime escalator ride into a novel (The Mezzanine). Actually, I preferred that to this novel of "raunch." I kind of got the point after the first story or two, and while I enjoyed his seemingly endless names for body parts, that was really the only redeeming quality. The story was nonexistent, the characters were interchangeable, and at the end, I felt like I needed a shower ... in a bad way.

Mo-om, I think I got some creepy reclusive author on me!

Don't get me wrong.  Nicholson Baker is worth reading.  I just wouldn't start here (or maybe I wouldn't even go here!).  If you want a novel that is shameless about sex but has a better story, you can try The Fermata, but my favorite is Vox, a novel that claims to be about phone sex, but I found incredibly touching.   It had traces of what I loved about the movie Before Sunrise.

My favorite Nicholson Baker book is The Anthologist, because the character Paul Chowder is well-written, and it started me on a poetry reading kick that I haven't tired of. 

Top Ten Books on my TBR List for Winter

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by the Broke and the Bookish; every week there’s a new topic to discuss and this week’s is:

Top Ten Books On My TBR List For Winter

Oh, man.  I am so excited for winter reading.  First there is that 2 week chunk of days off, and this year contains no traveling, no family, no visitors.  Other than getting ready for my class spring semester, I will have a few commitments.  I should be able to read a lot.  Add to that the Around the World in 52 Books Challenge that I'm participating in, and you have one excited reader.  Here are ten of the books I'm looking forward to reading in the next few months!

1. The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq
I have previously enjoyed other books by Houellebecq, and although I have not read his entire oeuvre, it has been a while since I've read anything by him.  Looking through Amazon, it looks like something by him came out last year, and I completely missed it (Whatever is the title).  A lot of critics are praising The Map and the Territory, and it sounds like this might be one of the more significant works by the author.  I won't be reading it for my Around the World Challenge, despite the fact that he is French, living in Spain, because I have previously read work by him.  (I believe I'm reading Balzac for France!)

2. Queen of America by Luis Alberto Urrea
I loved The Hummingbird's Daughter, because of its blend of magical realism, Spanish language (while it is translated, quite a bit of dialogue is still in Spanish), and the healing powers of the main character, Teresa Urrea.  It looks like Queen of America has the same main character, who I will be happy to return to, and it also looks like it takes place along the border of Mexico with other countries (USA, Cuba, etc).  Even better - I recently won a copy through the GoodReads publisher giveaway.  Since I was going to read it anyway, getting a book for free doesn't hurt.  I'm also not planning on using this for my Around the World Challenge because I'd read Urrea before, but I might read it the same week as the other Mexico pick just for kicks.

3. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I have already read Snow Crash at least once.  I think twice.  It is the pick for one of my online book clubs for January, and I am looking forward to reading it again.  When I re-read the Sprawl Trilogy when we did the Neuromancer readalong on SFF Audio, it was remarkable how much more I got out of it since I had read so much more science fiction in the past few years.  I'm expecting to have a similar experience at this point in my reading life with Snow Crash.  Except this time, I'm going to listen to the audio book.  Scott from SFF Audio claims it is one of the best audio books, and he would know!

4. Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
Speaking of audio books!  I keep hearing good things about Lauren Beukes.  She just won the Arthur C. Clarke award for her second novel, Zoo City.  I have audiobooks of both at home, waiting to be listened to.  The other thing that makes me excited about these particular books is that they are the very first audiobooks published by the new (2009) publisher, Angry Robot Books. They seem to be doing publishing in a way friendlier to the 21st century than most publishers - their eBooks do not have international restrictions or DRM.  In other words, they want us to READ them.  Thank goodness.

5. Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan
On the other side of that 21st century publishing coin, I will be happy to finally have access to Half-Blood Blues at the end of February, which is still technically the winter.  After all the acclaim (award nominations, award wins) and all the frustration in actually getting a copy, I want it more than ever.  (Want me to do something?  Just tell me I can't... Yeah, I'm one of THOSE people.)

6. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
This comes out in March, which gives me just enough time to read the two books by Winterson that I haven't read yet (see books 7 and 8! aha!).  Jeanette Winterson is one of my favorite authors, and my two favorite books of hers are The Powerbook and Written on the Body.  Such beautiful language.  This is her autobiography, and from what I've read (and from what I suspect just in her writing), it is bound to be an interesting and powerful story.  The title sounds like a question I've heard from my own mother.  Maybe Winterson and I have some things in common?


7. Art & Lies and 8. Gut Symmetries by Jeanette Winterson
I don't actually know much about these books, I just stumbled across them at an amazing used bookstore in Asheville, NC, knew I hadn't read them, and purchased them on the spot.  I think I will have read everything by the author when I finish these two.  These are good candidates for reading during the December holidays, actually.  Her prose is beautiful, so I will be reading these with sticky notes in hand.

9. From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon
In all of this international fiction reading that I am going to be doing, I am most excited for the books from Iceland.  I only get to officially pick one, and this is one of the many on my to-read list.  From the Mouth of the Whale has a winning combination.  Ancient culture!  Cold weather island!  Good writing!  Could someone find me a way to get paid to read books from Iceland and travel there as well?  Dream job!

10. The Old Man and His Sons by Heoin Bru
Another cold-weather-island book and possibly the book I'm most excited to read for my Around the World challenge.  It may also be the only Faroe Island work of fiction that has been translated into English.  I looked for a long time, and many are available in Icelandic but very few other languages. 

Part of me feels like I should include 1Q84 on this list, since I am still in the middle of reading it, and it is really great.  But I'm not sure I can look forward to a book I'm already reading.  What are you looking forward to reading?

The Great Dystopian Novel To Read List

Longer list alert!  This is the other half of the reading list mentioned in this post, originally compiled by Ross E. Lockhart.  These are the books I'm adding to my to-read list, because it is a silly goal of mine to have consumed all post-apocalyptic and dystopian titles.  Have any to add?  Any favorites to weigh in on?  I'd love to hear your thoughts.  

Amis, Martin
— Einstein’s Monsters  
Anderson, M. T.
— Feed
Armstrong, Jon
— Grey (et.seq.)
Asimov, Isaac
— Pebble in the Sky
Auster, Paul
— In the Country of Last Things  
Ballard, J. G.
— Crash
— Hello America
Barry, Max
— Jennifer Government
Bates, Paul L.
— Imprint
— Dreamer
Beaton, Alistair
— A Planet for the President 
Beckett, Bernard
— Genesis
Böll, Heinrich
— My Melancholy Face  
Boston, Bruce
— The Guardener’s Tale
Boyd, John
—The Last Starship from Earth 
Brain, Marshall
— Manna
Brooke, Keith
— Genetopia

Brunner, John
— The Jagged Orbit
— The Sheep Look Up *
— The Shockwave Rider  
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward
— Vril: The Power of the Coming Race 
Burgess, Anthony
— The Wanting Seed
Burroughs, William S.
— Blade Runner, a Movie
(see also Nourse, Alan E.)

Carbonneau, Louis
— Barrier World
Cobb, William
— A Spring of Souls
Cohen, Stuart Archer
— The Army of the Republic

Cowdrey, Albert E.
— Crux
DeVita, James
— The Silenced
DiChario, Nick
— Valley of Day-Glo
Dick, Philip K.
— Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said  
— The Man in the High Castle *  
Disch, Thomas
— The Genocides
— 334
Farmer, Philip José
— Riders of the Purple Wage
— Dayworld
Ferrigno, Robert
— Prayers for the Assassin (et.seq.)

Fischer, Tibor
— The Collector Collector
Fukui, Isamu
— Truancy
Gray, Alasdair
— Lanark: A Life in Four Books * 
Grimes, Tom
— City of God
Hairston, Andrea
— Mindscape
Hall, Sarah
— Daughters of the North Harkaway, Nick
— The Gone-Away World Harris, Robert
— Fatherland
Harrison, Harry
— Make Room! Make Room! * 
Herbert, Frank
— Hellstrom’s Hive
Hubbard, L. Ron
— Final Blackout
Huxley, Aldous
— Ape and Essence
Johnston, Paul
— The House of Dust
Keogh, Andrew
— Twentytwelve
Keppel-Jones, Arthur M.
— When Smuts Goes
Kerr, Philip
— The Second Angel
King, Stephen
(writing as Richard Bachman) 
— The Long Walk
— The Running Man
Kuttner, Henry
— The Iron Standard

Lamar, Jake
— The Last Integrationist
Le Guin, Ursula K.
— The Lathe of Heaven

Lerner, Lisa
— Just Like Beauty
Levin, Ira
— This Perfect Day
Lewis, Sinclair
— It Can’t Happen Here *
London, Jack
— The Iron Heel *
Lowry, Lois
— The Giver
Lundwall, Sam J.
— 2018 A.D. or the King Kong Blues  
Mark, Jan
— Useful Idiots
McCarthy, Wil
— Bloom
McIntosh, Will
— Soft Apocalypse
McMullen, Sean
— Eyes of the Calculor
Mellick III, Carlton
— The Egg Man
— War Slut
Miéville, China
— Perdido Street Station

Moore, Alan
— V for Vendetta
Morgan, Richard
— Market Forces
— Thirteen (AKA Black Man) Morrison, Toni
— Paradise
Nabokov, Vladimir
— Invitation to a Beheading

Neiderman, Andrew
— The Baby Squad
Nolan, William F. and George Clayton Johnson
— Logan’s Run
Norden, Eric
— The Ultimate Solution
Nourse, Alan E.
— The Blade Runner
(See also Burroughs, William S.) 
O’Brien, Michael D.
— Eclipse of the Sun
Oppegaard, David
— The Suicide Collectors
Philbrick, Rodman
— The Last Book in the Universe
Pohl, Frederick and C. M. Kornbluth — The Space Merchants
Pollack, Rachel
— Unquenchable Fire
Powers, Tim
— Dinner at Deviant’s Palace
Rand, Ayn
— Anthem
Reed, Kit
— Enclave
Robinson, Kim Stanley
— The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Wild Shore Triptych) *
Rucker, Rudy
— Postsingular
Russ, Joanna
— And Chaos Died
Scalzi, John with Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, and Karl Schroeder 
— Metatropolis
Sharpe, Matthew
— Jamestown
Shirley, John
— Black Glass
Silva, Ulises
— Solstice

Silverberg, Robert
— The World Inside
Singer, Lee
— Blackjack
Slattery, Brian Francis
— Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America *
Smith, Cordwainer
— The Rediscovery of Man
Smith, L. Neil
— The Probability Broach
Spinrad, Norman
— The Iron Dream
Starhawk
— The Fifth Sacred Thing  
Stevens-Arce, James
— Soulsaver
Takami, Koushun
— Battle Royale
Tevis, Walter
— Mockingbird
Theroux, Marcel
— Far North
Tomson, Rupert
— Divided Kingdom
Turner, George
— The Sea and Summer  
Turtledove, Harry
— The Gladiator
Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr.
— Player Piano *
Walton, Jo
— Farthing
— Ha’Penny
Waugh, Evelyn
— Love Among the Ruins
Wells, H. G.
— The Time Machine
— When the Sleeper Wakes

Weyn, Suzanne
— The Bar Code Tattoo (et.seq.) 
Williams, David J.
— The Mirrored Heavens
Wilson, Robert Anton
— The Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy  
Wilson, Robert Charles
— Mysterium
Womack, Jack
— Random Acts of Senseless Violence Wright, Ronald
— A Scientific Romance
Zamyatin, Yevgeny
— We *

Dystopian Novels Reading List, Part 1

Have I ever explained the title of this blog?  I hope it is pretty obvious... the sentiment that there are too many good books, and not enough time to read them.  Following busy readers in GoodReads and bunches of reading blogs is like sitting at a restaurant and being convinced that everyone else picked better menu items than you did.  I suffer from constant reading envy.

Another thing that really feeds my reading envy?  Lists!  I love lists.  At the back of the Brave New Worlds volume of dystopian short stories, editor John Joseph Adams included a chapter "For Further Reading," compiled by Ross E. Lockhart.  Such a great idea, and on the website you can even access the lists as a PDF or as buying lists in Amazon.com.  The list is incredibly long, so first I will post the books I've already read, and my next post will detail the books I haven't read yet!

Lockhart indicates the books with "high literary value" with an asterisk, so I'll just leave his judgment as is.   See after the list for books that didn't make the list, but should have.

Notable Dystopias, already read: 

Atwood, Margaret
— The Handmaid’s Tale *
— Oryx and Crake
— The Year of the Flood
Bacigalupi, Paolo
— The Windup Girl *
— Ship Breaker
Bradbury, Ray
— Fahrenheit 451 *
Burgess, Anthony
— A Clockwork Orange
Butler, Octavia
— Parable of the Sower *  
Collins, Suzanne
— The Hunger Games (et.seq.) 
Crace, Jim
— The Pesthouse
Doctorow, Cory
— Little Brother 
Gibson, William
— Mona Lisa Overdrive
— Neuromancer * (really this should say Neuromancer et. seq.)
Huxley, Aldous
— Brave New World * 
Ishiguro, Kazuo
— Never Let Me Go 
Lem, Stansiław
— Memoirs Found in a Bathtub   
McCarthy, Cormac
— The Road * 
Mitchell, David
— Cloud Atlas (“Sonmis Oratio”)  
Orwell, George
— Nineteen Eighty-Four * 
Stephenson, Neal
— Snow Crash 
Stewart, George R.
— Earth Abides 
Westerfield, Scott
— Uglies (et.seq.) 

Some of these I'd classify as post-apocalyptic (and indeed, the Wastelands anthology contains a similar list, which I've been working through ever since!), but I think some books are easily both.  In fact, it is pretty hard to have a post-apocalyptic world that isn't dystopian.   

I would heartily endorse the reading of any book on this list.  The Lem is a bit difficult because it is pretty ridiculous, and I wouldn't say the overarching theme of Cloud Atlas is dystopian (but it is still a brilliant book).  My favorites probably include the Atwood, the Butler, and Orwell, as far as in their handling of dystopian worlds and themes.
I'd also add a few more books to the list, definitely worth a mention:

Noise by Darin Bradley
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner (they left this off the Brunner list, but I'd put it back on!) 
The Book by M. Clifford
Ready Player One by Ernst Cline (this post-dates the anthology)
The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq 
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson (hey, it made io9's American Dystopia Top Ten list)

The Kitchen as a Laboratory

The Kitchen as a Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking by Cesar Vega
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Molecular gastronomy - applied. Written by actual food scientists, each chapter addresses a different food question and narrates the science that particular scientist or team undertook to find the answer. Some of these experiments were grant funded research, yet the book is easy to read for the most part, even for a lay person like me.

The book starts with a chapter on grilled cheese, where I learned why mild cheddar melts better than aged, and why fondue works. I couldn't put the book down after that.

Other chapters address texture, crispness, thickening agents, and my favorite - chewy ice cream. The scientists took a look at what makes salep dondurma (which Harold McGee wrote about in the NY Times in 2007) work, and to see if they could replicate it with other ingredients. They had to do this since the key ingredient, salep, a wild orchid derivative, isn't allowed out of the country of Turkey, where it is indigenous to that area only. I was fascinated and horrified and probably won't go to the trouble of trying the recipe they developed on my own, since it is a long list of ingredients I'd have to special order and aren't immediately recognizable, but I could if I so chose.

That's pretty much the underlying sentiment in this book - can we? why not? and how? I was fascinated by it and imagine others would be too. You can just gloss over the chemical diagrams like I did.

Brave New Worlds

Brave New Worlds: Dystopian Stories ed. by John Joseph Adams

A few years ago, I read my way through Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse, also edited by John Joseph Adams.  It was an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories that I really enjoyed.  This volume is all dystopian stories, similar vein, but not quite.  In fact, I think I can say for sure that I prefer post-apocalyptic over dystopian.  I believe this is because I enjoy reading about people who have survived, who are rebuilding, and all the ideas and creativity that can come out of that.  In a dystopia, people are often unable to take control of their lives, and bad things are happening to them, usually by other people, most likely the government.  Just one observation I made of my own preferences.

That isn't to say this isn't worth reading!  I took the list of the table of contents from John Joseph Adam's website, and will make brief remarks on the stories. Most remarks will be questions since most of the stories seem to ask them, and answering them would give them away. 


The Lottery — Shirley Jackson
Apparently this is the old standard of dystopian stories.  The story itself was good, also shocking, but I was more interested in reading about the reception of the story when it was first published in the New Yorker.  Subscription cancellations... hate mail... all to show the power a story can have.

Red Card — S. L. Gilbow
I'm not going to lie, I loved the concept of this story, where certain people get license to kill with no consequences.  It does introduce a different type of conflict in daily relationships!

Ten With a Flag — Joseph Paul Haines
The first of several fertility related dystopian stories.  What happens when the government knows to much about your unborn child?

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas — Ursula K. Le Guin
Oh, Ursula Le Guin and how she can build a world.  What about this little sentence - "Let the tambourines be struck above the copulations..."  She describes a seemingly perfect world.  It was horrifying, and the last sentence is the title.

Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment — M. Rickert
A culture where if women dissent, they disappear.  Phew.  I remember this author from the Wastelands anthology - her story Bread and Bombs haunted me for months (I'm still not sure I understand it, but you can read it full-text online here.)

The Funeral — Kate Wilhelm
In a controlling society, a glimmer of hope...  this reminded me of the tone of Never Let Me Go, perhaps just with the children and the headmaster type character.

O Happy Day! — Geoff Ryman
This story seems to ask the question of what would happen if a group of homosexual men were given the task of loading people onto the train cars bound for concentration camps?  It felt more like an exercise in "what if?" than a fully developed story.  This story had me stalled for quite some time.

Pervert — Charles Coleman Finlay
I loved this story, actually.  A nice twist to question how we think of sexuality in our society.  Can we make this required reading for people who want to make laws about other people's relationships?

From Homogenous to Honey — Neil Gaiman & Bryan Talbot
A graphic novel offering.  What if moralistic dictators could time travel to rid the world of immorality as they defined it? 

Billennium — J. G. Ballard
A crazy nightmare of overpopulation, one that John Brunner would be proud of.

Amaryllis — Carrie Vaughn
This was a repeat read for me, since she was a Hugo Award finalist this year.  Another fertility dystopian story, with a twist involving fish.

Pop Squad — Paolo Bacigalupi
The price of achieving immortality?  Making reproduction against the law, and babies into nothing more than pests needing to be exterminated.  How's that for a fun job?  An okay concept, but at this point I was kind of tired of fertility dystopias.

Auspicious Eggs — James Morrow
And the opposite of the reproduction horror spectrum - where women who don't reproduce are put to death.

Peter Skilling — Alex Irvine
Sometimes saving yourself for the future is a gamble.

The Pedestrian — Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury is a master at writing horror into the everyday.  Even a walk.

The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away — Cory Doctorow
Doot doot doo.  This story was tl;dr.  (That is shorthand for too long, didn't read... having this volume as bedside reading wasn't always the best choice, and I usually love Doctorow's dystopian voice.  I'd read Little Brother before I'd try this again.

The Pearl Diver — Caitlín R. Kiernan
Talk about complete loss of privacy - the government and your boss are both watching you, and they're collaborating.  Wait, this doesn't seem that off....

Dead Space for the Unexpected — Geoff Ryman
“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman — Harlan Ellison^®
I've grouped these stories together because they both have to deal with accounting for your time in ridiculous ways.

Is This Your Day to Join the Revolution? — Genevieve Valentine
Are you sure you don't know something we need to know?  Some of the writing reminded me of the overload of media and commercialism from Stand on Zanzibar.

Independence Day — Sarah Langan
Self-regulation, ridiculous surgery, and constant danger.

The Lunatics — Kim Stanley Robinson
Men forced to mine the moon practically every waking moment, and the work days are getting longer.  I don't want to ruin the story by saying any more.

Sacrament — Matt Williamson
The art of torture once it becomes a regulated form.

The Minority Report — Philip K. Dick
I've never seen the movie, but knew the basic premise.  The actual story is great, and the pacing really struck me as being well done.   I couldn't get the "precogs" out of my head.  In all the action, the true dystopia has to be the lives they lead.

Just Do It — Heather Lindsley
This might be my favorite story of the anthology.  It is funnier than most, but anyone who remembers the chapter in Fast Food Nation where he meets the smell/flavor chemist will definitely appreciate this story.

Harrison Bergeron — Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Everyone is equal!  For better or worse!

Caught in the Organ Draft — Robert Silverberg
When the old and rich implement a draft so that they can live forever off of younger peoples' organs.

Geriatric Ward — Orson Scott Card
Completely devastating story about society trapped in an early onset aging epidemic.

Arties Aren’t Stupid — Jeremiah Tolbert
People are genetically engineered to be good at one thing, and to be in pain when they can't do it.  Deep in my memory this story made me think of a Sesame street with the two puppet types - one that wanted the fruit in the tree but was too short to get to it, and the taller puppets with the arms that wouldn't bend so they couldn't feed themselves.  (This will make sense when you read the story.)

Jordan’s Waterhammer — Joe Mastroianni
Deeply disturbing society where love and sex are mysterious words passed down from the ground above, and human life has no value.

Of a Sweet Slow Dance in the Wake of Temporary Dogs — Adam-Troy Castro
This story!  This story will stick with me.  Smart of JJ Adams to stick it near the end.  True dystopia occurs when people are willing to endure anything for amenities.

Resistance — Tobias S. Buckell
Dystopia and voting.  For anyone who didn't live through the chad scandal.

Civilization — Vylar Kaftan
I loved this story, written in a Choose Your Own Adventure style!