Books
I read 30 books last year. Actually, I read 28 different books, but re-read two of them.
My top five, in no particular order:
1. The Golden Age. This trilogy by John C. Wright was some of the best sci-fi I've read in years. If you like your futures gritty, with stark depictions of human depravity and social injustice... then these books are not for you. One of the most brightly imagined tales to come along in a while.
2. Generation Kill. Evan Wright's book about the assault by Recon Marines into Iraq is the best embed account of the war to emerge so far. The book will whip you between moments of hilarity and utter terror in this grunt's-eye-view of battle.
3. The Life of Pi. Beautifully written story about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Not only does Yann Martel's tall tale actually come off as believable, but it actually turned out to be highly disturbing, despite the light tone sustained through most of the book.
4. Carlucci. Really three separate stories now wrapped into one volume, this book by Richard Paul Russo follows the travails of cop in a grim, near-future San Francisco that is teeming with any sort of deviant behavior you can imagine, and many that you can't. Russo is every bit the stark stylist that William Gibson is, and the stories left me aching.
5. Hmm. I'm not sure what to put in at number five. The first four were so clearly a cut above the rest, but I'm not sure that any others on my list make that high grade. I have a bunch of sort of second-tier books that weren't quite in the same league as this bunch, but I hesitate to pick just one. If forced, I guess I'd pick The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. It's a great primer on the current state of string theory, of which Greene is a major proponent. The book is amazingly readable for the layman, and I actually found it clearer and more informative than Stephen Hawking's books, such as The Universe in a Nutshell.
Runners-up include Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World, a charming biography of one of the fathers of the science of geology, William Smith; Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture, which attributes Western military superiority to a variety of cultural factors such as a tradition of democracy and respect for the individual; Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's military noir sci-fi adventure (stay away from the sequel, Broken Angels; and Moneyball, Michael Lewis's fun examination of how the Oakland A's assembled a kick-butt team by scouring the market for undervalued assets in much the same way that an investor might pick up a promising penny stock that has been overlooked by others. I wasn't totally convinced by his arguments, but it was an incredibly fun read.
My top five, in no particular order:
1. The Golden Age. This trilogy by John C. Wright was some of the best sci-fi I've read in years. If you like your futures gritty, with stark depictions of human depravity and social injustice... then these books are not for you. One of the most brightly imagined tales to come along in a while.
2. Generation Kill. Evan Wright's book about the assault by Recon Marines into Iraq is the best embed account of the war to emerge so far. The book will whip you between moments of hilarity and utter terror in this grunt's-eye-view of battle.
3. The Life of Pi. Beautifully written story about a boy stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. Not only does Yann Martel's tall tale actually come off as believable, but it actually turned out to be highly disturbing, despite the light tone sustained through most of the book.
4. Carlucci. Really three separate stories now wrapped into one volume, this book by Richard Paul Russo follows the travails of cop in a grim, near-future San Francisco that is teeming with any sort of deviant behavior you can imagine, and many that you can't. Russo is every bit the stark stylist that William Gibson is, and the stories left me aching.
5. Hmm. I'm not sure what to put in at number five. The first four were so clearly a cut above the rest, but I'm not sure that any others on my list make that high grade. I have a bunch of sort of second-tier books that weren't quite in the same league as this bunch, but I hesitate to pick just one. If forced, I guess I'd pick The Elegant Universe, by Brian Greene. It's a great primer on the current state of string theory, of which Greene is a major proponent. The book is amazingly readable for the layman, and I actually found it clearer and more informative than Stephen Hawking's books, such as The Universe in a Nutshell.
Runners-up include Simon Winchester's The Map That Changed the World, a charming biography of one of the fathers of the science of geology, William Smith; Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture, which attributes Western military superiority to a variety of cultural factors such as a tradition of democracy and respect for the individual; Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan's military noir sci-fi adventure (stay away from the sequel, Broken Angels; and Moneyball, Michael Lewis's fun examination of how the Oakland A's assembled a kick-butt team by scouring the market for undervalued assets in much the same way that an investor might pick up a promising penny stock that has been overlooked by others. I wasn't totally convinced by his arguments, but it was an incredibly fun read.
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