Books 2007

It's that time of year again, when I attempt to impress everyone by the number of books I've read.  (Because, let's face it, the titles themselves are never going to impress anyone.)  There's less this year than last, but I attribute that to the fact that I wasn't unemployed for two months this time around.

First off however, a quick summation: my favourite of the books I read was probably Iraj Pezeshkzad's  My Uncle Napoleon, a comic tale of a young boy growing up amidst feuding relations in World War II Iran.

On the other hand, the most disappointing was Terry Pratchett's Making Money, a sub-par rehashing of the much better Going Postal.  (The most in need of an editor was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  It fails to get most disappointing mainly due to the fact that after Half-Blood Prince I had less than high hopes for the book.)

My least favourite doesn't make it to the list.  Cruelest Reading Month defeated me with a single book: John Norman's abysmal Time Slave, abandoned after around 30 torturous pages.  I showed paragraphs to Becca, who had encountered parodies of his work before, and she responded with something along the lines of "I though they were just making that part up!"

The most pleasantly surprising of all the novels, though, was Alexei Tolstoi's (also spelt Tolstoy) Aelita, a light, somewhat dated and naïve, vintage science fiction piece about a Soviet scientist and a soldier who travel to Mars.  Technically an allegory for Lenin's New Economic Policy (there was a reason Tolstoi was sometimes known as "the Red Count"), I found it made me think of a less two-fisted Burroughs, full of ancient people, decaying empires, and a sense of wide-eyed wonder.  I have his other science fiction novel, The Garin Death Ray (aka The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin), kicking around somewhere and look forward to reading it.

So, all that said, here we go.  As always, feel free to ask about any of them and I'll try and give my opinion.

Books finished since Dec. 3, 2006 (likely minus one or two I forgot to insert into the list):

1. Bertolt Brecht - The Threepenny Opera.
2. Iraj Pezeshkzad - My Uncle Napoleon.
3. Christopher Moore - Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.
4. Mikhail Bulgakov - Heart of a Dog.
5. James M. Cain - The Postman Always Rings Twice.
6. Terry Pratchett - Wintersmith.
7. Stuart Lee Allen - In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food.
8. Ben Jonson - Volpone or, The Fox.
9. Albert Camus - The First Man.
10. Jonathan Kirsch - A History of the End of the World.
11. John Updike - Trust Me.
12. Irving Layton - A Wild Peculiar Joy.
13. Mordecai Richler - St. Urbain's Horseman.
14. Yukio Mishima - The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea.
15. Nick Cave - And the Ass Saw the Angel.
16. Gabriel García Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude.
17. Ogden Nash - The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash.
18. Harlan Ellison - Slippage: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories.
19. Samuel Beckett - Happy Days.
20. Pablo Neruda - Residence on Earth.
21. Edmund Rostand - Cyrano de Bergerac (Hooker translation).
22. John Steinbeck - Of Mice And Men.
23. Arthur Ransome - Old Peter's Russian Tales.
24. C. S. Lewis - The Screwtape Letters.
25. Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes.
26. Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles.
27. Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho.
28. Fernando Pessoa - A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems.
29. Albert Camus - The Fall.
30. Miguel de Cervantes - Interludes.
31. Ernest Hemingway - In Our Time.
32. Robert E. Howard - Cthulhu: The Mythos and Kindred Horrors.
33. Jon Ronson - Them: Adventures With Extremists.
34. Edward Fitzgerald (Translator) - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
35. Bertolt Brecht - The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
36. J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
37. Michael B. Oren - Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.
38. Woody Allen - Side Effects.
39. Jon Ronson - The Men Who Stare At Goats.
40. Jim Thompson - After Dark, My Sweet.
41. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich.
42. Alexei Tolstoi - Aelita.
43. James M. Cain - Serenade.
44. Mikhail Sholokhov - And Quiet Flows the Don.
45. Michael Moorcock - Storm Bringer.
46. Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World.
47. Terry Pratchett - Making Money.
48. Roger Zelazny - The Great Book of Amber: The Complete Amber Chronicles.
49. Mikhail Bulgakov - Black Snow: A Theatrical Novel.
50. George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia.
51. Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber.
52. Ramsey Campbell - Cold Print.
53. Fritz Leiber - The Wanderer.