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A Year in Reading: 2012 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 The companion piece to my film log, the book log keeps a listing of everything I've read over the course of a year, as well as giving me a place to type up a short review. As a handy reference, the book title of each listing provides links to the Amazon page for the book. Starting in 2009, I began providing star ratings of the books I read. The ratings are out of five stars, with five stars being equivalent to an A, 4½ to an A-/B+, four to a B, and so on. |
| 2-9 | Monsters
of Men, by Patrick Ness  |
[WARNING: spoilers for the first two books of the series will necessarily follow.] In the end, each of the Chaos Walking novels has its own themes, arcs, and stories, even as they all add up to one continuous tale. The first novel was an exploration of the world that Ness created, but also an allegory for how we function in an overwhelming amount of information, and how that men can learn to control that flood for their own purposes. The second was a novel about what we could find ourselves doing for a cause we thought was right, and just how far we could stretch our moral fibers. And book three? Book three is a novel about war, and what it does to us all - but it's also a book about morality, and redemption, and politics, and the way we can become so focused on winning that we neglect what may be right or wrong. And it does all of this while telling a riveting, powerhouse tale that left me stunned, unable to do much other than process the book for a while after I finished it. Just as threatened at the end of The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men is the tale of the war between humans and the Spackle. But it's also the tale of the conflict between the Mayor and the Answer, both of whom are so focused on their own beliefs as to what the future should hold that they find themselves unable to accept anything short of complete victory by their own terms. More fascinatingly, though, Ness also adds another narrator to the novel, one whose introduction adds an entirely new language, perspective, and view to all of the events of the novel. It's this character whose arc may be the most moving, ultimately, coming together in a climax that literally made me gasp with its honesty and painfulness. I've been floored by the whole Chaos Walking series, but even in the greatness of this series, Monsters of Men may be the most beautiful and powerful of the series. There's a beauty and a quiet hopefulness that emerges at the core of the novel that's hard to shake, especially in the midst of such horrors, and Ness's fusion of so many themes, ideas, strong characters, and great plotting all come together to make not just one of the best YA books I've read in recent memory, but one of the best books, period. I can't recommend this series enough. Go out and immerse yourself in Ness's world - it's a hard place, to be sure, but it's an incredible one as well, one that may affect you more than you ever expect it to. |
| 2-6 | The
Ask and the Answer, by Patrick Ness |
[WARNING: spoilers for The Knife of Never Letting Go will necessarily follow.] By the end of The Knife of Never Letting Go, Todd and Viola's flight had come to a stunning end as they discovered that the army from which they'd been fleeing all this time had already conquered everything in sight. What, then, does this new world order look like? Such is the central question of The Ask and the Answer, which finds our heroes thrust into two very diametrically opposed camps and forced to question whether the ends can ever truly justify the means. Like the best sequels, The Ask and the Answer feels less like a rehashing and more like a continuation of the first book's story, all while deepening the world that Ness has so vividly created. The first volume of the series was filled with grayed morality, and this book only increases that depth beautifully, covering some of the same ground Suzanne Collins did in Mockingjay but doing so in starker and maybe even more unflinching terms. The Ask and the Answer has to rank up there with the most engaging and fascinating science-fiction I've read in some time, as Ness takes his central conceits and follows them all the way to their logical ends, all while taking the time to create fully-realized, complex characters who defy easy description and moral choices that aren't as readily apparent as we might wish. The end result...well, let me be honest: if you think The Hunger Games is bleak (and it is), the Chaos Walking series makes those books look positively radiant and cheerful in comparison. But the story being told here is so riveting and fascinating, the characters so involving, the world so compelling, that the question of whether it's too bleak never comes up. Instead, you find yourself drawn into the tale inexorably, and the only time you'll stop is when you hit the end. And let me tell you: once again, you better have the next book ready. Because there's no way you'll want to wait for more. |
| 2-4 | The
Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness |
Even if the only thing The Knife of Never Letting Go had going for it was an absolutely killer premise, that might be enough for it to succeed, if the premise is as intriguing as this one. Knife opens in a small town named Prentisstown, where a war has left the human population with no surviving women and the thoughts of every male (regardless of species) loudly broadcasting at all times, creating a cacophony called The Noise. But it doesn't take long for our hero, a teenage boy less than a month from becoming a man within the society, to discover that perhaps everything he thinks to be true may not be, and as he begins to flee for his life, the book blossoms into a great thriller and mystery. It's a great premise, and the book packs a lot of genuinely surprising shocks along the way, and like I said, it would be enough to make a good book on its own. But Knife has more going for it, most notably some compelling and fascinating characters whose morality and actions make for a compelling spectrum. More than that, though, they make the choices that these characters face all the more dramatic and effective, be they choices of survival or more complicated moral crossroads. The first volume in a trilogy, Knife sets up a fascinating world and then tells an absolutely compelling tale about it, building all the way up to a fantastic ending that left me glad I had the second book already ready and waiting. If the rest of the series is anywhere close to this good, this could be one of the new standards for me. It may be unflinchingly bleak at points, but it's also complex, imaginative, and fascinating, and more than that, it's compulsively readable. |
| 1-30 | His
Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle |
The penultimate Sherlock Holmes short story collection finds Doyle either comfortable enough or bored enough with the character to start experimenting more and more with the form of his stories, and the end result is one of the most fun of all the collections, with the biggest variety of tales. There's a massive spy heist, a case that spawns from a landlord concerned that she never sees a client, one that begins with Holmes on his deathbed, and even one that's told from the third person perspective in which Holmes and Watson don't even appear until well into the story. Beyond that, you have the devil appearing and literally frightening people to death, Watson trying to investigate a disappearance all on his own, and surprising amount of political intrigue and even a little social commentary. In short, then, you have what's probably the most ambitious of all the Holmes collections, and easily the most consistently fun, all the way up to the title story that closes the volume and gives us a sense of where Holmes and Watson might have ended up. In a way, it's almost a shame that there's one more volume, because His Last Bow may be the perfect capper for the career of the world's most famous detective; in its pages you get the sense that Doyle has finally flowered and come into his own, eschewing his standard plotting and doing far more ambitious things. And for a reader, that's a pretty great joy to find. |
| 1-29 | The
Valley of |
In a lot of ways, the final Sherlock Holmes novel feels like a bit of a rehash of the first (A Study in Scarlet); like that novel, the novel is split into two halves, with the first half detailing the crime being investigated, and the second half plunging into the backstory that led up to the crime. And, like that story, The Valley of Fear largely revolves around events that occurred in America, leading to Doyle's somewhat entertaining efforts to write American characters while losing very little of the English diction and rhythms. And yet, while I recognize that this one lacks some of the freshness of Doyle's other work, I can't deny that it was pretty greatly engaging throughout. The crime at the heart of the case - in which a man is found dead in a modified version of a locked room mystery - is a solid one, and Doyle nicely tosses out a lot of red herrings and intriguing clues before delivering a solution that's quite satisfying. And while the second half of the story never feels particularly necessary to our understanding of the events of the novel, it doesn't make them any less gripping, as we follow a newcomer to a small mining town and his involvement with a local group of criminals and murderers. The second half of the book all builds up to a pretty great twist that I honestly never saw coming, one that really changed the way I thought about a lot of the book. There are some problems with the book; the inclusion of Moriarty never feels all that relevant, and the book's epilogue feels bizarrely tacked on. But it's still a great story, one that allows Doyle to move beyond some of the restrictions of Holmes's world and tell and altogether different kind of mystery tale. |
| 1-28 | The
Crossings, by Jack Ketchum  |
In which Jack Ketchum writes a short, brutal Western that brings many of his usual themes and motifs into the old West. Half of The Crossings follows a group of cattle herders; the other follows a group of women who have been kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by a group worshipping old Incan gods. The Crossings doesn't waste much time; this is a short little novella, and it becomes evident quickly that these two groups will soon come together in a horrific collision of violence and brutality, and neither of those counts are in short supply here. Ketchum has always been fascinated by how people who experience trauma and abuse react to such situations, and in watching these characters revert to what's almost a bestial state of violence, he ends up crafting a compelling enough little tale. But there's never much sense that this tale particularly needed telling, or that there's much profound to get at here; it's almost more of an experiment to see if it can be done. Well, it's done, and it's not a bad way to kill a few hours. But it's far from Ketchum's best, and in the end, it comes dangerously close to being something I never would have expected from Ketchum: forgettable. |
| 1-27 | Point
of Impact, by Stephen Hunter  |
I won't deny that my feelings on Point of Impact are probably affected by a couple of outside forces - namely, the effusive praise heaped on it by my friend Dietrich and my limited knowledge of the film Shooter, which was based on this book. The latter gave away the central premise of the book before I got to it; the former built up the book as a superb, taut thriller that was a great example of the genre. And while Point of Impact does set up a pretty solid storyline (which involves a best-of-the-best type Marine sniper who's recruited to hunt a sniper who might be gunning for the President, only to find himself being used for far less noble purposes), there's not a lot in the execution of it that really won me over. Prime example: Hunter seems as though he's desperate to prove his gun knowledge to the reader, but rather than working this in through the story, the book derails for massive amounts of time, sometimes multiple pages, to simply go on and on about the guns and their details. And while the research seems impressive, it's also remarkably dull. It also doesn't help that Bob Lee Swagger, our hero, talks not like a Southerner, but rather like every cliched "good ole boy" you've seen in movies and television. (Still, he comes out better than Swagger's lawyer, who's basically the country chicken lawyer from Futurama.) Meanwhile, the villains run the gamut from unrepentantly evil to cartoonishly evil, with one exception in the form of a psychologist who has been prison raped into compliance (seriously) and whose academic tendencies make him the joke of the novel. It sounds like I have nothing good to say about this book, I know, and that's not the impression I want to give - the actual plotting is often really well-done (particularly when it comes to a frame-up job that's slowly revealed), and almost every one of the action setpieces is incredibly gripping and exciting. But for every great moment, there's a lot of unengaging characters, gun jargon, and some swerves that become almost silly in how far Hunter goes to hide them. As a whole, Point of Impact is an okay action book, but that's about all it is; it certainly doesn't drive me to pick up more of Hunter's stuff, nor does it fill me with praise the way it apparently does so many people. |
| 1-22 | Abarat:
Absolute Midnight, by Clive Barker |
It's been a long wait for Absolute Midnight and for the Abarat series to continue, and even as a big fan of Barker's, you can't help but wonder after any wait like that if the new book will live up to your hopes, or if it will be a satisfactory continuation of the series. Well, Absolute Midnight delivers, and then some. Be forewarned: the title should give you a clue about how dark this book is, but even it won't prepare you; if the first books pushed a little against their YA categorization, Absolute Midnight demolishes it, delivering some premium grade nightmares of almost every variety imaginable, from Lovecraftian deep sea dwellers to horrific alien gods, from children's souls being trapped for eternity to brutal infanticide, from mob rule executions to dismemberment of heroic characters. The series has been building towards the plunging of the Abarat into an unnatural midnight, and characters have warned about the horrors that could be released, but so many of us have been tamed by YA authors that it's a little shocking to find a book that pulls almost no punches in its depiction of the living hell that the villainous Mater Motley unleashes here. If there's a gripe to be had here, it's that the book almost covers too much ground; from the birth of the Requiax to the return of some old friends, from Candy's conflict with the suddenly (and, to be frank, a little abruptly) evil Princess Boa to the revelations of Mater Motley's allegiances, Absolute Midnight covers a ton of ground, and feels a little rushed at points. At the same time, it's clear that whatever time Barker took to write the book paid off, as his imagination is still in full bloom, even if it's now turned to hellish visions rather than a wondrous new world. The ending is every bit the cliffhanger I dreaded, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't satisfied, or that I wouldn't be buying the next book in the series on the first day I possibly could. At the same time, given how unrelentingly bleak and dark Absolute Midnight is, maybe it's good to go find something a little happier to read for a bit. But let me be plain here: though it may be a little rushed, as a fan of the first two books, I loved this one; it feels as though Barker is finally letting all of the seeds he's planted burst into bloom, and doing so in a far more brutally effective way than I expected. |
| 1-16 | Abarat:
Days of Magic, Nights of War, by Clive Barker |
The second volume of the Abarat series is just as filled with wonders and visions as the first, but somewhere along the way you realize that Barker is plotting this whole series a lot more tightly than you might have thought at first. Days of Magic picks up a couple of weeks after the end of Abarat, with Candy and Malingo still on the run from the Criss-Cross Man, and with Christopher Carrion still intensely fascinated by Candy for reasons that even he doesn't fully understand. And based off of the first book, you might think that this will continue...but Barker pulls the rug out quickly, escalating things far more quickly than the reader expects. As the book unfolds, you'll start to realize just how ably Barker was laying groundwork and planting seeds in the first book; more than that, you'll start to realize that the scope of the series, and understand that the plotting here is far more complex than simply being a tale of light versus darkness. Nowhere is this more pointedly on display than in the book's finale, which genuinely shocked me on the first read; on a second, you can start to see how Barker's building towards it, and you have a sense of where we might be going from here. Luckily, now that book three has finally been released, I don't have to wait for another 6 or 7 years to find out what happens next, and that's great, because Abarat has the potential to be one of the great all-time young adult series. From its vivid imagination to Barker's beautiful artwork, from its complex morality to its compelling characters, from the villains to the heroes, it's hard to think of anything that's quite like Abarat, and even harder to think of a time when Barker's talent has been more on display. |
| 1-11 | Abarat,
by Clive Barker |
At his best, Clive Barker demonstrates an imagination that's leaps and bounds beyond just about any author I can think of; whether it's the rug-hidden Weaveworld, the nightmarish pleasures of The Hellbound Heart, the mindbending powers on display in The Great and Secret Show, or the mysteries of The Thief of Always, Barker demonstrates a knack for visions like nothing else I've ever read. And in my opinion, Abarat ranks up there with the best work he's done, even if it is a young-adult novel; the visions on display in this opening volume of the series are staggering in their scope and imagination, and inspire wonder, awe, and horror in ways that few authors are capable of. Of course, the book is only aided and bettered by Barker's beautiful illustration work throughout; the lush colors and stark sketches only flesh out his world all the more, conveying the sheer scope of it all. The story is hard to get a handle on entirely, at least in this first novel; by and large, this novel is about getting the main character (a young girl named Candy Quackenbush) from our world into the mysterious Abarat, a series of islands where each island is an hour of the day. What follows is a series of adventures and fascinating characters, from the Mischief brothers (made up of master thief John Mischief and his brothers, who are heads dangling on his own head's antlers) to Christopher Carrion, the Lord of Midnight who lives and breathes his own nightmares - literally. There are hints and glimpses of how this all ties together, but as a whole, Abarat is an introduction to this massive world - and while that lack of much resolution might normally bother me, my confidence in Barker's storytelling and my love of his imagination make this book an absolute joy to read, no matter what. |
| 1-6 | I
Don't Want to Kill You, by Dan Wells |
When I read Mr. Monster, I commented that Wells had managed to rare feat of making a sequel that deepened the original rather than just revisiting it, and the same goes double for I Don't Want to Kill You, the (probable) concluding volume in the John Wayne Cleaver trilogy. One of the fascinating things Wells has done in each volume of the series is provide John with an antagonist that fits the themes of the book, and without giving too much away, the metaphoric interpretations you can play with here are absolutely spot-on for John's increasingly complicated mental state. As the end of Mr. Monster suggested, I Don't Want to Kill You finds John in the role of the hunter, not the hunted, all while his social and family life continues to evolve based off of the events of the previous books. Indeed, one of the many great things about the series is how much John has evolved as a character; the John we meet as this book opens is a far cry from the John who debuted in I Am Not a Serial Killer, and the John at the end of this novel is even further from that. In fact, even though the book's ending seems to hint at ways that the series could progress, from a character perspective, this being the final volume of the series seems perfect; by the book's end, John has reached the end of this chapter of his life, and the various characterizations that make him up have shifted as a result of all of these events, making him a very different person now. All of this rich characterization and development would be more than enough to make this into a great book, but that ignores all the ways that I Don't Want to Kill You succeeds as a thriller, too; the mystery at its core is a really involved one, and there are a number of intense set pieces that stand up with any thriller I've read recently. I really can't say enough good things about the John Wayne Cleaver series; whether you judge it as a thriller, a debut work, a character study, or a horror novel, it succeeds at any of them, and plotting, twists, and characters are all ones that I'm unlikely to forget any time soon. A knockout series that deserves a lot more attention and notice than it seems to have gotten. |
| 1-3 | Mr.
Monster, by Dan Wells |
In I Am Not a Serial Killer, we met John Wayne Cleaver, a teenage boy whose sociopathic tendencies seem to predestine his transformation into a serial killer as he ages - a fate that he is trying to avoid while simultaneously being deeply drawn to it. And in that first book, as John found his town under siege by a true serial murderer, John found an outlet for those tendencies, as he stalked and killed the monster which was slaughtering his community. But as Mr. Monster, the second book in the series, opens, John soon learns that this particular genie is a lot harder to get back in the bottle now that it's been released. As John orbits around the investigation into the first book's murders, he finds his darkest urges harder and harder to ignore, all while the girls in his classes are starting to inspire some deeply disturbing dreams. All in all, John Cleaver is one of the more fascinatingly flawed characters I've read in recent years, and it's to Wells' credit that he's willing to follow Cleaver to these truly dark places, allowing the reader to empathize with John or not as they choose. And if that's not enough, Wells pulls off the impressive feat of making a sequel that feels genuinely like an extension of the first book rather than a revisiting, providing an arc for John while still being a richly satisfying thriller on its own merits. In two books, Dan Wells has created a rich, fascinating character, and he's also come up with a complex world with a rich story running through it. In short, he's created a phenomenal series on his first time out, and he's converted me to a fan already. Maybe this says it perfectly: I had other books lined up to read, but the instant I turned the last page of Mr. Monster, I immediately opened up the concluding volume in the series - there was no way I couldn't. |
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