Books Read in 2010

Lightroom is far and away the best photo-editing and -organizing software that I've seen (and I've tried a lot of them), and this book is a rock-solid overview of how to use it.

Scott Kelby's guide is, as usual (and I have read a half-dozen of them), the best way to cut through the mass of features in any photo software and get to a workflow that makes the best use of its capabilities. I would have liked a little more depth on the features that are new to Lightroom 3, but I extracted enough that I feel confident using the new software.

I first read Neuromancer almost 20 years ago (before the worldwide web), and it blew me away then. I'm less blown away now, probably because so much of Gibson's universe has been adopted by mainstream culture. The Matrix borrowed freely from Neuromancer, as did Strange Days and just about every other scifi movie of the past two decades. The entire premise of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse is laid out in a throwaway paragraph where Molly tells Case about her past:

"You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all. You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . ." She cracked her knuckles. "Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it. . . "

This time around, I loved the noir atmosphere of the opening chapters, but the second half of the novel fell flat. It wasn't because I had read it before — I really didn't remember the plot at all. I think it was the way the layers of deception were revealed. It seemed like Gibson didn't figure out the ending until he got there, so some of the bits of resolution felt forced.

I think Gibson has become a much better writer over the years, and I'm looking forward to the release of Zero History.

Jonathan Carroll creates authentic, quirky, wonderful characters like no other writer in fantasy/speculative fiction whom I've read. The narrative details are rich and interesting and I could easily read hundreds of pages of Carroll's descriptive writing even if there was no plot advancement. Fortunately that's a non-issue, since there is a plot too. I loved all of the major characters here, especially Wyatt and Arlen, but I also enjoyed Carroll's portrayal of Death. Recommended.

At the time of this writing, you can get a kindle e-book edition of From the Teeth of Angels from Amazon for $0.99, which is a steal.

The Windup Girl has many of the elements that would make up my ideal science fiction novel: its universe is complex and immersive, there is no explanation of any of the fantastic elements, it lets you figure out the rules of the universe as you go, and it is plausible but slightly exaggerated on nearly every dimension. What's missing, unfortunately, is a character to root for. There are several characters that could be protagonists, but they all go beyond flawed (flawed is good!) to unlikeable. The narrative is fractured, and although the pieces ultimately fit together, the structure feels forced, and the ending ends up being a bit unsatisfying. It's like China Mieville without the fantasy elements, but also without the heart.

Although the basic form of this entry follows the pattern of the previous books, some slight hints about the narrator's backstory are starting to creep in, and Sunny's vocalizations are now sometimes clever puns, both of which are making the series more interesting.

I thoroughly enjoy Sarah Vowell's appearances on The Daily Show, and I share a lot of her political views, so I expected to enjoy her writing, but this history-lesson-cum-memoir was pretty dull. There are a handful of very witty short passages, but there is little sense of forward motion, and I found it all too easy to put down.

Kevin and I are still enjoying these, but I wish I had more of a sense that the series was going someplace.

Doomsday Book has a terrific premise (future historians have found a way to travel back in time to the time periods they study) and a decent plot outline (heroine is trapped; her colleagues struggle to save her), but I really struggled to finish this novel. It is dreadfully slow, and the "comedy of manners" thread with the American bell-ringers did not work for me at all. It read to me like a novel from the 60s rather than the 90s.

It won both the Hugo and the Nebula, so it must be pretty good on some level. I guess I'll chalk it up to a matter of taste.

I read this aloud to both kids (ages 5 & 9), and they both claim to have enjoyed it, but I do not understand the mass appeal this book seems to have. I really disliked it this time around. The wordplay was occasionally amusing, but not overly clever, and the structure is a disaster.

These books truly do not invite separate reviews, so I will merely note that Kevin is still enjoying listening to me read them.

I liked this book club selection more than I expected to, but the phonetically-spelled dialogue was annoying and the plot was too predictable.

Kevin continues to enjoy this series, and I continue to appreciate the many repeating motifs Snicket uses in the narrative. Clever, playful stuff.

This is a strong first novel — much better than any other self-published novel I've read (admittedly, I only have a handful of data points). I identified with the protagonist and enjoyed many of the small observational details (it's not densely observed like Nicholson Baker, but there is a witty turn of phrase on most pages). The plot is rather simple and straightforward, which works because the focus is on relationships. I don't usually read this style, but I enjoyed it.

When I first read this almost a decade ago, I didn't slow down enough to appreciate how witty it is. But by reading it out loud to Kevin, I really got to enjoy it. It's not great on it's own, but I have a sense the series as a whole will be worthwhile, and Kevin is eager to continue with it.

I hate only giving this three stars when I just gave a Dan Brown novel the same rating (because Neil Gaiman is a freaking genius compared to Brown), but in the context of the larger Sandman universe, this is a minor work.

Another minor Sandman add-on. Good reading, but not great.

If you've ever read anything by Dan Brown, you know exactly what to expect: paper-thin characters, a ridiculous villain, and a plot that jumps out of the gate at 60 m.p.h., holding the cruise control there right through to the last page. But you also get just enough stimulation to keep you turning pages. Yeah, the puzzles are trivial. Yeah, the plotting is absurd. Yeah, it's not great writing.

I enjoy a Dan Brown book in the same way I enjoy a bag of potato chips: it's totally empty calories and I hate myself a little for consuming it, but I do enjoy one now and then.

This is the first volume of The Sandman where the artwork stood out more than the writing. Which isn't to say that the writing isn't good, because it is. It's just that most of the other volumes — especially The Kindly Ones — used a more cartoonish art style that didn't do much for me. With this volume, I wanted to savor each panel. Good stuff, and a nice but unnecessary coda to the Sandman story.

This is the climax of the Sandman story arc, and Gaiman pulls together many threads from previous volumes. There are a lot of cuts between different story lines, but it all holds together beautifully, and the ending is very satisfying. I'm curious to see what kind of coda he puts in the final volume, The Wake.

I read this aloud to Kevin, and he enjoyed the story of inter-dimensional traveler Joey Harker, though there were a lot of words and concepts that went way over his head. I was mildly entertained. It's aimed at 10-year-old readers, and there's not much in it to hold an adult's attention.

I continue to enjoy Stross's mash-up of Lovecraftian horror, espionage, and bureaucracy, but somehow this novel didn't quite live up to its predecessor, The Atrocity Archives. Still, I'll probably chase down the next volume when it's published.

This is a decent reference to a pretty good array of algorithms. It touches on sorting, search, graphs, and computational geometry. The one-page summaries of the algorithms are mostly very good, though some are more self-sufficient than others. The text is adequate if you've been exposed to an algorithm before, but I found it lacking in the areas where my background was weakest (the explanation of Ford-Fulkerson is particularly bad). On several occasions (including Ford-Fulkerson), I got a much better understanding by calling up the Wikipedia page on a particular algorithm.

Although there are shortcomings, I made some notes about a few of the algorithms and improved my understanding of the tradeoffs between a few different algorithms, and I can easily imaging using this as a quick reference sometime in the future.

This really hit the spot. Stross's juxtaposition of bureaucracy, spy-craft, and Lovecraftian horror is awesome, and the little geek/computer-science/hacker details are both perfectly tongue-in-cheek and spot on. I can't wait to read the sequel.

World's End is Gaiman's nod to Canterbury Tales, and it holds together pretty well. I was amused when the stack depth of story-within-a-story got deeper than I could hold in my head.

Delirium is my least favorite of Dream's siblings, but this road-trip story was very enjoyable.

After reading the insanely positive reviews on Amazon, I pitched this to my book club, and we decided to read it. I didn't really know what to expect, except that it's a novel about a young girl in Germany during the holocaust, and it has been marketed toward young adults.

I expected to like it a lot more than I did. The prose is extremely stylized, to the point where it became annoying (a few times, there would be a sentence or two that sounded like Vonnegut, but those passages were rare). The chapters are all very short with almost no momentum between them, so it was very easy to put the book down after reading for just a few minutes.

So style-wise, I didn't like it.

The substance, describing the consequences of Hitler's tyranny from the point of view of an innocent young girl, her foster parents, and the residents of the ordinary German neighborhood they live in, was much more interesting. Although I didn't enjoy most of the book, the ending was well done, and I guess it was worth it.

I'm very curious to see what the other book club members thought.

Of the three recent "period" novels Dan Simmons has written, Black Hills is my favorite. Where Drood fell flat for me by being too Dickensian, and The Terror seemed to plod a bit here and there, Black Hills kept my attention throughout. The ending was a little too preachy, but the overall historical texture made up for it.

Kevin is still enthusiastic about having me reading the Harry Potter series aloud, but I'm getting burned out. The first couple of books in the series are written to be read aloud, but as the series goes along, awkward sentence constructions and word juxtapositions become more and more frequent. And, if you didn't know, the books also get to be very long. It took us almost four months to get through volume five. Phew!

We're taking a little break, but we'll get back to it.

This seventh collection of Sandman comics comprises a handful of short stories centered around a theme of storytelling. They don't advance the overall story arc much, but they are all well-written and satisfying.

I didn't expect to like this sequel to Daemon as much as I did. Suarez does a great job pulling together the loose threads from the first book and delivers a fast-paced and emotionally satisfying conclusion. All of the major characters from Daemon return, and they each get a decent arc.

Taken as a whole, the two novels are a strong condemnation of the power structure of our society and a pretty good description of what transparency of power would be like.

Sign me up for the darknet!

In this collection, Gaiman really hits his stride with The Sandman. Dream and his siblings do not occupy many panels in this sequence, but the story is strong, and though it can stand alone, there are several threads pulled from earlier chapters that reward readers of the entire series.

I expected to like this a lot better than I did. The Chicago World's Fair is an interesting topic, as is a real-life serial killer. However, Larson's writing style really didn't work for me. The author is clearly a meticulous researcher, as evidenced by the extensive endnotes and bibliography, but the sheer amount of minor detail was mind-numbing, and I found the little colorful details about sunsets and so on a bit hard to take alongside the documented bits. The last quarter of the book, which is told as a procedural, moves a lot more quickly than the rest of the book, and I enjoyed the chase. If it hadn't been a book club selection, I would have put it down after 100 pages.

I enjoyed this a lot more the second time, having now read the first few volumes of the series. Looking forward to continuing onward!

I saw a video by the authors of this book on Cool Tools, and I was sufficiently intrigued to try the recipe in the video — an artisan-style whole-wheat bread. The process was easy, the bread was delicious, and I went on to make some yummy pizza with the leftover dough. After that, I didn't hesitate to buy the book, and I've tried a couple more recipes and techniques since then (garlic knots and loaf-pan style — both were excellent).

The "five minutes a day" catch-phrase is slightly misleading, since it takes about twenty minutes of active work and several hours of rising and baking time to make the bread (the authors average that twenty minutes over four loaves to get to five minutes). But it is easy work, and the results are terrific.

I found a great tip in the book for keeping the bread fresh: just place the loaf cut-side down on a dinner plate and leave it on the counter. Today, I'm on day three of a whole-wheat loaf, and though the crust has hardened, the cut side is still nice and soft. I'm looking forward to finishing it for lunch.

I plan to make another batch of dough today (100% whole wheat with olive oil), and I'm looking forward to trying some of the other recipes.

I'm a huge Joss Whedon fan based on the Buffy and Firefly franchises, and I was a fan of the Uncanny X-Men (and spinoffs Alpha Flight and The New Mutants) back in the early-to-mid-eighties, so I suspect that I liked Whedon's take on the X-Men more than your average Whedon fan.

It should come as no surprise to any of Joss's fans that he finds a way to make the heart of the story arc be one of the not-so-powerful female characters from the X-Men universe: Kitty Pryde. Her story here is more compelling than those of the other mutants, and Whedon succeeds at giving her a bit of depth. The story covers insanely wide ground over the course of the four "volumes", and the premise is absurd (though no more than is usual for superhero comics), but it's good fun.

More great fun from Moore, and I enjoyed it a lot in spite of not having read most of the source material Moore draws from. I'm looking forward to following this series further.

You can tell that Alan Moore had a blast writing The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It takes place in an alternate universe where many of our most iconic and peculiar fictional characters (Mina (Murray) Harker, Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jeckyll, the invisible man, etc.) are real, and the aforementioned characters (along with a few others) have banded together in the late 19th century as the ultimate crime-fighting team.

It's a fantastic romp through a lot of literature I haven't read, but it's great fun — probably moreso if you've read the source material.

The Magicians is a grown-up mashup of Harry Potter and the Chronicles of Narnia, with references to Tolkien, Oz, and other famous works of fantasy.

The protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, is never satisfied. Actually, one could stop there, but I'll keep going. He is smarter than most of his peers and bored with his high-school existence, until he is whisked away to a secret college of magic, where he is smarter than most of his peers and becomes bored with his existence. Quentin keeps shooting for the next great thing, and each time he reaches it, he realizes it wasn't what he hoped it would be.

I can imagine that Quentin's dissatisfaction would annoy many readers, but I actually sympathized a lot with him. Thankfully, I realized a long time ago that to be happy, one needs to focus on process rather than goals, that it is counterproductive to keep looking for the next best thing that's always just around the corner.

This was better than Grossman's previous novel, Codex, and I think he may end up being a novelist worth following.

I liked this a lot better than the Buffy Season 8 comics. Fray takes place far in the future, with the first slayer being called since Buffy herself. That slayer is Melaka Fray, and her slayerhood is complicated by her family and her watcher stand-in in ways that Buffy never experienced. The story is slight but complete, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to.

Rising Stars is a lot like the TV-show "Heroes". The premise — a small number of individuals endowed with super powers by a celestial event — is the same (though JMS wrote this long before "Heroes" aired). Both series start out compellingly, and both fall apart in the middle act. JMS pulls things together with a reasonably satisfying conclusion, but the overall series suffers from too many characters and selective attention to the consequences of the superpowers.

This was fun, but not lasting.

[The Absolute Sandman, Vol. 1 is a gorgeous, oversized, fake-leather bound tome comprising the first twenty issues of the Sandman comic, and the print quality is fantastic. It's an extravagance, but it's not that much more expensive than buying the equivalent cheaper collection.]

I first dipped into Gaiman's Sandman series back in 1997, and I started in the wrong place (with Season of Mists). As a result, I wasn't drawn into the Sandman universe, and I gave up. Recently, however, I've gone on a deep dive into Alan Moore's graphic novels, and my interest in Sandman returned. This time, I started from the beginning.

I'm hooked. The plotting isn't anywhere near the tightness and complexity of Moore's graphic novels, but it's a helluva lot easier to follow. The mythology is rich, and though I don't know where it's going yet, it seems to be going somewhere.

Season of Mists is next in the chronology, and I'm curious to see how much better I like it in context.

From Hell is thoroughly-researched historical speculative fiction, and it's a tremendous work of art. Jack the Ripper has been studied to death in the literature, and there isn't much consensus about the identity of the murderer. Moore has taken a recent theory (one of the more plausible ones in many ways) and woven it into a complex story of conspiracy that oozes with period authenticity. The extensive end notes reveal the details of Moore's scholarship, and highlight the intensive research that Campbell put into the artwork as well.

All though it is a work of scholarship, this graphic novel is also brutally adult. There are extensive scenes of graphic violence and sex, some of which border on being gratuitous. It is also hard to follow in places, though the end notes help considerably, and many of the confusing scenes become clear in retrospect after finishing the work.

For me, this surpasses V for Vendetta and Watchmen, and therefore is likely Moore's greatest work.

I have liked Thomas Pynchon in the past, but his latest novel left me completely cold. I didn't find the drug-addled hippie cast to be particularly interesting, and the plotting was nonsensical. Usually with Pynchon you can expect some clever wordplay on every page, but here the brilliant turns of phrase are too infrequent.

More Moore.

I didn't particularly get into the story here, but I very much enjoyed the layouts, especially the way that the artists used non-standard frames. I don't think I'll bother seeking out the subsequent volumes, but this was a fun read.