Books, Books, Books!

[seedee]

The sun is shining, the temperature is above freezing, and I don't have it in me to post a book rant. So I tried to come up with a list of the last twenty books I read (not sure if I got them all).

I rated the books according to the ten point scale of subjectivity that is neither fair nor comprehensible and depends solely on my momentary mood. It spans from 1 (don't bother) to 10 (can't read a second time because I drooled all over the pages and now they stick together which is seriously annoying).


From best to worst:


Johannes Cabal the Necromancer - Jonathan L. Howard 10/10

1Q84 - Haruki Murakami (fantastic transl.: Ursula Gräfe) 9/10

Perdido Street Station - China Miéville 8/10

Wintersmith - Terry Pratchett 8/10

Into the Wild - John Krakauer 7/10

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card 7/10

Fudoki - Kij Johnson 7/10

Good Omens - Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman 7/10

Der Soziopath von nebenan - Martha Stout (Transl.: Karsten Petersen) 6/10

A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini 5/10

Die Essensfälscher - Thilo Bode 5/10

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 5/10

Milchgeld - Volker Klüpfel/Michael Kobr 4/10

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins 4/10

Achtung Baby - Michael Mittermaier 3/10

The Demon's Lexicon - Sarah Reese Brennan 3/10

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms - N. K. Jemisin 3/10

Dresden Files/ Storm Front - Jim Butcher 3/10

Der Schwarm - Frank Schätzing 2/10

High Heels and a Head Torch - The Essential Guide For Girls Who Backpack -2431/10
(Don't judge me; it was a present. After remembering that sad excuse for a book, I almost feel like ranting.)


What do you think? Any books you would have rated differently? Any recommendations now that you know what I like?

I hope you all have a great day.

♥ ♥ ♥

Comments

[vaysh11.livejournal.com]

Fascinating list, vanCD. Based on it, I have an inkling you may like Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sparrow_%28novel%29). Old book, from the mid 1990ties.

[vanseedee.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thank you for the rec. That goes right on my reading lists; it sounds great - and I never heard of it before. Asche über mein Haupt ;)

[katmarajade.livejournal.com]

Ender's Game is probably my favorite book of all time. I've read it literally dozens of times and I think it gets better which each read. Good list!

[vanseedee.livejournal.com]

I really liked Ender's Game. It's a great book. I wasn't too fond of the ending, though. That was too much imo.

[annafugazzi.livejournal.com]

::sigh:: I adored it. Then I found out the author was a wingnut. And that kinda killed it for me :(

[katmarajade.livejournal.com]

mmm... yeah, he's a bit wacky irl, but Ender's Game was written back in the 70s and he wasn't nearly so hardcore back then. And when it comes to novels (or movies or music or any kind of art really) I genuinely don't care about the author's (or actor's or artist's) politics or really anything about them as a rl person. *shrug* All I care about is what they can create. It seems to me that most truly brilliant authors/artists/actors are pretty wacky irl and people think they're crazy. Some just hide it better or are wacky in whatever ways are popular in their generation. OSC is one of my all-time favs, whatever his rl politics. So is Oscar Wilde, who was thought just as weird in an altogether opposite spectrum. And I am quite sure that I would loathe most of my favorite actors if I met them in the real world, but I still love their work. *shrug* That's my take, at least. ♥

[vanseedee.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think that's one of the reasons why I was so uncomfortable with the ending. He was very high up on that moral horse.

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

I've only read one of these! I reckon I suck.

And I liked the Hunger Games a lot better than you did, mostly because I fell completely and irrevocably in love with two of the main characters (I have issues with the third book in the trilogy, though).

HOWEVER. Mostly I'm commenting because I picked up an icon today which I took because I immediately thought, eeee, Seedee will LOVE this one! ♥

Edited for reasons of literary embarrassment.

[vanseedee.livejournal.com]

OMG I LOVE YOUR ICON. I know I'm predictable but I don't give a damn. I was cooing away at it before I even read the comment.

I think if you had a list, there would probably be only one book I'd have read, too. We just have different tastes. I'm glad that this doesn't include icons :P

I tried liking the Hunger Games - I picked it up after your rec. But Battle Royale has been one of my favourite books for years. The Hunger Games is too close to that book for comfort. It stops where Battle Royale just starts delivering the punches. Whenever Katnip was alone, though, I really liked her as a character.

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

I added another keyword to the icon. ♥

Battle Royale would probably be too much for me, then. I felt pretty much punchdrunk after finishing the HG trilogy. But as long as we agree on icons and Harry Potter, I don't worry about the rest. :D

(On the subject of the literary embarrassment — I could swear I'd been seeing that yellow cover in the bookshelf for at least a decade. I can't believe it's only been three years. Dammit. And they say time passes quicker as you grow older. *sigh*)

[vanseedee.livejournal.com]

Awwwwww. ♥ ♥ ♥

As long as there are icons like this, we'll always find common ground :P

If you have both, then maybe you had the first one in mind? The Kite Runner. The font is the same and the covers are kind of similar. Well, not really, but I mixed them up before. It's not a bad book, and there's many interesting things about it - but, I don't know, I didn't get too deep into the story itself, and I had trouble caring for the characters. Which is definitely the opposite of what the author intended.

[thimble-kiss.livejournal.com]

Yeah, no, we have the Kite Runner too, but that cover is burgundy red, at least in the Norwegian version. :P There's no excuse!

Of course, this has prompted me to actually take them off the shelf and look in them for the first time (they're my husband's acquisitions). Maybe I'll even read them some day. *g*