Books I Bought in 2009

I've commented on every book I bought this year. It's not quite a list of every book I've read this year; I borrow a few, I re-read many, and some books I bought this year didn't get read until after New Year's. But, it's close.

I acquired 47 books in 2009.

January 2009

Schuette, Kim R.: The Book of Adventure Games; The Book of Adventure Games II

Two collections of maps and walkthroughs for 80s text adventure games. The first volume is bigger and has all the best games up through 1983. The second volume is slightly barrel-scrapy -- but I cannot possibly object, because it has a map and walkthrough of a game I wrote. My first professional recognition! My life followed directly.

Green, Simon R.: The Unnatural Inquirer

There's no point distinguishing Green fantasy novels. This is a Nightside one, in which Nightside stuff happens.

Bujold, Lois McMaster: Passage (The Sharing Knife, 3)

First half of second story in the Lakewalker universe. Low-key; people save the world in these books, but they're not about saving the world. This one is about being on boats. And having teenage kids.

February 2009

Sawyer, Robert J.: Starplex

Silly, unless I pretend I'm 16 and reading Analog, and then it's all too familiar. Only it came out when I was 26 and not reading Analog any more. Whoops. Giant multispecies starship (a la Brin), incursions from the Eschaton (a la Bear), long arguments about shadow matter (a la Baen Books and it's 1985 forever), you get the idea.

Caine, Rachel: Undone (Outcast Season, book 1)

Spinoff trilogy from the Weather Fluffer series. Damn, I wish my brain hadn't generated that term, because I'm never going to get rid of it. Defrocked genie falls to Earth and learns the joys of fast motorcycles and designer shoes. I don't remember plot elements, but that's not going to stop me from reading the rest of the series.

Hanover, M. L. N.: Unclean Spirits

Is it Mary-Sueism when everybody loves and admires you, but that pisses off your boyfriend's ex? This seemed okay. I probably had more specific comments but they didn't stick.

Lukyanenko, Sergei: Last Watch

Fourth book in the increasingly misleadingly named... well, nobody ever said this was a trilogy. The movies stopped at two (except there might be a third). (Actually, this book contains a wry jab at how completely unrelated the movie continuity is.) Anyhow, this is a tidy little magical thriller, and we learn enough about the underlying nature of reality to bring the four-book series to a comfortable stopping point.

Walton, Jo: Lifelode

Cosy high fantasy about a village household halfway between East-of-the-Sun and West-of-the-Moon, or, if you like, a bunch of very normal people who don't know they're living in a game of Civilization. The narrator keeps house; this is her talent. The fact that she can see the past and the future all mixed together is not a talent, nor a curse either, which is an inimitable feat of writing and also keeps the reader seriously off-balance. Unfortunately the war and the trial scene put the storyline off-balance too; they are temporally mixed with, but never really blend with, the quiet (and occasionally histrionic) growing-up and grown-up depiction of family life. Worthwhile piecewise.

Walton, Jo: Sibyls & Spaceships

Poetry. I picked up the collection to remind myself, and wound up re-reading a lot of it. So it's got that. It's also got the span when John M. Ford left us and George W. Bush wouldn't go, which makes it a bit hard to re-read, even this little time later.

Zelazny, Roger: Manna From Heaven

Zelazny's latest -- that is, his last -- short stories. His beautiful shape of prose is still evident, but the stories don't quite draw blood. On the other hand, this includes five Amber fragments, set after the tenth book and clearly beginning to set up a brand-new storyline. Those are as gonzo-fun as Amber ever was. They might not have built up to a solid novel, but I'm sorry they're all we have.

Jarpe, Matthew: Radio Freefall

A stack of nice ideas in search of a novel. The novel they are in search of is a band story, and there's some AI hijinks too, and a Heinlein-riff orbital freehold. The music-industry material seemed solid, whereas the computer parts were not very convincing; I have a terrible fear that this is because I know lots about computers and nothing about the music industry. I remember the bad guy as being a ridiculous caricature of evil, but I might be mixing him up with the protagonist of Edelman's Infoquake.

Morrow, James: Shambling Towards Hiroshima

Wry-bitter short absurdity about the other WW2 superweapon project: giant radioactive lizards bred at Area 51 to stomp Tokyo into submission. Told from the point of view of a famous Hollywood man-in-the-monster-suit, roped into the project because -- because -- why should I tell this story? Morrow tells it much better.

Baugh, Benjamin; Hicks, Fred: Don't Lose Your Mind

Collection of 26 insanity/abilities for the Don't Rest Your Head RPG. (Ants crawling under your skin! Until you tell them to crawl out and eat somebody.) Each one details what you can do, what happens when you overdo it, and what happens when you completely lose your grip. I usually pass over RPG books that are just lists of things, but this is a delightful nightmare smorgasbord.

March 2009

Thurman, Rob: Deathwish

I said last year that I expected this to be a long-haul series. Wrong; this (fourth) book mops up the major plotline, as our hero's unpleasant relatives try to turn the human race into canapes once and for all. The wrap-up is a little strained, but better to do it while the characters still have their charm.

West, Michelle: The Hidden City

Grumpy old thief (tomb raider, not burglar) takes in street waif. Street waif learns to trust him; also shows alarming propensity to adopt more strays. This is an odd remix of the tropes of the author's Cast In... series (city with hidden magics; politics and petty nobility; orphans) with the Gang Of Girls Don't Need No Boys Here that more than one author has concealed in her trunk of teenage first novels. (Sherwood Smith even published hers.) I'm not sure whether this is indulging in juvenilia, subverting it, or re-imagining it with an adult perspective. It works, so far. Not sure where sequels will go.

Duncan, Dave: The Alchemist's Pursuit

Third book about apprentice wizard/student/detective in Renaissance Venice. Courtesans are turning up dead; traps, politics, disguises, chases ensue. Still fun.

Butcher, Jim: Small Favor

I-don't-even-know-how-manyth book about sassy Chicago wizard. The plot has gotten pretty dense at this point; the author's writing skills are keeping up. I still wouldn't mind some sort of series conclusion, though.

Montfort, Nick; Bogost, Ian: Racing the Beam

Study of the history and technology of the Atari VCS ("Atari 2600"). In particular, discusses how the hardware -- intended to support the full range of games from Pong to Slight Variations Of Pong -- was brutally hacked by clever game designers, enabling them to write every game you remember that isn't Pong. Why are all the rooms and mazes in Adventure horizontally symmetrical? This book explains.

Martin, George R. R.; Dozois, Gardner; Abraham, Daniel: Hunter's Run

The authors' afterword takes pains to point out that this is not two elder statesmen of the field collaboring with a rising young star. It's two young stars of the 70s tossing a novel idea back and forth, getting bogged down, putting it in a trunk, and then (twenty years later) offering it to a new young star to finish. Weird, but less one-sided than it seems at first.

Anyhow, this is an entertaining bit of frontier adventure SF. Think "third-world company-bent mining town" frontier, not "square-jawed American cowboys". The authors (I'm not going to try to sort them out, except for a vivid touch of Martin's alien lifeforms) do a nice job of presenting a mean, self-centered cuss of a protagonist whom I didn't like, but rooted for anyway. (Which turns into its own set of problems; you'll see.) Also, nice to have an SF protagonist who, when lectured by aliens about the central macguffin of the plot, doesn't respond "Fascinating!" or "That's incredible!" but rather "...You are a lying whore with breath like a Russian's asshole!"

Fox, Daniel: Dragon in Chains

Lovely Chinese fantasy novel. I realize that this is a mixed compliment about a book written by a white guy (pseudonym of British author Chaz Brenchley). But it is utterly lovely, and its created world is firmly set in Chinese tradition -- someone more historically knowledgeable than me could probably pick out a date. It's got emperors, it's got dragons, it's got fishermen, and jade is a magical substance of immense power. Skips back and forth between several characters and story threads, all deft and human. I want more.

Valente, Catherynne M.: Palimpsest

Dream-y, exquisite stream of prose that I didn't care about much. The central metaphor, or image -- is it a metaphor if you just declare it to be a magical law of reality? -- rubs me the wrong way, and I won't pretend the reasons aren't petty and personal. If you like wildly polyvalent female figures of power, the Orphan's Tales will do just as well as this.

April 2009

Castro, Adam-Troy: The Third Claw of God

Second book about Andrea Cort, political troubleshooter and draftee in a number of wars, some of them invisible. As with Emissaries From the Dead, this is a formal murder mystery -- a classic bottled-up-with-all-the-suspects setup -- which is also a powerful character story and a political thriller. The series plot-arc bumps along more steps than you might expect, too. Is it hyperbolic to give Adam-Troy Castro as the answer to "who is the new Bujold?" Maybe, but I'll stand behind it.

Rothfuss, Patrick: The Name of the Wind

Darling breakout fantasy novel of the year. I got there late, and... this is a whole lot of fun. But you gotta admit: it's a fun, well-done, engaging, hell of a Gary Stu. Destiny, red hair, tragic adolescence, unprecedented magical power -- the lot. I'd have been hooked even without the buckets of unresolved hinted plot threads.

Elliott, Kate: Shadow Gate

I really liked Spirit Gate, but I somehow lost the thread when trying to read this one. Probably would have been fine if I'd read them back to back, but the broad spread of characters were fuzzy in my memory, insufficiently reintroduced, and their stories were too separate for me to get back into. Also, if you have a bunch of people who are distinguished only by the unique colors of their cloaks -- and they insist on going nameless, for magical reasons -- is it fair to put one in a scene without mentioning the cloak color? Really?

Monette, Sarah: Corambis

Conclusion of the Melusine series. I don't think I'm satisfied with Monette's pacing. She tends to have stretches of desperate action and stretches of "actually, we're doing pretty well for ourselves", alternating in ways that don't make for good individual novels. In this case, the first half of the book is a flight into exile, and the second half is... weirdly congenial and low-momentum. Yeah, sheep are dying somewhere, and everybody's got various kinds of trauma going on, but it's not tense. Oh, well, the characters (old and new) are brilliant and lively and I need something to complain about. Worth it anyhow for the pissy academics of magic.

Sperring, Kari: Living With Ghosts

Magical intrigue in a vaguely Three-Musketeerine city with bonus fog, ghosts, and angst. Too much angst for me, and then the author killed off most of the lower-class neighborhoods (plague, for a start) to raise the stakes for our heroes. It felt cheap.

Dahlquist, Gordon: The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters: Volume One

Best title I've seen in a year. The book was okay. The opening scene was promising: a young lady of quality (Victorian England) is politely but obscurely dumped by her fiance. She falls into hopeless despair for about half a page, and then is off furiously tracking him, bluffing her way onto a train and then into a masked ball of positively Goreyan decadence. If the narrative had stuck with her, I think I would have loved it, but it cycles around through a fusty doctor and a mercenary skullcracker, who aren't nearly as awesome. There's plenty of gaslamp gonzo science, conspiracy, and villains with Prussian accents, but I had a hard time staying interested. I might read volume two, or I might not.

Sniegoski, Thomas E.: A Kiss Before the Apocalypse

Reminds me a lot of Simon R. Green: titanic battles between primal powers, with pedestrian prose treading on all the good parts. And a fetish for the wincingly-lame phrase "so much more than that." (Really, I went to check that Sniegoski wasn't a pseudonym for Green. He's not. Or if he is, he's been writing about six books a year, and needs to be assassinated for the good of the industry.)

Anyhow, it's an angel slumming as a private investigator. It works pretty well, sentence-level construction aside. The most important trick with your typical unstoppable-divine-force protagonist is to give him some reason not to uncork the wings and flaming sword every time a vending machine eats his change. This book manages that, and also gives him convincing connections to the mortal world.

Kochan, Stephen G.: Programming in Objective-C 2.0; Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X

I read these and was able to start writing MacOS and iPhone apps. Yes, ObjC is a candy-ass language. One gets over it.

May 2009

Swann, S. Andrew: Prophets (Apotheosis, book 1)

Religious galactic empires go to war over lost colony. Rogue AI shows up, declares intent to devour the universe. Everybody becomes very sad. I don't actually remember much of this book, except for a vague notion that a military stalemate that depends on both sides pretending not to know about an asset isn't very stable. Also, for a universe-devouring AI to quote the Book of Revelation doesn't really make it any scarier.

Butcher, Jim; Green, Simon R.; Richardson, Kat; Sniegoski, Thomas E.: Mean Streets

Four novellas: Dresden Files, Nightside, Greywalker, and Remy Chandler (the angel PI, see above). All good. The Butcher story in particular is a good follow-on to Small Favor. Green's annoying tics are less annoying at short length, I liked the Richardson story much more than her first novel, and the Sniegoski was fine too. If you are familiar with all of these series, this is worth picking up; if none of them, this is a good introduction. Well marketed, Roc.

Nourse, Alan E.: Psi High and Others; Tiger by the Tail

A fixup and a story collection, both from the 60s, all classic Nourse. You know, SF really was blatantly sexist back then. It's the 60s in more ways than that: the Big Men of society are cigar-chomping Senators. And the doctors of the Hoffman Medical Center, because it's Nourse too. I think the stories hold up.

Moore, Alan; O'Neill, Kevin: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910

There is a certain ballsiness in publishing a musical in graphic-novel form. Alan Moore owns those balls. It's the Three-Penny Opera, of course. Entertaining as always, in that LoEG way.

Sanderson, Brandon: The Hero of Ages

Suitably cataclysmic wrap-up to the Mistborn trilogy. (Cataclysmic because they've spent two books finding out how totally hosed they are, and you don't fix that by chucking a bit of jewelry down the loo.) This volume had fewer clever twists per hectopage than Sanderson sometimes manages, but it was satisfying.

Green, Simon R.: Daemons Are Forever

There's no point in distinguishing... sorry. This is a Drood book, not a Nightside one, which means a different set of hyperbolically- overpowered lunatics trying to assortedly destroy and defend reality. My new complaint about Green (without any trace of withdrawing the old ones) is that he gives absolutely no sense of power levels. Who is cosmically undefeatable, when doing what, and who is just a hardass with a line on some magical power? It varies from scene to scene, according to plot needs. How worried should the reader be, in any given scene? The author will now tell you. I guess this is why Green spends so much time tying adjectives into knots.

Reynolds, Alastair: The Prefect

Standalone novel set in the Glitter Band, some time before the biological disaster that sets up his original trilogy. In a system of a thousand orbiting polises, the only global authority are the people who enforce democracy: Thou Shalt Not Mess With The Polling Machines. Someone does, of course, and the conspiracy gets more complicated from there.

I remember his last novel (Pushing Ice) as having a great science-wowzer plot, wrapped around a character narrative which resembled two preadolescent girls sulking at each other for two hundred years. Reynolds is clearly maturing as a writer; the characters in this book are solidly adolescent. Even the rookie cop, who most nearly has an excuse, feels underage. All the rest fall off the credibility wagon when they fail to arrest the obvious bad guy for acting like an obvious bad guy in public. Oh, well. There's a plot, and things explode.

Sanderson, Brandon: Warbreaker [borrowed]

Stand-alone fantasy (although it leaves plot hooks for sequels). This is not nearly as cataclysmic as the Mistborn trilogy, but the fate of at least two countries is at stake, and there's some impressive fireworks. Sanderson does his usual job of inventing an absurdly detailed magical system and then leveraging it into a lot of nifty scenes and a decent plotline. In this case, a three-strand plotline of political skulduggery. I won't say Sanderson's character writing has gotten good, but it's gotten reliably entertaining; lots of boldly-drawn, colorful personalities, including the best dismal merceneries ever, and a sociopathic talking sword.

July 2009

MacIntyre, F. Gwynplaine: The Woman Between the Worlds

Gaslamp fantasy that starts in a Wellsian mode and veers towards the Lovecraftian. The owner of a tattoo parlor is visited by an invisible woman hoping for a pigment upgrade. She is, however, more than she appears -- har har -- and our heroes find themselves on the run from the sort of interdimensional terror that makes grandiose threats and laughs maniacally as it swirls around you. (Not very Lovecraftian, I know.) This could have been a good book, but the author drags most of it through a smelly bog of fin-de-siecle who's-who: Arthur Conan Doyle, William Butler Yeats, Bram Stoker, George Bernard Shaw, and far, far too many more, parading through the plot in press-gangs. (Nor can you play it as a game, as in Moore's League stories.) When Aleister Crowley is drafted to be your sidekick, you know the author has some serious fanboying to get out of his system. Eventually the plot starts back up again, and comes to a reasonable conclusion, unless maniacal laughter annoys you.

Van Eekhout, Greg: Norse Code [borrowed]

It's California, twenty minutes into the future, and Ragnarok. A recently-recruited Valkyrie is sent out to run genetic assays for the blood of Odin, to track down more potential Valkyries; other Norse deities wander the landscape, etc. This had a few great scenes (Hugin and Munin grumping; the small Midwestern town of the dead) but mostly I found the tone off-kilter. Not funny enough to be a comedy, not weighty enough to be a story about the end of the world. Everything seemed to be either too distant or too small-scale to be Ragnarok. Bear's Windwracked Stars wouldn't know a laugh if one bit it on the ass, but at least it felt real.

Novik, Naomi: Victory of Eagles

Dragon And His Soldier Boy, book five. Our heroes' march to disgrace is interrupted by Napoleon's army. Everyone then gets to spend the book building up resources and plans for the big fight to throw the Frenchies out of London. The theme of dragon self-determination simmers under the surface of it all; Napoleon is promising freedom- equality-and-fraternity to all lizardfolk, whereas the British government is firmly reactionary. Will the pressures of war begin to break down social boundaries, or will that be the pressure of a pissed-off reptilian megafauna with a maximized sonic breath weapon? Coming soon: Australia.

Carey, Mike: Vicious Circle

Second book about down-on-his-luck exorcist in ghost-ridden London. Demonic portents begin turning up, and everybody thinks Felix Castor knows a lot more than he actually does. Everybody is trying to stop him, too. As soon as he finds out what they're trying to stop him doing, he'll be delighted to help. I like this series a lot.

Stross, Charles: Saturn's Children

Stross does sexbots. Let me rephrase that. No, on second thought, let it stand.

Cute but fluff. I've heard a few chapters of this read by Stross at various cons, and that's how I recommend it -- he's having so much fun that it's contagious, but more so in person than on the page.

Smith, Sherwood: King's Shield

Book three of world-spanning prince-grows-up story. Inda is yanked home from exile, just as the long-threatened Venn invasion is about to start. Everyone then gets to spend the book building up resources and plans for the big fight. And I do mean "building up"; there's a big battle, but a lot more sending messengers around, preparing castles, sneaking soldiers around, and so on. Don't imagine that's dull stuff. (The invasion is down a narrow mountain pass from a beach landing, which gives plenty of opportunity for excitingly delaying actions.) In the meantime Inda is trying to get used to his home country, which he hasn't seen since age eleven; his king and his betrothed are trying to get used to having him home; everyone is trying to get used to Inda's outlander friends (pirates, mages, girlfriend ten years older than he is, oh my), and, oh yes, the Venn are secretly having a constitutional crisis. All these people, on both sides, are intensely real. The author even manages to get in a side plot about a group of eleven-year-old girls -- they are just as real as the adult warriors and princes, in a way that makes me regret my snide comments about Alistair Reynolds.

If I have a complaint about this book, it's that the plot bounces around somewhat unevenly. A lot of threads are packed in, and not all of them get equal weight. I assume a lot of stuff is being set up for the fourth and, I understand, final volume.

Williams, Liz: The Shadow Pavilion

A new Detective Inspector Chen story. Bollywood tiger demons! Need I say more? I like the badger teapot more than ever. The hapless movie-star agent too. If none of this makes any sense to you, you really need to jump back and find Snake Agent.

Last updated July 28, 2009.

Books I own

Comments on books I bought in: 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

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