The books of 2011: what did I miss?

[kestrell]

I don't know what it is about today, but I've been cold all day, so I finally gave in and pulled out the incredible oversized-and-still-growing sweater which Eitan knitted for me years ago. And when Isay oversized, I mean, it hangs to my knees--I swear when I throw it in the dryer it gets bigger.

And if I had the least bit of productivity left, it's gone bye-bye now that The NY Times has published its list of the top 100 books for 2011, a list which I always enjoy reading as I alternately mock and scribble down titles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2011.html?_r=3&ref=books

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Books I liked particularly well which I read this year. (Sorry, can't juggle both the consumption and creation dates).

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Orkorefor - damn, if I"m still babbling in twenty years, I may remember this decade as the one with Obama and Orkorefor.

How to understand Israel in 60 days or less by Sarah Glidden. This is a great story, and it's also a fabulous graphic "novel" (actually memoir) with watercolor backgrounds and brushed characters.

The statues that walked by Terry L Hunt. He reexamines the physical evidence for the huge stone faces on Easter Island. He tears apart the conventional wisdom of primitives clumsily destroying their own ecosystem under death.

Giving up the ghost by Hillary Mantel. A memoir of a fiercely Catholic upbringing, shaped by chronic pain issues which the family had no inclination to investigate. This one happens in Northern England. You recognize her name because of the bookstop historical fiction Wolf Hall re life during England's Civil War. Her memoir makes a lovely pair with

Life with Sudden Death by Michael Downing. His fiercely Catholic upbringing outside route 128 was shaped by the death of his father, the interests of his 8 brothers and sisters, and the undeniable fact that his vocation included writing beautiful prose and macking on available boys.

Solar storms by Linda Hogan is beautifully written and creepy as all get out and precisely evokes the landscape of the northern lands at the Canadian-US border. Somewhat ghost story, somewhat ethics manual, somewhat instructional tale.

OK, that's enough for today. I haven't posted hardly any book info this year and I'm afraid the pressure was high.

[kestrell]

Nnedi Orkorefor: no books on NLS or Bookshare by this author--don't tell me this game isn't rigged. I would try to scan some of her books but the African names would probably give my OCR program fits; still, if I get a crazy amount of energy going, I am going to try it.

[jesse_the_k]

I have no excuse whatsoever for spelling her name wrong — I've proofed it in many a WisCon publication. It's Orkorafor (a instead of the e I typed earlier).

Here's the book's home page.
http://nnedi.com/who_fears_death.html

That page mentions how it was nommed for everything and won World Fantasy Award. There are first two chapters on the site, enough to see whether it's worth exploring more.

Tis available on Kindle: have you been able to get the free Kindle readers for iPhone or Mac to talk? If so, there's your answer for $8.

But if the Kindle version is sold with talking off, then I'm hoping the WisCon experience may have made her more open to the "lend the file for reading" request.

[kestrell]

The accessible Kindle for PC uses a combination of its own TTS and the user's screenreader, so it doesn't matter if the speech has been turned off for the Kindle ebook (I realize that sounds a bit contradictory, and I can't explain it either). It's accessible, but it's also incredibly slooooow, and it doesn't let you go through word by word or character by character to find out how things are spelled, which makes me crazy. However, I know someone who can massage the file into something I can read on any of my ebook readers, so I will add these (there was a YA title which came out this year also) next time I get a batch of ebooks.