Best book you've read this year?

Just finished The Lady in Blue by Javier Sierra (sp?). Kind of a religious/supernatural espionage mystery, historically based. Very interesting.

 

Not a new book (2004), but loved My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Also read Vanishing Acts (same author) which was good.

 

Can't name just one best.

My favorites:

_All Tomorrow's Parties_ by William Gibson
_Empire of the East_ by Fred Saberhagen

_The Dark Knight Strikes Again_ is genius (Frank Miller)

_On the Take_ was very important.

Harry Potter #7 was great fun. =)

Hmm.

_American Gods_, and most anything else, by Neil Gaiman.

 

Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists by Ben Wiker.

Excellent exposition of the larger ramifications of the atheistic materialism Darwin's theories undergird.

 

Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill (Stephen King's son)

I'll add another vote for Freakonomics also.

 

The Cruelest Miles. Great read about the diptheria epidemic in Nome, AK in the 1920's and the race to get the medicine there by dogsled. Fascinating. Also gets into much about the struggle of everyday life in that era.

 

Hmmm... I've been on a kick where I've been re-reading old classics - mostly because my books are out of boxes and on shelves for the first time in seven years. Recently:

The Ringworld books by Larry Niven
The Dorsai Saga by Gordon R. Dickson
Miners in the Sky by Murray Leinster (Way out of print, sorry....)
The Ender's Game saga by Orson Scott Card
The Tales of the Otori series by Lian Hearn (not really a "classic", but good)

If I were to choose a select few books to recomend to others, these would top the list:

Dune by Frank Herbert
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
Empire of the East by Fred Saberhagen
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein
The Postman by David Brin
Nine Princes in Amber (and the rest of that series...) by Rodger Zelazny
Initiate Brother and Gatherer of Clouds by Sean Russell
The Rider at the Gate and Cloud's Rider by CJ Cherryh
Wolf and Iron by Gordon R. Dickson
Armor by John Steakley
Bridge of Birds, Eight Skilled Gentlemen, and The Story of the Stone by Barry Hughart

My problem is that I read voraciously, and I'm always out of books to read.

 

Jon Stewart " America" The Book

was a great read and yet very funny, makes ya wonder

 

My favorite this year is "After This" by Alice McDermott

 

Most recent, that I just finished this week, is America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It . Pretty good, Mark Steyn is a funny guy, and he makes a compelling argument about demographics being more important than bombs in the fight for western civilization. This one has a definite right-bias, so liberals won't enjoy it.

Also great reads:
Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court by ABC News journalist Jan Greenburg, is a very good read for anyone interested in the politics of picking supreme court justices. This one is even-handed and would be enjoyed by liberals as well as conservatives.

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham's wonderful book about how America was founded as a secular but religious nation, and the true meaning of the founder's words .... the Christian Reconstructionists and radical secularists will be very uncomfortable because they are both proven wrong, but everyone else, religious and not, left or right, will enjoy the insights Meacham gives.

I didn't enjoy A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now nearly as much as I thought I would, because it tends to repeat itself. It is basically a thesis that the origin of our poisoned political discourse is in the feeling that anger validates the self, as first expressed by the beat generation in the late 50's and early 60's, up to our "angry white male" and "venomous liberal" invective we see thrown around so much today. Its interesting, but a book about half the length could have told the same story.

 

"Skinny Bitch" Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin
"Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows" J. K. Rowling
"The Goat-Foot God" Dion Fortune
"The Sea Priestess" Dion Fortune
That's just this month....

 

harry potter and the deathly hallows - j. k. rowling (actually.... the whole harry potter series! AWESOME! i re-read books 1-6 in preparation/to refresh my memory before the final book.... and now that i know how it all ends.... i've decided i want to listen to them and i'm currently on book 4.... i'm enjoying them just as much even though i know the overall outcome... !)

 

The two classics I reread most often are:

Ben Hur

Pride and Prejudice.

Every time I read either of these books I come away with something new that I hadn't noticed or thought of before. Interestingly enough, Wallace, the author of Ben Hur, was a general in the Civil War that later became a governor.

I recently heard an interview of the author of a new book that sounds very interesting: Hocus Potus by Malcolm MacPherson

 

I'll join the list of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" readers - got to read this on the Monday after its release (my 2 daughters had to read it before I could get it). Apart from it being just a great series, it has so encouraged children to read. My two read so much more these days, the TV is collecting cobwebs.

Apart from that - latest reads are:

"Traitor" by Steven Coonts
"Saucer" - The conquest" by Steven Coonts (a re-read)
"The Earth is Flat" by Thomas Friedman - not bad until he got onto his government bashing jag - ruined the last half of the book
"Chart Throb" by Ben Elton - great sendup of those shows like Idol

Mad Hatter - Thanks for the list of great SciFi - there are a couple there that I have not read, so will go looking for them.

 

Nice line up guys/girls

I've read many this year but I htink the best was:

Collapse by Jared Diamond


"In the prologue, Diamond summarizes Collapse in one paragraph, as follows.

“ This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing on collapses rather than buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other "input" variables postulated to influence a society's stability. The "output" variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses. â€
—page 18


Diamond lists eight factors which have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:

1.Deforestation and habitat destruction
2.Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
3.Water management problems
4.Overhunting
5.Overfishing
6.Effects of introduced species on native species
7.Human population growth
8.Increased per-capita impact of people

Further he says four new factors may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies:

1.Human-caused climate change
2.Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment
3.Energy shortages
4,Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity

Diamond also states that "it would be absurd to claim that environmental damage must be a major factor in all collapses: the collapse of the Soviet Union is a modern counter-example, and the destruction of Carthage by Rome in 146 B.C. is an ancient one. It's obviously true that military or economic factors alone may suffice" (p. 15)."

 

I really enjoyed Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond as well.

Collapse deals with the fall of civilization, but GGS deals with WHY certain groups of people never advanced to the point of being "civilized" - what are the reasons that the earth is divided into have and have-not societies?

 

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If you enjoyed Collapse you might also like The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. He discusses how the world would continue if man were suddenly gone, by plague, war or whatever. How long would it take for nature to have its way with man's evidence? It's a very interesting read.

 

the loop by jacob ward

From amazon
Artificial intelligence is going to change the world as we know it. But the real danger isn't some robot that's going to enslave us: It's our own brain. Our brains are constantly making decisions using shortcuts, biases, and hidden processes—and we're using those same techniques to create technology that makes choices for us. In The Loop, award-winning science journalist Jacob Ward reveals how we are poised to build all of our worst instincts into our AIs, creating a narrow loop where each generation has fewer, predetermined, and even dangerous choices.

 

The Art of Living, by Edward Sri

Next up - I am going to reread an old classic - Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck

 

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind is my current favorite.