What I have read in 2009

My 2009 Reading List

American Gods - Neil Gaiman Generation Kill - Evan Wright Sea of Thunder - Four Commanders and the Last Great naval Campaign 1941-1945 - Evan Thomas

I fell way behind in keeping this up, so I'll update it now in prep for the 2010 version. The following are not exactly in the order listed. Black Edelweiss: A Memoir of Combat and Conscience by a Soldier of the Waffen-SS - Johann Voss Russia's War - Richard Overy Shooter - Gunnery Sgt. Jack Coughlin The Watchmen - Alan Moore Beyond Band of Brothers - meep Winters Cemetery Dance - Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child He Who Dares - Michael Paul Kennedy We Were Soldiers Once... And Young Lt Gen. Harold Moore & Joseph Galloway Ghost Soldiers - Hampton Sides The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien (Read this aloud to my seven year old) World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks

I think that's it.

_{On 2010-01-07 at 03:25:18, Wrecker asked to smell your meep}

Currently reading Oliver Twist with great sadness. I got it after the mention by Chuck Palahniuk in Haunted that I just re-read over Christmas. Its a tradition.

There was a new intro in Haunted that I hadn't read before. Chuck talks about his reading the story Guts and people fainting in the audience. He mentioned two other books that had parts so disturbing that listeners would faint dead away while listening. Oliver Twist - the murder scene ..I think its this one if remember right.

The other was a kitchen table abortion from John Irving's Ciderhouse Rules.

Currently rereading Catch 22 for the umpteenth time. Also read The Phantom Tollbooth the other day for meeps and giggles. Next might be The Children in Room E4.

Working on: The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler, which I doubt I will finish.

Finished: Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

<span class="post_was_edited">On 2009-01-04 at 01:11:26, government_death_robot asked to smell your meep</span>

The Star Beacon and The News Herald.

Reading this, think of it as a prequel to American Gods

Ha ha! Agreed Katuna. Well spotted sir.

Finished reading Still Life With Crows by Preston and Child on Jan 2nd.

Finished reading Lisey's Story by S King. Jan 16th... Not bad... SOWISA

Finished Brimstone another Preston and Child...Feb 2nd.

Freakonomics - A rouge Economist explores the hidden side of everything. ~ Stepven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner Finished Feb 14

Six Sacred Stones - Matt Reilly Finished Feb 20 (Two days. meep I couldn't put this one down)

Dies The Fire - S.M. Stirling Finished March 17th on the plane from Toronto to LA

ARMOR - John Steakley Finished Mar 19th on the way home from LA... Jesus these long flights are good for reading...

Come Closer - Sara Gran Finished March 29

Mister B. Gone - Clive Barker Finished May 18th

Oh you are going to get your wish!!!

Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card Finished June 25 This book was incredible...I can't believe I hadn't read it before!

Stephen King's Everything Eventual..Read on the BlackBerry WattPad Finished July 2nd Some fantastic meep in here!
- Lunch at the Gotham Cafe - In the Deathroom -Riding the Bullet -The Road Virus heads North -Autopsy in Room 4 and my Favorite: 1408 (I must say, this one scared me when I first read it..spooked me a bit/ though slightly tweaked when they made the excellent film and meepin freaked me reading it the 2nd time)

**Finished a Song of Ice and Fire 1 - A Game of Thrones by: G.R.R.Martin (July 31st) Read with WattPad on my BlackBerry.

** Finished "Vampire$" by John Steakly - Aug 4th... Been coming back to this one off and on...

Aug 17th - Finished - Dean Koontz - Frankenstein Book 3 (Dead and Alive)
Awesome Series! The Frankenstein monster returns after 200 years to take down his creator who has become an unstoppable world force, creating a new race!

Sept 04 - A Song of Ice and FIre Part 2 - A Clash of Kings... (THis series is pretty meepin enjoyable)

Sept 22 - Clive Cussler - Atlantis Found...My first Dirk Pitt novel. I have been reading some enjoyable meep this year... Makes me want to re-watch Sahara with Matthew McConaughey, since Dirk Pitt was supposed to be a lot older...

Sep 29- Dan Brown's Deception Point - Meh... Not bad.. Nice to see he can write a non churchish book.

Oct 8th - Clive Cussler - The Mediterranean Caper (First Dirk Pitt novel.. these are very meeping enjoyable! Will be reading more of this series for sure.)

Oct 15th - Clive Barker's Abarat This is a very difficult book to review... I kind of enjoyed it, am glad to be finished it, but it took about 6-8 months to get through because it never really held my interest. I can see how people liken it to a darker slightly purposefully creepy and strange Wizard of Oz. Its as if said, oh sure Oz was cool, but my world has a differently designed island for every hour of the day, people have fishbowl hats and henchmen whose facial features move around their faces on little tiny feet... purposefully strange... so back to my Wizard of Oz comparison... Girl doesn't like it at home in "Chickentown" girl goes through a weird scenario where she is whisked away to a magical land where she travels, in a somewhat set out order, meeting various players who help or hinder her...blah blah... and now being finished this giant book I find out there was no big reveal, no end in sight... the is a meeping squeal... I really don't think I want to take the time to find out what happens.

Oct 30th - 3rd Song of Ice and Fire (A Storm of Swords) I love how many of the main characters get killed. Thats how you do it! lol

Nov 6th - Earthdark - Monica Hughes Not bad...quick read, 120 pages of SciFi...read in a few hours while kids played at KidZone

Nov 8 - The Terminal Man (Michael Crichton OK This book was meeping stupid... The only thing I can say is that I was motivated to get this one out of the way and since I'm on vacation I was able to whip through it... ugh meeping stooopied

Nov 30 - Finished A Call to Arms (Alan Dean Foster) This was fun to read and I will look for the 2nd one in the series for sure. I love how they tell the story of these 2 factions within the universe who have been waring for 1000s of years, then they stumble upon the humans who are unpredictable, violent in nature and totally show them what fighting is all about.

Favorite part - Big warrior alien reaches out to comfort a human. The man swats away the hand in fear and breaks the aliens arm, putting the aliens in fear of our terrible stregth...Bwuahahaha

Dec 1 - Finished - The Coming of the Horseclans (Robert Adams) I kinda hated reading this book and at the end was reading words from start, mid, end of page to jump through...

I won't read the rest of the series, but I will say that the hidden concept of the story seems to be pretty cool...

An immortal man in a post apocalyptic, plants the seeds of religion and civilization in scattered peoples, to come back a few hundred years later to lead a clan of horsemen that has formed, from the plains to the ocean, where he alludes (at the end of the book) that he will spend many generations steering the people from barbarian riders, to a sea faring people... all so that he can work towards getting out to some island...

I like the molding civilization sub story... too bad you have to read the story to understand it...

<span class="post_was_edited">On 2009-12-02 at 21:27:05, Steel asked to smell your meep</span>

LORDKAHUNA: Reading this, think of it as a prequel to American Gods

I forgot to mention that I have read James And The Giant Peach,once upon a time.

It`s a goodun!

Steel: Currently reading Lisey's Story by S King.

I enjoyed that one.

Heather:

Steel: Currently reading Lisey's Story by S King.

I enjoyed that one.

I thought it sucked. Like most of the books I've read by said projectile vomiter of the written word.

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything- Kerry Patterson, etc.

The Art of Talking to Anyone-Rosalie Maggio

How Toyota Became #1-David Magee

Current-Team of Rivals:The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

currently reading House Atreides

Reading and rereading: Machining the AR15 Lower Receiver Forging - Brandes

Read: Building Firearms - Hoffman

Read: The Gunsmithing and Tool Making Bible - Hoffman

tantrum: How Toyota Became #1-David Magee

tantrum: Current-Team of Rivals:The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

This one is so full of awesome, I re-read it at least once a year. Have you read her work on FDR? Equally riveting.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes - King

A buddy lent me The Elfish Gene. Little slow in the first chapter or two.

Reading Children of Hurin by Tolkien

Also chugging along the WoT series, im at book 6 Lord of Chaos.

American Gods is good meep.

Save yourself some grief. Stop at lord of chaos, its a decent stoping place.

Myself, I'm reading three cups of tea, guns germs and steel, power faith and fantasy (history), and jeremy scahill's book on black water. I'll probably eventually finish most of one of them

Since the week befor xmas:

Imagine Clint Eastwood as an old sniper, this is the latest in a bigger series about the same dude.

This was pretty cool, check it out (I don't want to give anything away)

Trashy action pulp (I nubs trashy action pulp)

Sequel (shame)

VERY cool and well written action meep

This site is kind of cool for these kinds of things. (I just swarmed it too.) Its kind of a trip once you get all the books you've read on here and realize that you've read a meepLOAD of books.

Clavis_Apocalypticae:

tantrum: How Toyota Became #1-David Magee

This one's on my list.

tantrum: Current-Team of Rivals:The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

This one is so full of awesome, I re-read it at least once a year. Have you read her work on FDR? Equally riveting.

Want to read the FDR book soon. Enjoying this one quite a lot.

tantrum:

clavis:

tantrum:Current-Team of Rivals:The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

This one is so full of awesome, I re-read it at least once a year. Have you read her work on FDR? Equally riveting.

Want to read the FDR book soon. Enjoying this one quite a lot.

This book title is somewhere in the back of my "want to read" list, but I'm not sure where I heard of it. Daily Show interview? I usually want to read just about everything that ever shows up there.

It might be time to Oprah up and make a LinkSwarm Book of the Month Club. Anyone have any problems with Amazon?

Seconded.

Just finished these:

^ Gladwell says there is no such thing as special, talented individuals who grow up to be geniuses or prodigies or nobel prize winners or whatever. People who succeed in their field invariably had a lot of unfair advantages and the opportunity to practice their specialty for 10,000 hours or more.

^ The current state of the American male is a nebulous mix of despair and failure to meet bullmeep expectations.

<span class="post_was_edited">On 2009-01-07 at 05:05:07, Lownotes asked to smell your meep</span>

Lownotes: Just finished these: ^ Gladwell says there is no such thing as special, talented individuals who grow up to be geniuses or prodigies or nobel prize winners or whatever. People who succeed in their field invariably had a lot of unfair advantages and the opportunity to practice their specialty for 10,000 hours or more.

sounds interesting; i will have to put that on my to-do / ta-da list.

Finished Twist. Sad.

Starting Complicity</> by Iain Banks

Just starting this. I hear it's a story about George W. Bush.

Edit for huge pic dumbness

<span class="post_was_edited">On 2009-01-10 at 00:59:45, Wotak asked to smell your meep</span>

I didn't know Steve Martin was the biggest stand-up comedian of his time, drawing crowds of 40,000 people.

The book focuses on how he became a stand-up and the philosophy of his act. Then, it briefly explains why he decided to stop doing stand-up forever.

<span class="post_was_edited">On 2009-03-24 at 14:40:40, Lownotes asked to smell your meep</span>

Just re-read The Descent by Jeff Long after I picked up the sequel, Deeper.

Descent:

Lazily ripped from Author's site: meep exists. In Tibet, while guiding trekkers to a holy mountain, Ike Crockett discovers a bottomless cave. When his lover disappears, Ike pursues her into the depths of the earth....In a leper colony bordering the Kalahari Desert, a nun and linguist named Ali von Schade unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old....In Bosnia, Major Elias Branch crash-lands his gunship near a mass grave and is swarmed by pale cannibals terrified of light....

Deeper:

From the same site: A decade has passed since doomed explorers unveiled a nightmare of tunnels and rivers honeycombing the earth's depths. After millennia of suffering terror and predation, humanity's armies descended to destroy the ancient hordes. Deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, a doomed science expedition killed the subterraneans' fabled leader, and suddenly it seemed that evil was dead and all was right with the world again.

highly recommended.

one of the better books ive read in a long while, especially if you're into latin american lit

the forever war - good book about the mideast

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - Tom Robbins

Empire of Debt, the Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis - William Bonner and Addison Wiggin

I read American Gods by Neil Gaiman last year... excellent read... I then followed it up with Jurgen: A comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell and Deathbird Stories by Harlan Ellison ... all great reads

Read: The Paradox of Tarheel Politics - Rob Christianson

Reading: The Horse, The Wheel And Language - David W. Anthony

Up next: Born Standing Up.

Well I have read alot of Dean Koontz stuff. I have always loved reading autobiographies. I have read Marylin Manson's, Howard Stern. I just finished reading Fieldy's (Korn) book, really good read. My next buy will be Dimebag Darrell's autobiography He came to rock.

This book was so poorly written I barely made it through, and in the end I learned nothing I didn't already know besides some new anecdotes - like a couple of meth heads who left their jeep full of gas in the snow because they thought they were lost, but weren't, and froze to death on the phone with a 911 operator. Oh, and another great anecdote from the book was about a little girl who accidentally found a meth lab in her apartment complex, so the meth heads crushed her skull.

vasudeva: It might be time to Oprah up and make a LinkSwarm Book of the Month Club. Anyone have any problems with Amazon?

I think we tried that before, it ended in abject but hilarious failure.

http://www.linkswarm.com/thread-1038-p3.html#pid12812

Sadly the list that had built up there is gone.

after finishing 'the savage detectives' (referenced above) ive started reading this behemoth: i'm only 100 pages deep and already loving it. bolano seems to be the type of literary elitist who takes his art work very seriously and yet simultaneously realizes how ridiculous he and all of the rest of the literary establishment can be. again, highly recommended.

just finished neil gaimens Neverwhere, not bad, typical gaimen fare, The Graveyard Book was a good read too.

just started reading the latest in Frank Herberts Dune series, Paul of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin j Anderson. it fills in some gaps between Dune and Dune Messiah about the jihad and rise of the empire, ok going so far, doesn't seem quite so heavy in parts like a few of the other ones in the series.

going to go re-read a classic pulp sci-fi series next, The Amtrak Wars by Patrick Tilley, post nuclear apocalyptic american indian tupe mutie tribes versus high tech underground bunker survivors who go on to take on a japanese culture who have reverted back to caste and honor style society.

finished a canticle for leibowitz on the plane back from utah.

from amazon: Walter M. Miller's acclaimed SF classic A Canticle for Leibowitz opens with the accidental excavation of a holy artifact: a creased, brittle memo scrawled by the hand of the blessed Saint Leibowitz, that reads: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels--bring home for Emma." To the Brothers of Saint Leibowitz, this sacred shopping list penned by an obscure, 20th-century engineer is a symbol of hope from the distant past, from before the Simplification, the fiery atomic holocaust that plunged the earth into darkness and ignorance. As 1984 cautioned against Stalinism, so 1959's A Canticle for Leibowitz warns of the threat and implications of nuclear annihilation. Following a cloister of monks in their Utah abbey over some six or seven hundred years, the funny but bleak Canticle tackles the sociological and religious implications of the cyclical rise and fall of civilization, questioning whether humanity can hope for more than repeating its own history. Divided into three sections--Fiat meep (Let There Be Man), Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy Will Be Done)--Canticle is steeped in Catholicism and Latin, exploring the fascinating, seemingly capricious process of how and why a person is canonized.

i liked it a lot, but i read half of it and then put it down for a couple of months. definitely revisiting.

started reading accelerando.

amazon again: Expanded from several stories originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Stross' latest novel follows several generations of the Macx family through the rapidly transforming, Internet-enabled global economy of the early twenty-first century to the human and transhuman populated worlds of the outer solar system a half century later. The saga begins with Macx patriarch Manfred, a freelance "venture altruist," giving away patentable high-tech ideas in exchange for endless handouts while looking forward to the day when nanotech-programmed smart matter surpasses humanity in intelligence and productivity. Fifteen years later, his adolescent daughter Amber is an indentured astronaut trolling the orbit of Jupiter, and by 2070, Sirhan is Amber's permanently space-bound offspring, paying witness to the fruits of his grandfather's early innovations as something ominous and nonhuman is systematically dismantling the planets from Pluto to Earth.

a bunch of short stories collected around the singularity. if the first story is any indication of how the rest will be, i fully expect this to rock my meep off.