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Your 2011 Best Reads?

shadforth

shadforth

Member
1 Room by Emma Donaghue
2 The Help by Kathryn Stockett
3 Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
4 Fires In The Sky by Louise Doughty
5 On Canaan's Side by Sebastian Barry

Special mentions:

Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell
A Brother's Blood by Michael C.White
Titan by Stephen Baxter
Fatherland by Robert Harris
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth
Revelation by C.J Sansom
The Law Of Dreams by Peter Behrens
Awakenings by William Horwood
Wolfsangel by M.D Lachlan
 
I will mention 2 books:

1. 2666, Roberto Bolano - incredibly dark, and made me angry in places. Won't be forgetting this soon.

2. The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova - Started with a bang, couldn't remember such an exhilarating start to a novel in a long time. Ended well, but along the way made me roll my eyes more than a few times at the miraculous coincidental circumstances that moved the plot along. Still, quite enjoyable.
 
In alphabetical order, just because. All books I heartily recommend, if not always for the same reasons. Also, limited to books available in English.

Dawn Over The Kalahari - Berg, Lasse
Adventures In The Immediate Unreality - Blecher, Max
The Hunger Games trilogy - Collins, Suzanne
I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive - Earle, Steve
The Prague Cemetery - Eco, Umberto
Little Man, What Now? - Fallada, Hans
Skippy Dies - Murray, Paul
Dictionary Of The Khazars - Pavic, Milorad
The Invention of Curried Sausage - Timm, Uwe
Baltics - Tranströmer, Tomas

Three great books not available to most people yet:
Korparna - Bannerhed, Tomas
Orbitor trilogy - Cartarescu, Mircea
Moderspassion - Axelsson, Majgull
 
My 5 Star Ratings for 2011

Time to Hunt - Stephen Hunter
Band of Brothers - Stephen Ambrose
Citizen Soldiers - Stephen Ambrose
To The Last Man - Jeff Shaara
The Rising Tide - Jeff Shaara
A Darkness More than Night - Michael Connelly
 
beer good, didn't know you were the Hunger Games type. Isn't it like Battle Royale? How'd it compare?
 
direstraits said:
beer good, didn't know you were the Hunger Games type. Isn't it like Battle Royale? How'd it compare?
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Better as a novel than Battle Royale was as a novel. In fact I'd argue it's the exact opposite of Battle Royale - if the story of BR is children from a conformist society being told that they must be individuals (and kill each other), then this is the US version where those raised to think they're individuals must learn to organise. But really, it's a bit of an unfair comparison, apart from the main plot device they're very different novels.
 
In chronological order:
The Memory Chalet - Tony Judt
The Summer Without Men - Siri Hustvedt (Kindle)
Remainder - Tom McCarthy
Embassy Town - China Mieville
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters - J.D. Salinger
The Hunters - James Salter
The Pedersen Kid - William Gass
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

Of them, the one above the rest that best captures the human spirit:

The Hunters - James Salter
 
bg: Hmm, I have to say I've always had a negative impression of the Hunger Games. I will try to hunt that down next time and try it out. I've not read Battle Royale either, but I know of it's pretty famous premise, of course. On surface they did seem similar, which is why I stayed away.

Peder: How was Embassy Town for you? Have you read other Mievilles?
 
direstraits said:
bg: Hmm, I have to say I've always had a negative impression of the Hunger Games. I will try to hunt that down next time and try it out. I've not read Battle Royale either, but I know of it's pretty famous premise, of course. On surface they did seem similar, which is why I stayed away.
Click to expand...

There's really no need to read BR, but the movie is fantastic. Watch it.
 
direstraits said:
Peder: How was Embassy Town for you? Have you read other Mievilles?
Click to expand...

I thought EmbassyTown started out fabulous but then ended in a standardized sort of good-guys vs bad-guys conflict.

I've read The City and the City. Interesting throughout.

Perdido Street Station was the best for fantasy and perhaps the best overall by a narrow margin.

Station > Town > City, IMO
 
BG: Got it.

Peder, you with Mieville! And Kat with Star Trek. Wow, I must have been gone a loooong time. :) Or maybe I didn't pay attention. :)
 
direstraits said:
BG: Got it.

Peder, you with Mieville! And Kat with Star Trek. Wow, I must have been gone a loooong time. :) Or maybe I didn't pay attention. :)
Click to expand...

LOL! A year is a short long time anyway, and it is good to see you back. Mieville a surprise? I try to read around. :whistling:
 
A list of best of 2011...

Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek
The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
What they Fought for 1861-1865 by James M. McPherson
The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt
Augustus by Anthony Everitt
The Stalin Epigram by Roberty Littell
Sister by Rosamund Lupton
The Pedersen Kid by William Gass
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
The Quiet American by Graham Greene

There were some others, for example the Louise Penny Canadian mysteries. Most enjoyable, and a few by Thomas Perry as well.
 
It wasn't a new 2011 book that thrilled me last year, it was a classic novel that shot up to number one on my list last year: To Kill A Mockinbird by Lee. It was truly an awesome read which demands many more re-reads.
 
Because I don't write down the names of the books that I read (and because I have a lousy memory !) I'm not able to remember all the books that I read in 2011. I'm sure that I read something that was worth mentioning , I just don't remember what it was :sad:

Anyway, those that I remember (mainly because I read them recently) :

- Hunger by Knut Hamsun
- Shadow of The Wind
- Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution
- The Hunger Games.
 
The manga is... I'm not sure it's better than the novel, but it's certainly, ahem, more than the novel.
 
Well, you can certainly see... more. If you say the movie's fantastic, then supposedly the visual stimuli plays a part?

Unless, of course, they changed the movie's storyline significantly.
 
Certain parts of the story were... shall we say, embellished in the manga and played down somewhat in the movie. It got an adult rating in some countries, but that was for violence.
 
Finished the manga (easy when it's available instantaneously on the tablet). So you read it? I need to process what I saw.
 
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