Notes from Mt. Bookpile

Whew!  What an end to the year... 400 books read, 91 in this quarter.  Reviews on the other blog. No other comments here: stay tuned for the year-end book posts!

Biography/Memoir

• The Backward Glance; Ronald W. Bresland
• Summer At Tiffany, Marjorie Hart
• The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, Carolyn Heilbrun
• Dancing with the Witchdoctor; Kelly James
• The Ballerinas, from the Court of Louis XIV to Pavlova; Parmenia Migel

Children's/Young Adult

• Being Henry David, Cal Armistead
• Pure, Julianna Baggott
• Long Lankin, Lindsey Barraclough
• About Average, Andrew Clements
• Period 8; Chris Crutcher
• The Different Girl, Gordon Dahlquist
• Obsidian Mirror, Catherine Fisher
• Destiny, Rewritten; Kathryn Fitzmaurice
• The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand, Gregory Galloway
• A Tangle of Knots, Lisa Graff
• Seraphina, Rachel Hartman
• The Evolution of Mara Dyer and The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer, Michelle Hodkin
• Paulina, Lesley Howarth
• Grave Mercy; R.K. LaFevers
• Brides of Rollrock Island, Margo Lanagan
• Prodigy, Marie Lu
• If You Find Me; Emily Murdoch
• Keeping Safe the Stars, Sheila O'Connor
• Out of the Easy, Ruta Sepetys
• The Madman's Daughter, Megan Shepherd
• Orleans, Sherri Smith
• Hokey Pokey; Jerry Spinelli
• Ship Sooner; Mary Sullivan
• Days of Blood & Starlight, Laini Taylor
• Navigating Early; Clare Vanderpool
• Prince Puggly of Spud And the Kingdom of Spiff, Robert Paul Weston

Adult Fiction

• House of Meetings, Martin Amis
• The Guilty One, Lisa Ballantyne
• Floating; Nicole Bailey-Williams
• The Painted Girls; Cathy Marie Buchanan
• For Kings and Planets; Ethan Canin
• Being Dead, Jim Crace
• The Citadel; A.J. Cronin
• The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Deen
• A Thousand Pardons, Jonathan Dee
• The Gates of Ivory, Margaret Drabble
• The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides
• I Wish Someone Was Waiting for Me Somewhere, Anna Gavalda
• The Dinner, Herman Koch
• White Truffles in Winter, N.M. Kelby
• The Vanishing Act, Mette Jakobsen
• Black Water Rising, Attica Locke
• The Death of Bees, Lisa O'Donnell
• The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth
• Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan
• Rules of Civility, Amor Towles

Horror

• Steampunk Poe
• Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

Mystery

• Dark Tide; Elizabeth Haynes
• A Question of Identity, Susan Hill
• The Impossible Dead and Standing in Another Man's Grave, Ian Rankin
• Seduction; M.J. Rose

Non-Fiction

• That Mad Game
• The Skull in the Rock, Marc Aronson
• A Little History of Science, W. F. Bynum
• The Pause Principle, Kevin Cashman
• The Law of Superheroes; James Daily
• Faces From the Past, James M. Deem
• It's Raining Fish And Spiders, Bill Evans
• The Split History of the Civil War, Stephanie Fitzgerald
• The Wild Horse Scientists, Kay Frydenberg
• Spirit Seeker, Gary Golio
• This I Believe, John Gregory
• The Warrior's Heart, Eric Greitens
• Rescuing the Children, Deborah Hodge
• Among the Islands, Tim Flannery
• The Information Diet, Clay Johnson
• Into a Paris Quartier, Diane Johnson
• We Are Their Voice, Kathy Kacer
• Dear Teen Me, Miranda Kenneally
• Leonardo and the Last Supper, Ross King
• So You Wanna Be a Superstar? Ted Michael
• Young, Innocent and in Prison, Jeff Mitchell
• When Organizing Isn't Enough, Julie Morgenstern
• The Bronte Sisters, Catherine Reef
• Inside Scientology, Janet Reitman
• Growing Up Muslim, Ali-Karamali Sumbul
• Fourteen And Sentenced To Death, Bill Swan
• Effective Grading, Barbara Walvoord
• Pier 21 and Children of the Titanic, Christine Welldon
• Titanic, Philip Wilkinson

Speculative Fiction

• A Blink of the Screen, Terry Pratchett
• The Golem And the Jinni, Helene Wecker
• Alif the Unseen, Willow  G. Wilson

Best Reads of 2012

Looking over my reading from last year, I'm a little surprised at how many 5-star books there were 31 of them.  And I thought I was getting more critical in my old age!

Here's how they break down:

Adult Fiction

• A Land More Kind Than Home (Apr)
• The Orchardist (July)
• Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Dec)
• The Song of Achilles (Mar)
• The Stockholm Octavo (Oct)

Children's/Young Adult (all genres)

• Bitterblue (Jan)
• The Brides of Rollrock Island (Dec)
• Code Name Verity (May)
• A Confusion of Princes (Jan)
• The Diviners (July)
• The Drowned Cities (Jan)
• Every Day (June)
• Gone (June)
• If Only (Jan)
• Lost Girls (Jan)
• Nursery Rhymes Comics (April)
• Revived (Mar)

Humor

• The Zillionaire Vampire Cowboy's Secret Werewolf Babies (July) 

Mystery

• The Beautiful Mystery (Sept)
• The Chalk Girl (Mar)
• Gone Girl (Dec)
• Into the Darkest Corner (Mar)
• The Solitary House (Mar)
• Standing in Another Man's Grave (Nov)

Non-Fiction

• A Hidden Wholeness (April)
• 40-Day Journey with Parker Palmer (Sept)
• Religion for Atheists (June)

Speculative Fiction

• Alif the Unseen (Oct)
• A Blink of the Screen (Dec)
• The Golem and the Jinni (Nov)
• The Night Circus (Sept)

Sigh

There's a group I belong to, the Plain Language Association, dedicated to promoting clear, plain language over jargon, not just in the legal field (where the movement began) but everywhere.

I hate jargon and when I edit people's work I tend to change things like "stakeholders" to "community" (unless, of course, they're talking about people building fences, tying up plants or hunting vampires, in which case "stakeholders" is absolutely the right word).  I change "impact" to "affect" or "effect", depending on which is correct.

If you were to watch tv with me, you might have to cover your ears when I yell at the announcer's sign-off (usually you hear "for Tom, Dick and Susan, I'm Larry", which implies that for everyone else, he's Dave or Joe; what he means to say is "on behalf of...").

So you can imagine how I responded to reading this in my e-mail this morning, part of a message enumerating upcoming changes to a social media site I use:

a simplified design, provides deeper insights, and surfaces new ways to connect and build relationships. 

I'm not even going to start....