Annual book post

I like to read. A lot. This year's list is different in a couple of ways. First, inspired by my good friend, Elaine, this year there is a short description of each one to help you decide if you want to read it as well. This means that the list is longer than usual - or maybe it just seems so. Secondly, I have introduced illustrated book reviews. There are less of these than I had hoped, but only because I seriously injured my drawing arm and lost 3-4 months of potential productivity. Anywho, the whole series of illustrated book reviews can be found here. I hope to have more in 2017. Enjoy!

1. Bats of the Republic - Zachary Thomas Dodson. An illuminated novel, the drawings being one of the main reasons I bought the book. Odd, surreal. Honesty, I thought there would be more about bats in it.
2. The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B - Teresa Toten. Good at capturing confusing emotions and working some of them out. Two pages were ripped from the volume I read. The book made sense anyway.
3. The Golden Age of Death - Amber Benson. #5 in a series
4. The Edge of Lost - Kristina McMorris. Through loss of family, immigrating, assimilating and adventure, an Irish boy is constantly reinventing himself. The tie-in to SF Bay is what made me pick it up.
5. The Broken Teaglass - Emily Arsenault. Two newbie lexographers find citations from a book that doesn’t exist published by a firm that doesn’t exist and become obsessed. Kind of trite.
6. The Dragon Engine - Andy Remic. First in a series. Battles, gore, fornication. A decent number of female characters who are warriors, not whores. Not compelling enough to read the rest of the series.
7. All the Way - Jordin Tootoo. Autobiography of the first Inuk hockey player to make it into the NHL.
8. The Bookman’s Tale - Charlie Lovett. An antiquarian bookseller finds a painting of his dead wife in a book from the 1600s. Naturally he becomes obsessed. Wraps up a little too neatly.
9. On the Origin of Superheroes - Chris Gavaler. Clearly researched (but not footnoted) tome that reads like a rambling lecture; the kind that is fun to listen to, but so scattered you fail the test.
10. Elizabeth Is Missing - Emma Healey. I read this in one sitting, the story held tight. Insistant that Elizabeth is missing, Maud’s memories reveal more than those around her expect.
11. Absolutely Truly - Heather Vogel Frederick. A family moves to a small town to take over the grandparents bookstore. 7th grader Truly finds a note in a book and enlists the help of her new friends to solve the mystery it poses. A pleasant romp that was not blatently obvious.
12. Hood - Emma Donoghue. Unexpectedly widowed, a closeted lesbian remembers and grieves. True to the 1990s it is set in.
13. All About Emily - Connie Willis. Happy to find one by Willis I haven’t read. This one is a great cross of AI and old movies/ Broadway.
14. The Woman Who Read Too Much - Bahiyyih Nakhjavani. I picked it out for the title. Well written, lyrical. None of the characters seem to have names, just descriptors (the Envoy’s wife; the Shah’s mother’s favorite slave; etc) - many have more than one. I never read enough at one setting for them to gel.
15. Wild Magic - Tamora Pierce. First read this in 2008. Am reading it with V before bed this time around.
16. 
17. Cat*A*Lyst - Alan Dean Foster. An odd book involving treasure seekers in the Peruvian jungle who stumble on teleportation with the help of cats.
18. The Devil’s Detective - Simon Kurt Unsworth. Hell as a giant beaurocratic business. Dante’s Inferno crossed with Gilliam’s Brasil. Toss in some Dashiel Hammet, and maybe read something else.
19. Lifted By the Great Nothing - Karim Dimechkie. An interesting look at cultural confusion through the eyes of a young Lebanese man who immigrated to the US as a baby and was raised with no knowledge of his past.
20. Girl Underwater - Claire Kells. A college swim champ survives a plane crash and works her way through the trauma of living. Mildly predictable, but with enough character to keep ones attention.
21. Tigerman - Nick Harkaway. A retiring sargent is assigned to an island that is slowly being evacuated before it is destroyed. Well written, but pointless.
22. Paper Lion - George Plimpton. Recommended by my brother. The author convinces the 1967 Detroit Lions to hire him as a rookie quarterback so he can write about football from the inside.
23. The Unquiet Dead - Ausma Zehanat Khan. A police investigation into what seems to be a simple accidental death proves to be anything but. Identity, manipulation and bitter memories effect every character, their actions and inactions
24. The Sage of Waterloo - Leona Francombe. The battle of Waterloo retold by a rabbit. I don’t like glorified battles and I hated Watership Down, not sure why I thought I’d like this. Well written; not my thing.
25. The Murdstone Trilogy - Mal Peet. A funny take on the fantasy trilogy as one follows a writer whose agent tells him to write quest tales which thrusts him into more than he can handle.
26. In the Unlikely Event - Judy Blume. Well written as always. This one reminds me of Fanny Flagg or Maeve Binchy; neighbors helping neighbors. 50 years of stories in snippets.
27. The Mystics of Mile End - Sigal Samuel. A family deals with religion and mysticism in similar ways while feeling the others couldn’t possibly understand them. Distinct characters, only some of whom I liked.
28. Creative Non-Fiction magazine #58. Weather.
29. Backlands - Victoria Shorr. A fictionalized account of a true story. Outlaws in northern Brazil in the early 1900s. Hazy. Lyrical.
30. At the Water’s Edge - Sara Gruen.
31. Cordials from your Kitchen - Pattie Vargas & Rich Gulling. Recipe book for a new obsession.
32. Where They Found Her - Kimberly McCreight. Secrets and sexual abuse. I was impressed with the way the author connected the people in this small town. The reader knows the connections, but most of the characters do not.
33. The Island of 1000 Mirrors - Nayomi Munaweera. Civil war in Ceylon/Sri Lanka through the eyes of neighboring families.
34. Get In Trouble - Kelly Link. I love Link’s short stories. Many have stayed with me for years since I first found them. Reading this book is like visiting an old friend.
35. Elementary: Ghost Line - Adam Christopher. I like his other books, thought he wrote the books that the tv show is based on, but it is the other way around. Still good writing.
36. The Zoo at the Edge of the World - Eric Kahn Gale. Guinea in the Victorian era. A boy who stutters when talking to people, but can communicate clearly with the animals in the zoo his father keeps.
37. Secondhand Souls - Christopher Moore. Not as funny as some of his earlier stuff.
38. Night Mares - Manda Scott. A mystery around horses dying of an undetectable virus. I don’t like horses much. It was $1 at the used book store.
39. Unseemly Science - Rod Duncan. Number 2 in a great series.
40. The Opposite of Lonliness - Marina Keegan. Essays and Short stories published post-humuously. I like the nonfiction better.
41. Voyage of the Basilisk - Marie Brennan. Third in a series. I don’t really like the protagonist, but Brennan can write. So I keep reading, ya know?
42. The Forgotten Girls - Sara Blaedel. Danish mystery. One case leads to several others. Unexpected twists. I read it in one sitting.
43. 
44. Uprooted - Naomi Novik. Better than I expected with all the hype around it. I like her writing in the dragon series, but none of the characters really so it was nice to find another tale I could sink my teeth into,
45. Lab Girl - Hope Jahren. Listening to the audio book, read by the author. Tales of growing up, her research, the comparisons between.
46. Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher. Another audio book listened to while puttering. Read by the author. Extremely funny.
47. Dead Heat - Patricia Briggs. #4 in the Alpha & Omega series.
48. Smoke & Mirrors - Neil Gaiman. One of the few I haven’t read. Listening to Gaiman read it is soothing.
49. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School - Matthew Frederick. Bought to help me get a handle on subject matter at the library wheere I work. Accessible, if a bit fascile.
50. Rose of No Man’s Land - Michelle Tea. A book club book. Well written teenage angst complete with really poor decisions and betrayals.
51. The Accident - Chris Pavone. An annonymous manuscript sets off a chain of events, murders and confusion. Fast paced, pulls you along. I totally did not see a couple of the twists.
52. Weird Girl and What’s His Name - Meagan Brothers. A miscommunication between friends spirals out and back through confusion, regret, and love.
53. The Relic Master: A Novel - Christopher Buckley. Reading this on kindle while commuting. A satirical look at the business of buying and selling religious relics.
54. Save Room for Pie - Roy Blount Jr..  Little snippets of his writing on food in general. Also bits he wrote for Bluff the Listener.
55. The Girl With All the Gifts - M. R. Carey. Dystopian fiction. Better than most. The ending had a nice twist that flowed from the story without being dead obvious or stupid.
56. Daring Greatly - Brene Brown. For a book club.
57. Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire. My only complaint is that this book was not long enough. I want to buy a copy for everyone I know.
58. Fire Touched - Patricia Briggs. #9 in a series.
59. The Last Bookaneer - Matthew Pearl. Book pirate makes money from lack of universal copyright laws. This tome details his obsession with Robert Louis Stevenson
60. Science Comics: Dinosaurs - MK Reed & Joe Flood. Shows what was known at different points in history and the process of discovery.
61. A Gathering of Shadows - V.E. Schwab. Second in the series.
62. No Longer at Ease - Chinua Achebe. Reading this electronically while commuting. I am finding it moving, but can’t remember who anyone is, as I only ride the train once aweek.
63. Creative NonFiction #59 Theme: Marriage.
64. How to Pass as Human - Android Zero. aka. Nic Kellman. Interesting viewpoint. Very wordy. Not really the graphic novel I thought it was. More like a book with pictures.
65. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry - Fredrik Backman. Funny. Sad. Read it in one sitting, so some of the craft seemed trite.
66. Sparrow Hill Road - Seanan McGuire. Retellings of old ghost stories, only more so, and from the point of view of the ghost.
67. Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel. Well done apocalypse novel in that it left more questions than answers.
68. The “Backwards” Research Guide for Writers - Sonya Huber. Aside from the use of quotation marks for emphasis in the title, a good resource.
69. The Black Diamond Detective Agency - Eddie Campbell. Nice illustrations. I have trouble telling some of the characters apart, but then all men look the same to me.
70. The Good, The Bad and the Smug - Tom Holt. Goblins trying to take over the world by remarketing evil.
71. The Soul of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery. Good writing. Almost more about the aquarium in Boston than cephalopods. Almost.
72. Relish - Lucy Knisley. Food. Comics.
73. The Library at Mount Char - Scott Hawkins. Weird. More violent than I expected somehow.
74. Exquisite Corpse - Penelope Bagieu. Nice crisp illustrations. The ending had a good twist.
75. The Return of the Discontinued Man - Mark Hodder. I think I missed one in this series. Characters do a good job of summing up early books in 2nd chapter.
76. Elementary: Full moon - Adam Christopher. Second in a series.
77. Blue and Yellow Don’t Make Green - Michael Wilcox. Older book on color as research for an essay.
78. Yes Is More - Bjarke Ingels. Architectural movement described in a grapic novel.
79. The Power of Color - Sara Marberry and Laurie Zagon. More research. :)
80. The Manufacture of Mineral and Lake Pigments Containing Directions for the Manufacture of All Artificial Artists and Painters Colours, Enamel Colours, Soot and Metallic Pigments: A Textbook for Manufacturers, Artists and Painters - Dr. Josef Bersch. Huh, I wonder what this book is about?
81. The Organic Artist: Make Your Own Paint, Paper, Pigments, Prints and More From Nature - Nick Neddo. Research is so much fun!
82. The Anthropology of Turquoise - Ellen Meloy. A reread for color research!
83. The Secret Language of Color - Joann and Arielle Eckstut. More research.
84. Mrs. Roosevelt’s Confidante - Susan Elia MacNeal. Eh. I think I missed one in this series. Honestly, I only read them because Alice knows the author.
85. Benefit of the Doubt - Neal Griffin. More graphic than I like my mysteries.
86. The Magic Strings of Frankie Pesto - Mitch Albom. Narrated by Music. Uneven.
87. Color: A Natural History of the Palette - Victoria Findley. More research.
88. Monster - A.Lee Martinez. Funny. Ridiculous. Magic. Read it.
89. Go Set a Watchman - Harper Lee. Much of book seems like place and character sketches vaguely linked together.
90. The Invisible Library - Genevieve Cogman. Magic, steampunk, alternate worlds, secret plots. Good shit.
91. The Drunken Botanist - Amy Stewart. Some good drink mixes, fun botany.
92. F*ck Feelings - Michael Bennet and Sarah Bennet. The sort of self help book where one sentence resonants in every chapter. Enough to keep one reading, but not enough to change your life.
93. The March of the Crabs - Arthur De Pins. A better comic than novel.
94. The Automatic Detective - A. Lee Martinez. Took me a while to get into this one. Not as funny as some of his others
95. View from the Cheap Seats - Neil Gaiman. A collection of essays, book intros and speeches.
96. The Origin of Feces - David Waltner-Toews. Another audio book. Everything you wanted to know about shit. Well not everything....
97. The Diviners - Libba Bray. A flapper. A Ziegfield girl. A con man. The Museum of the Occult...and murder.
98. A Criminal Magic - Lee Kelly. Predictable. Magic outlawed. She wants to avenge her mother’s death. He wants to erase his father’s ties to magic.
99. Happy People Read Books and Drink Coffee - Agnes Martin-Lugand. I thought there would be coffee in it. I also throught there would be books. Disappointed on both fronts.
100. Life Everlasting - Bernd Heinrich. Cycles of decomposition from the Maine woods. Yay, burying beetles! Later chapters feel like summaries of his earlier books.
101. Brainrush - Richard Bard. Guy gets superpowers when earthquake hits while he is in an MRI machine. Too bad it didn’t end there.
102. Black Widow Forever Red - Margaret Stohl. Not as bad as I feared it, not as good as I’d hoped.
103. Creative NonFiction #60. Childhood.
104. The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender - Leslye Walton. Lovely surreal bits: parents fading until they turn to ash; sisters turning into canaries. Horrible ending.
105. A series of seven articles on Knowledge Management in Architecture, Engineering and Construction for work. Together they count as a book because they make up 122 pages of tiny print.
1. Carrillo, P. (2006) “Exploiting Knowledge Management: the Engineering Perspective”
2. Azhar, S. (2011) “BIM: Trends, Benefit, Risks and Challenges for the AEC Industry”
3. Monson, C. (2015) “Themes in Recent Research on AEC Project Collaboration”
4. Monson, C. (2015) “Shifiting Logistics of Constructability and Design”
5. Bouazza, C. (2015) “The Use of BIM in Managing Knowledge in Construction Project Delivery”
6. Hosseini M. (2015) “Adopting Global Virtual Engineering Terms in AEC Projects”
7. Grover, R. (2016) “Knowledge Management in Construction using a SocioBIM Platform”
106. After the Ending - Lindsey Fairleigh and Lindsay Pogue. Doom and gloom. Horrible.
107. The Dragon Oracles Omnibus - T.J. Garrett. Four book set in one free ebook. No one would buy it.
108. The Wildlife of Our Bodies - Rob Dunn. A look at the bacteria and critters that live in and around us and why we are not well when they are gone.
109. A Thousand Naked Strangers - Ken Hazzard. Follow am EMT through the streets of Atlanta.
110. The Girl on the Train - Paula Hawkins.  Commuter trains, drunken blackouts, lies, a woman gone missing, and another who can’t remember.
111. Yes, Please! - Amy Poehler. Not as funny as she is live.
112. Black Man in a White Coat - Damon Tweedy. Western medicine through the eyes of a black doctor operating in the south.
113. Live Right and Find Happiness - Dave Barry. Better at distracting me while I got stitches than #112
114. The Cogsmith’s Daughter - Kate M. Colby. A mechanical frog. A king who rules with absolute power. A desert kingdom. Revenge.
115. The Last Gatekeeper - Katy Haye. Unbeliveably stupid.
116. The Winter People - Jennifer McMahon. Creepy in a good way. Some cultural appropriation. Argument for character motivation weak.
117. Misadventures of an Awkward Black Girl - Issa Rae. Hailed as funny, but I didn’t laugh.
118. Riverkeep - Martin Stewart. Dark. There are times when the author chooses pretty language over clarity.
119. The Pigeon Tunnels - John Le Carre. Good writing. Chunks of the historical significance of episodes eludes me...
120. Ways to Disappear - Idra Novey. A translator’s Brazillian author disappears. Mystery. Mafia.
121. The Family Plot -  Cherie Priest. Salvage company clearing out a haunted house. Only creepier and much better than that sounds.
122. The Dante Connection - Estelle Ryan. Second in the series. I love them.
123. The Alexandrite - Rick Lenz. The constant typos take away from what little joy the story might bring.
124. Someone Tell Aunt Tillie She’s Dead - Christiana Miller. Just this side of horrible. Good for the commute
125. Lost Lake - Sara Addison Allen. Waking up and making connections is an underlying theme.
126. A Red-Rose Chain - Seannan McGuire. 9th in a really good series.
127. Wrede on Writing - Patricia Wrede. A number of things I needed to hear right about now.
128. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle. Pretty sure I’ve read this before. Been years though.
129. Thirteenth Child - Patricia Wrede. Almost too much world building. Moved really slowly.
130. Miss Ruffles Inherits Everything - Nancy Martin. Predictably horrible.
131. If I Forget You - Thomas Christopher Greene. Billed as Romeo & Juliet if everyone lived. Just as bad.
132. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist - Sunil Yapa. Fictionalized account of 1999 Seattle protests.
133. The Killing Forest - Sara Blaedel. Creepy cults and secrets. The police were on cases they had personal interest in. Lots of death and drama.
134. Illuminae - Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Dystopian tale. People driven, not quite enough world building to be believable.
135. The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace. I never did figure out what this book is about.
136. Creative NonFiction #61 - Lessons from Nature
137. So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood - Patrick Modiano. Moves between now and memories so much it is hard to tell what is true or how old the characters are.
138. The Little Paris Bookshop - Nina George. Sappy. Took forever to get to the next plot point.
139. The Raven Boys - Maggie Stiefvater. Much better than I expected, since all the tumblrs raving about it also love Twilight. First in a series.
140. Clara & Mr. Tiffany - Susan Vreelander. Good art history & attention to artist tools. Sappy emotions.
141. The Braque Connection - Estelle Ryan. Third in a really good series.
142. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - J.K. Rowling. Read the British version in 2000 or something. Have not read the entire series. Decided it was time.
143. Digital Fortress - Dan Brown. The best pick of the paperbacks from the sea side condo when I ran out of books on vacation.
144. A Man called Ove - Frederick Bachman. Grumpy man finds he needs people after all. Yawn.
145. Science is Culture - Adam Bly editor. Conversations about science, philosophy, etc. Some better than others
146. The Muralist - B.A. Shapiro. An interesting look at the WPA mural project during WWII.
147. True Story #1 Fruitland by Steven Kurutz
148. The Masked City - Genevieve Cogman. Second in a series
149. Courtroom 302 - Steve Bogira. A year behind the scenes in a Chicago courthouse.
150. The President’s Vampire - Christopher Farnsworth. As cool and hokey as one would expect. Vampire loyal to US president fights secret war against terrorist snake people.
151. True Story #2 A Trip to the Zoo by Steven Church
152. Wake of Vultures - Lila Bowen. An orphan turned cowboy. Vampire whores. Shapeshifters. A quest to kill the Cannibal Owl. Awesome stuff.
153. Machines of Loving Grace: the quest for common ground between humans and robots - John Markoff. What it sounds like. Interesting ideas, not sure I agree with them all....
154. The Brazilian Bombshell - Martha Gil-Montero. Reread half of the book looking for one sentence that I wanted for an essay I may never finish.
155. Why Not Me? - Mindy Kaling. I’ll admit to having to look her up on IMDB, mostly because I am a book nerd and don’t watch much tv when it is current. This may explain why I was more confused than amused by this well written tome.
156. Speaking in Bones - Kathy Reichs. 18th in a series.
157. The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishaguro. Britons & Saxons. No one remembers anything due to a strange mist. Weird.
158. Lobster Johnson - Mike Mignola. Love this goofy comic.