I have been doing a very bad job of keeping a reading log or commenting on the books I have read…
Partially this is a function of depression and partially a function of just not wanting to spend more time on my screen…
Regardless, I have done a surprising amount of reading this past year. It has been one of my main coping strategies during the never ending COVID scourge of WFH, masking, and general fear.
My book source of choice has been the Libby app by Overdrive. It is super convenient: it lets you check books out of the library; it has a good reading interface; it syncs across all of my iThings; it keeps track of all the books I’ve read.
In 2021 I have read:
- Oryx and Crake
- The Year of the Flood
- MaddAddam
- Childhood’s End
- Amatka
- 11/23/63
- Where Men Win Glory
- A Promised Land
- The Passage
- The Twelve
- The City of Mirrors
- Life After Life
- No One is Talking About This
- Exhalation
- Arrival
- The Gun
- Under the Dome
- Ready Player One
- Ready Player Two
- Klara and the Sun
- One Second After
- Annihilation
- The Years of Rice and Salt
- Forever Peace
- Forever Free
- Triplanetary
Not all of the books were good, but all were passable.
The best were probably the MaddAddam series, Klara and the Sun, and Annihilation.
The most disappointing were the “Ready Player” series. The writing was fine, but I just could not care about the narrator, nor did I by into the techno-utopian tone. Count me out of a world where big tech is the path to a better tomorrow.
I found One Second After disappointing as well. The writing was stiff and the story predictable. The fact that human beings are not prepared for a major disaster and will barely survive without our technology is not a call to arms, but the sad state of reality.
Triplanetary was a total throw back pleasure of swashbuckling, manly man writing.
The “Forever” books were good, but not nearly as good as the Forever War. I should amend that a bit; Forever Peace was a bit pants. It falls apart when the resolution to all problems is “computer enabled mind meld”. That is almost as lazy as using time travel to wrap up plot holes.
The biggest surprise for me was the series that started off with The Passage. I thought the short-lived Fox show was a good romp, but was bowled over by how good the source material turned out to be. I’m not sure how Fox could have filmed the rest of the series, but it would have been interesting to see how they tried.
In conclusion:
- Reading has kept me sort of sane
- Libby is great
- I should blog more
