2012 Summary

It was a bad year for reading and for blogging.  First of all, I simply didn't find enough good new books this year.  Partly this is financial.  I did not buy as much this year.  Also, some of the titles I did buy simply were not very good. 

For the first time in many years, it looks like I will not make the goal of reading 52 new books this year.

I have been reading, and I do have eleven days off before the end of the year, so I will have a couple more titles to add to my total, but right now I have only gotten to 36, so it seems unlikely.

What was good?  Well, this year I was very much impressed with Gillian Flynn.  I did write about her first book, Sharp Objects, and her third one, Gone Girl, was simply stellar.  In talking with a colleague about it, I admitted it was a hard book to recommend because it's hard to know what to say without giving anything away.  It is so full of surprises that I needed to take extreme care.

I did pick up a couple of books by favorite authors -- new John Sandfords, new one by Kathy Reichs, whose books about forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan is the basis for the TV series Bones.  I think, however, that I prefer the books to the show, as the novels seem a bit more realistic to me.

I've sampled a lot of YA stuff this year - missing Harry Potter and Hunger Games books, I am looking for alternatives but not much has worked.  I did see a good review of the new Cathrynne Valente book about Fairyland, so I read the first one.  It was okay - if you liked the Oz books (again, very different from the movie), you might like her books.  While they were okay, for me there wasn't anything much to get excited about.

I did finish the Matched trilogy by Ally Condie.  The first book, Matched, was terrific. The second one, Crossed, suffered the fate of many middle chapters - just a long bridge that went not much of anywhere.  The final volume is Reached.  It was better but still did not live up to the promise of the first book.  I actually re-read the Hunger Games series this year and I feel the same way about it.  I still feel that the first book is the best.

Another series, Acacia, by David Anthony Durham, got better.  The final book was as good as the first and second ones.  Nicely done.  It was thick going for a while because of the large cast of characters, but it turned out much better than I had thought.

Finally, I picked up volumes 4-6 of Naomi Novik's dragon series.  Interesting premise - that the English and French have dragons as part of their armies during Napoleon's war of conquest.  Our hero is an English dragonrider whose dragon was actually captured in the egg from a French ship.  Together, Will and Temeriare have grand adventures and travel as far as China in the various books.  Again, some are excellent, some not so much, but worthwhile overall.

I am certainly looking forward to a better year up ahead.  Perhaps I will find an author that I love with extensive backlist and will read myself silly next year.

Happy days...