books of 2011
¶ by Rob FrieselAll the 2011 books:
My Top 5 Favorite Reads from 2011
- The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss — The fantasy novel for readers that otherwise don’t like fantasy.
- Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem — Lethem continues to blow me away; this was amazing.
- The City & The City by China Miéville — “It’s like John le Carre finishing a Raymond Chandler manuscript by getting Jorge Luis Borges to scribble suggestions in the margins.” (review)
- The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood — The title gives it a way: a flood myth for the twenty-first century. (review)
- Chthon by Piers Anthony — A visceral, prurient, and Freudian science fiction psychodrama. (review)
Honorable mentions
- Brave New Worlds edited by John Joseph Adams — As you could tell, the above list was limited to novels. But this anthology was so well done I could not not mention it here. (review)
- The Trouble with Physics by Lee Smolin — Best non-fiction I read all year. Not just a great (and accessible!) discussion of physics as a science, but also of the curiously destructive system in place around all sciences. A fascinating read. (review)
- Seven Languages in Seven Weeks by Bruce Tate — …which I didn’t even actually like all that much; but this was a book that I thought was emblematic of how people should go about thinking about and learning new programming languages. As has been said a few times now: this book is more important than it is good.
All the Bookmarks
All the odds and ends that ended up between the pages to mark my place this year:
- bookmarks (old, new, and found)
- Post-It notes
- shopping lists
- envelope scraps
- receipts
- business cards
- a Maker’s Mark “Ambassador” card
- a postcard with a catamount on it
- a child’s drawing
Bonus Round
A “timeline” style visualization of my 2011 Goodreads.com shelf: here.
And for the nerds out there: here is the script (and some of the assets) that I used to generate the timeline visualization. (In the style of Bruce Tate, I’ll leave it up to the intrepid reader to acquire their own API key and fit the rest of the bits together.)
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