Polymath

Handicapping the 21st Century Novel

Now that 2007 is well under way I thought it was time to look back at this new century and its literature. What are the great novels of the 2000's?

Handicapping the Great 21st Century Novels - an interactive experience (special pre-Alpha preview)

Continued...

@T0N3D!!!!!

"Superb"... "magnificent"... "The best thing he has ever written" — the kinds of things that are said about almost every book that is published these days, from James Patterson to Mo Willems. Yet when I heard these same things said about Atonement by Ian McEwan, I somehow thought such praise was well-deserved.

Silly me.

The overall narrative is fairly light. There is the tale of Robbie and Cecilia (two star-crossed lovers), and the personal struggle of Briony, and then a handful of plot-driven characters in the background. The story spans five years or seventy, depending on whether you include the final section.

2006 in Review

It used to be my practice to post a year-end review of books, but for the past two years I have been posting monthly (/semimonthly) summaries of recent reading, and I never wrote a 2005 review. If I recall correctly, there was a one month old child in the house at the time.

Errata: Some time during the past year I read A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, but it got left out somehow.

So, in the past year I made a concerted effort to read some forty-one books. Four of these were nonfiction, the rest fiction. Of the fiction, I abandoned or otherwise failed to finish four books, those four being:

* Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
* Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
* Hominids by Robert J. Sawyer
* JR by William Gaddis

There is a fair chance that I will eventually resume reading Dostoevsky or Gaddis, but no chance that I will finish the Willis or Sawyer volumes.

Out of all the fiction, I would say about eight of the books were of literary quality. The rest were fluff, but enjoyable fluff.

Best fiction of the year: Gateway by Frederik Pohl. Written in 1976, still a good read, and it motivated me to read several other books by Pohl.

Worst fiction of the year: The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I have my doubts that Hosseini actually wrote the book, more likely there was an uncredited ghost writer/team of editors behind this.

Well, time to get back to reading. Currently working on: Not Even Wrong by Peter Woit.

Reading for November and December 2006

I did not finish either JR by William Gaddis or Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray. JR was interesting, but a little too much like trying to read a television.

I also did not get much beyond the first week of writing for NaNoWriMo.

I did read:

* Myth-ing Persons (1984)
* Little Myth Marker (1985)
* M.Y.T.H. inc. Link (1986)

by Robert Asprin. The series really hits its stride with Little Myth Marker, then Asprin's writing output started sputtering in the 1990's.

After a year on my shelf, I resumed Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy from page 500 or so. I still have about 40 pages to go.