What books did you read in 2011?

[Dinner]

It has Demi Moore?

God damn it. This is five star material and someone needs to give this man a god damned medal. I'm serious. That was almost the perfect set, serve, and return. It was a perfect spike for a point.

[Imran Siddiqui]

[KrazyHorse]

I found it cliched and unfunny.

[Al B. Sure!]

I agree with KH on this one. At most it's mildly amusing, if tiring, not anything special. I should know. I room with a stand-up comic.

Unless Oerdin was being sarcastic. That is possible, although Oerdin is more likely to be wrong than sarcastic.

[Dinner]

True enough.

If you're not into female-protagonist, nerdy modern-fantasy stuff, it is probably not for you.

I will say that her most recent release was more of a post-Cold War espionage thriller than modern-fantasy, though obviously that was the basis.

And her new upcoming release, in October 2012, is more a straight-up horror novel.

It sounds like the lady can't decide which genre she wants to be in.

On a different note NPR has a great article about a 20 year old women from Minnesota with no formal training as a writer who never the less has made $2 million just in her first year of writing even though none of the publishing houses wanted to publish her stuff. She writes modern fantasy romance (supposedly it's soft core porn for girls who are into weird fantasy ****) and when no publishing house wanted to publish her book she self published it for the e-reader market. Her books quickly became a runaway success selling to girls who love things like the Twilight series and now she has dozens of offers from publishing houses and Hollywood studios to pay her for her books. I really do think e-readers are going to make self publishing THE way for aspiring young authors to break into the business because it cuts out the middlemen, let's just about anyone publish what they want cheaply, and reach consumers directly.

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804084/a-self-published-authors-2-million-cinderella-story

[molly bloom]

I can also recommend Tom Rob Smith's "The Secret Speech" ("Kolyma" in Germany after the gulag), a thriller set in the post-Stalinist USSR, though it was not as excellent as the previous "Child 44" with the same main characters. Esp. the finale during the Hungarian revolt 1956 felt a bit weaker, too "movie-like" for my taste. Still a very good read. I plan to read his third part of the series this year.

It's quite serendipitous, but after I'd read an old article in a Guardian 'Weekend' magazine, I thought I'd find out who Tom Rob Smith was. Yesterday (before I read your post) I'd picked up 'Child 44' at the library. Last night (01.15) I finished it.

It was tugging at the seams in places for the sake of the plot (but then no more so than Dickens, so...) but what was good was the atmosphere of mistrust, distrust and repression that he evoked.

I'd recently re-read 'A Social History Of The Third Reich' and also finished 'The Baader Meinhof Complex' a few months ago, and what was fascinating were the parallels between Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany- the punishments for jokes, the purges, the arbitrariness of some rulings, the element of personal malice in prosecutions, the inefficiency... and I thought what a good little apparatchik Gudrun Ensslin would have made.

Of all the Baader Meinhof crew, the daughter of the pastor was to me the most frightening, the most self-righteously convinced- even to the extent of endlessly critiquing Ulrike Meinhof when they were imprisoned.

What a first class, stone cold gorgon she was.

Have you read any of the Serpent's Tail authors ?

http://www.serpentstail.com/browse-books/crime-fiction

I think if you liked Tom Rob Smith there's a fair few on their list you'd enjoy too.

[Zevico]

Molly-I recommend Nomenklatura by Michael Voslenski to anyone reading up on totalitarianism. I think it helps to understand not just Communists, but the exercise of power in authoritarian systems generally.

A brief summary from http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...t-ruling-class

A clinical dissection of the Soviet system, in which a group of managers and bureaucrats (some 1.5 percent of the population) are engaged in ceaseless political maneuvering among themselves while maintaining total power, as a privileged class, over all the others. The author, who left the Soviet Union in 1977, follows his argument to its logical conclusion: the impossibility of basic change, either toward liberalization of the internal order or toward modification of an aggressive foreign policy. This study of Soviet experience since Lenin evokes Milovan Djilas's analysis of the "new class" published some 30 years ago; appropriately, Djilas contributes a brief preface to the book.

[molly bloom]

Molly-I recommend Nomenklatura by Michael Voslenski to anyone reading up on totalitarianism. I think it helps to understand not just Communists, but the exercise of power in authoritarian systems generally.

A brief summary from http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...t-ruling-class

A clinical dissection of the Soviet system, in which a group of managers and bureaucrats (some 1.5 percent of the population) are engaged in ceaseless political maneuvering among themselves while maintaining total power, as a privileged class, over all the others. The author, who left the Soviet Union in 1977, follows his argument to its logical conclusion: the impossibility of basic change, either toward liberalization of the internal order or toward modification of an aggressive foreign policy. This study of Soviet experience since Lenin evokes Milovan Djilas's analysis of the "new class" published some 30 years ago; appropriately, Djilas contributes a brief preface to the book.

Thanks for that. I hadn't come across his name before. I definitely recommend Grunberger's 'A Social History of The Third Reich'- as a whole and for individual sections.

What I found fascinating about 'Child 44' were the parallels with the social situation in Nazi Germany (even down to people saying things like 'if only Stalin knew what the NKVD/MGB were doing in his name' which paralleled exactly what ordinary people said and thought about Hitler in the Third Reich) and how he'd managed to capture the profound lack of trust that you read about in the memoirs of people like Nadezhda Mandelstam.

The inefficiency of both regimes (the self-delusion, bureaucratic inpetitude, ossification) is staggering.

What is thoroughly unpleasant is that having read things like 'The Baader Meinhof Complex', 'Error Of Judgment' and 'Get Off My Ship' you have the creeping realization that the totalitarian/authoritarian mindset is easily adopted by a wide range of people across a vast swathe of societies.

[Imran Siddiqui]

On a different note NPR has a great article about a 20 year old women from Minnesota with no formal training as a writer who never the less has made $2 million just in her first year of writing even though none of the publishing houses wanted to publish her stuff. She writes modern fantasy romance (supposedly it's soft core porn for girls who are into weird fantasy ****) and when no publishing house wanted to publish her book she self published it for the e-reader market. Her books quickly became a runaway success selling to girls who love things like the Twilight series and now she has dozens of offers from publishing houses and Hollywood studios to pay her for her books. I really do think e-readers are going to make self publishing THE way for aspiring young authors to break into the business because it cuts out the middlemen, let's just about anyone publish what they want cheaply, and reach consumers directly.

http://www.npr.org/2012/01/08/144804...nderella-story

Cool story. I am happy to support these folks by owning an e-reader. Not that I download their work, but you know .

[Tupac Shakur]

I found it cliched and unfunny.

Struth.

[Hughasd]

very nice sharing

[Lonestar]

I read "The Gun: A history of the AK-47".

[DanS]

I'm ashamed to say that I did not finish a single damn book in 2011. Doing other things.

[BeBMan]

Have you read any of the Serpent's Tail authors ?

http://www.serpentstail.com/browse-books/crime-fiction

I think if you liked Tom Rob Smith there's a fair few on their list you'd enjoy too.

Nah, haven't read them. I don't read crime/thriller stories or books that often anymore, so I'm not really up to date with what is good there (TRSmith I just picked up because some people told me about it, and I found the setting in stalinist/later post-stalinist Soviet Russia interesting). But if those are good I may try them

[Jon Miller]

I am not sure how many books I read last year. I read more than I have on my kindle (and I got my kindle in 2010), but I have over 112 books on my kindle.

Currently I am reading (for the first time) The Quantum Thief http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief and A Dance With Dragons (finally, I wanted to reread the others before I read it because it had been so long, it took a while for me to feel like reading them (last week)).

JM