Morning Meme: Books
Dec. 10th, 2004 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentWrite 150 words on your favourite books of the year, post it beneath this in your Journal and then email it along with your address to The Guardian.
I'm torn between piling on the superlatives and piling on the titles. Most of the books I read this year were new, and genre, and my favourites could change tomorrow.
Ian McDonald's sprawling future-Indian epic, River of Gods, is probably number one, though. It's exuberant and inventive, linguistically and conceptually. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas runs it very, very close, however; it's perhaps even more ambitious, but I think it has marginally less heart.
City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer, made it to the UK this year, and it was worth the wait. In parts dark, decadent, surreal fantasy, in parts whimsical metafictional game, the linked stories here build a complex and compelling world. Lastly I'll note Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, a thoughtful and important book about moments of change: environmental, of course, but also personal, social, and scientific. Robinson handles their intersections masterfully.
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ninebelow]
I'm torn between piling on the superlatives and piling on the titles. Most of the books I read this year were new, and genre, and my favourites could change tomorrow.
Ian McDonald's sprawling future-Indian epic, River of Gods, is probably number one, though. It's exuberant and inventive, linguistically and conceptually. David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas runs it very, very close, however; it's perhaps even more ambitious, but I think it has marginally less heart.
City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff Vandermeer, made it to the UK this year, and it was worth the wait. In parts dark, decadent, surreal fantasy, in parts whimsical metafictional game, the linked stories here build a complex and compelling world. Lastly I'll note Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, a thoughtful and important book about moments of change: environmental, of course, but also personal, social, and scientific. Robinson handles their intersections masterfully.
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ninebelow]
