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How many books did you read last year? Also, what was the best book you read?
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You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here.
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:13PM
Two autobiographies, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Man and his Symbols (Jung).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @09:01AM
The Picture of Dorian Gray?
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Tuesday December 27 2016, @07:47PM
I just finished it and I began to read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and Linux Quick Fix Notebook [amazon.com] from 2005, must be way outdated.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @03:59PM
You certainly are in the high brow selection of what I'd suggest my peers would read. bravo.
i tried to get alexa to call me winston when at a friends house, and they (the friend and alexa) didn't understand and I felt foolish for some reason. it is hard to set an example using popular literature to demonstrate a societal ill when society is ignorant to such ills.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Sunday January 15 2017, @09:58AM
Well done. I read Dorian Grey a few years ago. I've been trying to tackle at least a couple of the classics a year.
This year, I read the Art of Dumpster Diving, The Sixth Column, Candide, Snow Crash (again), The King in Yellow, and a handful of others. I recall there was a quite a few Lovecraft stories in there, but I don't recall which ones exactly. I know Charles Dexter Ward was in there. My dad keeps trying to get me into Turtledove, but I've never committed to it. I'd read more, but I tend to lose all track of time and will sit there reading until 7 am if I'm left to my own devices, so I wind up avoiding it for the most part, but I do enjoy reading quite a bit.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Thursday December 22 2016, @10:27PM
Was in jail early in the year, read a bunch of Louis L'amour and some other westerns, a couple of anthologies by Niven, and a couple of the Foundation books, which got me on a major scifi spree when I got out, reading a bunch of stuff I'd seen recommended or hailed as classics but had never read - a lot of Asimov, Heinlein, CJ Cherryh, Le Guin, RA Lafferty, Stanislaw Lem. I reread the Culture books (Iain Banks), as well as Earthsea. I read some nonfiction too, a couple history books about native Americans, and some books about gardening.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Friday December 23 2016, @12:36AM
Forgot to mention which I thought was best; I'm torn between A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge, and The Dispossessed by Ursula le Guin. Downbelow Station by CJ Cherryh was really good too.
(Score: 1) by charon on Friday December 23 2016, @04:51AM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:44AM
Was in jail early in the year,
How many people did you kill?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:45AM
They're not people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @07:46AM
You crazy son-of-a-bitch!
(Score: 1) by DannyB on Monday January 09 2017, @07:00PM
Corporations are people too!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday December 23 2016, @08:42PM
In jail ?!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by t-3 on Friday December 23 2016, @09:16PM
~45 days total, but I didn't have access to books for about half of those due to being moved around (3 days in a holding cell with about 30 others, no books there, then to a general area with a small library for 4 days, then I got moved to a 10-man cell for the remainder of my stay, but the book cart didn't come for weeks). I'm a pretty quick reader and had a bunch of free time though, I estimate I read about 30 books overall. Some days I read 2-3 books (especially when I ran out and read the stuff other people had grabbed, which were mostly 100-200 page westerns and crime novels), many days I just slept, played cards and dice, did crosswords/sudoku, and rapped. Not being able to pick-and-choose what to read meant I ventured into a lot of genres that I normally wouldn't read, like war novels, some John Grisham books, and the aforementioned westerns. I wrote a bunch of rap songs and some poetry as well.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 09 2017, @08:16AM
Have you been able to pick what to rape, though?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Monday January 09 2017, @06:03PM
Being surrounded by a bunch of bearded men in various states of undress eliminated all serial desire pretty handily.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Sunday January 01 2017, @05:02AM
The Culture novels always managed to boost my (pretty low) annual book reading count by at least one. A great shame that Iain Banks died so relatively young.
My favourite Culture Book would have to be "Use of Weapons" for the wonderful way that Iain Banks told the story both forward and backward from a particular point in time. It also contains my favourite sentence ever in a novel (toward the end of the book there is a wonderful use of ambiguity in a sentence that delivers a very powerful plot element).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 23 2016, @06:54AM
The abridged miniseries on Syfy a year ago really mangled Childhood's End.
(Score: 2) by captain_nifty on Friday December 23 2016, @04:44PM
I tend to be a voracious reader and go through a lot of books.
My favorite fiction from this year were the Silo series (Wool, Shift, and Dust) by Hugh Howey.
For nonfiction my favorite was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes,
I'm not sure if I fully agree with Jaynes' proposition, but it was a well thought out idea and a nice exploration of the historical evolution of consciousness.
(Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:37AM
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Friday December 23 2016, @06:21PM
The very best book I read this year is “From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari. It was so good that I purchased several copies to give to friends.
I’m always fascinated by the development of humanity and the mysteries, at least to me, of how we became able to master fire, domesticate animals, forge metals and the many things the ancients did to create our civilization.
This book attempts to answer many of these questions and does so in a very readable and intelligent manner. Highly recommended.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday December 23 2016, @07:35PM
By James S. A. Corey are the ones I remember, just got Babylon's Ashes this morning and expect to finish it by Monday.
I average 1-3 books a week, depending on the books.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:38AM
Ooooh - something prompted me to watch the series. Was it a review here on Soylent? Yeah - blame it on Cafebabe: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/08/14/1246235 [soylentnews.org]
The shows were amazing. The special effects may or may not have been entirely accurate, but there was no really stupid crap in it. Pretty realistic, overall.
I want to read the books, but haven't started yet.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday December 31 2016, @11:23PM
Same here. Got the recommendation right here to watch the show and already picked up a couple of the books but I've been holding off on reading them since the series is good enough for me to want to spoil it.
Btw, 2nd season premiers in a month.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday December 24 2016, @05:08AM
Thanks a lot, school. 3-4 chapters of a text doesn't count.
Best book, that's an easy one. Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. By far the best analysis of the human condition I've read, in fact, it renders Shakespeare utterly useless. If you can cut through it's 840-ish pages of extremely verbose journies through human nature, God, the Devil, the legal system, and archetypes, and at-the-time radical narrative techniques; you'll emerge a better person.
Apples and oranges. War and peace is a worthy read, especially the epilogue, but is of the tone of a single omniscient narrator. The Brothers Karamazov is written by an omniscient narrator but emphasizes character dialogue much more than narrator dialogue, thus, with TBK you feel as if you are sitting and listening into the conversations of the characters themselves rather than having them explained by the narrator. There are other techniques used in the latter, like the side-narration of a part of the book representing the diary of a monk in a monastery.
An interesting fact about both books is that there is mention of infinitesimal calculus, and in the case of War and Peace comparing that to historical developments. Lowly book-writing Russians knowing more math than most Americans of the same age. Imagine that!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @02:26AM
Yeah the dog shit I scraped off my shoe last week that still sits by my front walk knows more math than most Americans, of any age.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @05:06PM
Tolstoy was of nobility with independent wealth, and Dosty was a city intellectual, though often suffering financial difficulty, and both were the preeminent writers in their own lifetime.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:43AM
"renders Shakespeare utterly useless"
I sorta somewhat agree with the sentiment. Dostoevsky is superior to Shakey. But, a great author doesn't render a good author useless - merely less useful. And, IMHO, Shake isn't nearly as good as he is touted to be. I just never got into his stuff. Maybe all the silly women teachers who gushed over him turned me off to him.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @02:17PM
They are of melodramatic theatre format diminishing a certain sense of gravita, so less appealing to male readers I think.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:23PM
The big triumph of Shakespeare is not really the story, but the format, that is ALOT of Iambic pentameter, even if half the content is utter garbage. I am still not convinced Shakespeare was not a group think.
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:01PM
> Thanks a lot, school. 3-4 chapters of a text doesn't count
Especially if you didn't finish coloring all of them.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday January 03 2017, @01:01PM
I take it you never read it then.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday January 09 2017, @08:23AM
I take you don't know how he was before being the better person he is now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday January 09 2017, @04:49PM
Until he relapses as he does from time to time.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by novak on Saturday December 24 2016, @07:04AM
I collect Phillip K Dick novels, basically just whatever I can find at used book stores, and so far I have read 34 of them. The best novels of his I have read this year are "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich," and "Eye in the Sky." I was not particularly impressed by "The World Jones Made," and most of his other really famous books I read prior to this year (Valis, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, A Scanner Darkly, Radio Free Albemuth- all are excellent).
I'm currently reading Dan Simmons's "Illium," and it is also an excellent book.
novak
(Score: 2) by Webweasel on Monday December 26 2016, @05:37PM
+1 for a Scanner Darkly, nothing I have read gets as close to drug culture as that book does. Movie is excellent too.
I read "Flow my tears the policeman said" last year, also well recommended.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:27AM
Library of America has a 3-volume set of Dick's novels (available individually or together on Amazon), and Citadel Press has a trade paperback collection of his stories (OOP, but still available, also on Amazon).
I just purchased them this year for my local library; sadly, no one has yet checked the books out, though all the films based on them go out regularly.
(Score: 2) by panachocala on Sunday December 25 2016, @04:51PM
The Witches is the best book ever - if you haven't read this I really feel sorry for you. Excellent for 9-14 year olds.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 04 2017, @04:50PM
It's definitely one of Dahl's better books, although I think his short stories are often better, e.g. The Hitchhiker.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday January 05 2017, @02:46AM
Though not Dahl's usual fare, I would vote for Danny the Champion of the World, as his best book, especially if you can find the edition illustrated by Jill Bennett (Quentin Blake, in the new edition, just does not do the story justice)--a more naturalistic setting than his other juvenile books, but still with the Dahl atmosphere and humour throughout.
And with poaching--years after first reading it, I still wonder if you can poach pheasants using raisins...
Further, if you can get hold of it, The Roald Dahl Omnibus is well worth the read--it has most of the stories he wrote for an adult audience, including the famous one where a wife brains her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, cooks it up and serves it to the investigating police. The stories were frequently anthologized and adapted by Hitchcock for his television programme.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @04:58PM
An English abbreviated version - the current original runs to something like 18k pages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25 2016, @10:02PM
This resource is no longer valid. Please return to the beginning and try again.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Monday December 26 2016, @10:21PM
... this year, a ton of political and economic background material. So, fewer books than I used to.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 27 2016, @11:30AM
Back in the day, I would read two to six books every week. Some trash, some great classics, some reference, some technical - I was always reading. Nowadays, a book every couple weeks. With the web, I can find things that interest me - like this site. Before the web, there was radio, phonograph, television - none of which kept my mind busy.
Best book(s) last year? Cixin Liu's 'Three Body Problem' series. I'm still waiting for the fourth book to come out. Maybe I'll check on that now . . . . no, not yet.
It seems that the name of the series is 'Remembrance of Earth's Past'. I am quite certain that it was simply tagged 'The Three Body Problem' when I started reading it. Ehhh - marketing, I suppose. That doesn't change the content, I'm sure.
(Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 31 2016, @12:30AM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:41AM
Likely 50 books or more, most of which I've read multiple times this year. Some of the more notable titles include Fox in Socks [youtube.com] and Everybody Poops [amazon.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:42PM
ok, i didn't know about everybody poops. thanks for the reference, my almost three year old is nowhere near potty trained...
with me i think the most read was "are you my mother?".
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Thursday December 29 2016, @04:46AM
Got into audiobooks and was burning through two or three a week between April and August when I decided I was too cheap to continue. Piillar to the Sky by William Forstchen was my favorite. I suck at explaining things, so I'll just link to audible.
https://mobile.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Pillar-to-the-Sky-Audiobook/B00HSTAEI4 [audible.com]
I also really enjoy the narrator. But this is because to me he is the voice of Mark Twain. Had this been a 2015 poll I would have said "The Innocents Abroad". Twain and some buddies travel to the Holy Land and troll everyone along the way, a glorious adventure.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 29 2016, @05:45AM
My favorite of the books I read this past year is Gone the Next by Ben Rehder. Which reminds me, I should write a review.
It is a mystery about a kidnapped girl. It is set in Texas. The main character is a videographer who works for insurance companies when they suspect fishy claims. He is not perfect, but he is likable enough.
The e-book is free on Nook and Kindle. There is also a paperback.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday December 29 2016, @10:03PM
I brought a dozen back from the Hugo convention in August, bought another half dozen or more this year, and a couple of library books. Right now I'm almost finished with Stephen King's time travel story 11/22/63. It will probably be the best one I've read this year unless I hate the ending.
Oh, and I published one and am almost ready to publish another, it's in the final edit stage.
I pity people who hate to read.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by gawdonblue on Monday January 02 2017, @02:03AM
It will probably be the best one I've read this year unless I hate the ending.
It's by Stephen King, so... What is actually the best book you read in 2016?
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Friday December 30 2016, @09:06PM
I hardly get round to reading dead-tree books nowadays. But the e-reader and/or the phone manage to help me get my reading fix anyway. It's especially convenient if you like to get into series - book one finished, clickertyclick, next one started! Unless you're reading next to your bookshelf, that's faster.
Thanks to e-reading, I finished five books in the days around Christmas. Would never have happened with regular books - wandering off from family and sitting in a corner with a book is not quite social, but if people start whipping out their phones and playing on them, I don't mind whipping out my phone and reading on it.
(Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 31 2016, @12:43AM
(Score: 1) by charon on Saturday December 31 2016, @12:49AM
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:34AM
It's just a 'book of dumb laws', but they've been researched and are ACTUALLY dumb, not overly specific internet interpretations of a non-dumb law.
I got a lot of giggles out of it, and I needed those giggles this year.
(Score: 2) by mendax on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:00AM
I'm trying to read Les Miserables, but Victor Hugo's digressions make the book inordinately long. Still, it's a great book, at least so far.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @01:12PM
I read that in 2016 too. One of the best of the reading year for me.
(Score: 1) by shanen on Saturday December 31 2016, @08:03AM
Best was probably The Shallows , though it's a couple of years old. A couple of math books by Alex Bellos were extremely good, as were a couple of psychology books by Dan Ariely. Future Crimes and Data and Goliath were recent computer books that I especially enjoyed. Ready Player One was probably the best SF I read this year. Our Final Invention was sort of on the line between computer science and SF. I read a lot of history, but can't find a really good one. Perhaps Putin's Kleptocracy or one of the business histories of Facebook or Amazon? Best Japanese book may have been one about the secrets of hearing aids...
#1 Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice{5} ≠ (Beer^4 | Speech) and your negative mods prove you are a narrow prick.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:51PM
This past month I've been winning against alcohol addiction. Cannabis seems to have turned the tides in the most subtle way possible.
An IRC friend finally got me to pick up Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erickson again. I finished that one, and I'm about half way through Deadhouse Gates. Gardens is a bit slow, but Deadhouse really starts to add some action. The depth of the world Erickson created is breathtaking especially in its originality. My IRC friend assures me that the series just gets better from here on out.
Hopefully I can have some wine with everybody else tonight without causing a problem. It's good to be back to reading again.
(Score: 1) by dierdorf on Tuesday January 03 2017, @07:46AM
I have averaged a book a day for sixty years. That's not 22,000 different books, of course. Some of my favorites I read almost every year, so I might have read them least fifty times. I'm now old enough that pretty soon I'll be able to save a lot of money by buying only one truly enjoyable ebook and reading it every day the rest of my life, figuring that I'll probably have forgotten most of it by the next morning. (My mother had memory issues the last year of her life, and she also joked about it -- gave me permission to tell her the same stories about her grandchildren every time I visited. I retaliated by saying I was going to teach her a new game -- Easter Egg Hunt Solitaire.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 04 2017, @03:49PM
Do you not work?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14 2017, @08:31PM
He's a book editor.
(Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday January 03 2017, @06:16PM
I always wondered how many people had books spoiled for them by high school literature class.
Before I went to high school, I was a voracious reader. I would read anything and everything. I had read most of Tolkein's works, plenty of Asimov and Clark as well as hundreds of other books I can no longer remember. Then, four years of high school literature classes turned reading into a chore. Dozens of books to read while analyzing and dissecting each chapter. Spending weeks reading and discussing The Catcher in the Rye, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, The Great Santini and the "local color" of William Faulkner showed me just how awful reading can be. I think it was the 15 pages analyzing the thematic elements of The Scarlet Letter, their relationship to the earlier sermons of John Winthrop and their sources within 17th and 18th century Puritan society that finally demolished any desire to read for pleasure.
To be fair to my teachers, the point of the exercise was to teach analytical reading concepts which it did accomplish. At the time, I always hoped we could read a book I was interested in like Asimov, Clark, Tolkien or similar writers. In retrospect, I am glad they did not because my affection for those writers would likely have been ground to nothing by having to write 20 pages on the symbolism of Rama's shape or the tragedy of man in I, Robot.
In all the years since high school, I have read maybe 7 or 8 books for pleasure, though one of them was an Alien vs Predator novel and another was a Star Wars novel so I am not sure that they count as books exactly. These days, I mostly read technical information and news. I'm not sure if I am missing out or not but I just lost the interest in picking up a book.
I wonder if anybody else had a similar experience.
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday January 05 2017, @03:34AM
As a librarian, I have to say, "If you're readin', you're readin'..."
...and, you might go back and re-read The Hobbit or some of the books you remember from early on--I recently rediscovered Red Planet, and Have Spacesuit, will Travel by Heinlein, and the Time Traders and Witch World by Norton, which I don't think I'd read since Elementary or Jr. High, and had a blast!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday January 04 2017, @04:06PM
Damn, that's a difficult one. I read 200+ books a year, so it's not easy even remembering what all I've read. And there wasn't a new Dresden Files book out last year, so I can't just default to that like I normally would. Hmm...
I guess I'll go with my annual reread of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress since I can't think of anything I read last year that was better.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 09 2017, @07:03PM
Bulletproof SSL and TLS by Ivan Ristic
Understanding and Deploying SSL/TLS and PKI to Secure Servers and Web Applications.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by nethead on Wednesday January 11 2017, @01:46AM
Binged out on Diskworld
How did my SN UID end up over 3 times my /. UID?
(Score: 2) by darnkitten on Thursday January 12 2017, @12:29AM
I run a small rural library, so most of my reading for the past couple of reading is for the benefit of my patrons, so I have an idea what I can recommend to them, and I haven't done much reading for myself.
That said, some standouts from the year past:
Steam Pig, , etc., by James McClure - South African police procedural series set in and written during Apartheid. Strangely addicting;
With the Light, by Tobe Keiko - a manga series about raising an autistic boy, sadly interrupted during Junior High, by the death of the artist;
The Day of the Owl, by Leonardo Sciascia, a novel about a mafia killing, written during a time when it was officially denied that the mafia even existed;
The Curse of Capistrano, by Johnston McCulley - the original Zorro novel; and
(not a book) Bron/Broen (The Bridge), the Danish/Swedish thriller series, and its remakes, The Bridge (US) and The Tunnel (UK/France).