My Year in Books 2007

Your Humble Blogger read 108 books in 2007. That’s a pretty fair number, up from a low of 2006 and down from the highs of 2005 and 2004. I suspect that the number of unblogged but read books was up, but of course I don’t actually have any way of knowing that, not really. Of the 108, I read 58 for the first time, and I reread 50. Actually, I’m counting The Android’s Dream twice, because I read it in March and then again in December. Ah, well. Anyway, 57 is the low for the last four years.

I read a lot of Young Adult speculative fiction. 25 of the 58 new books were YA/SF, and another four were YA but not SF. There were 16 SF novels (well, 14 and a book of short stories), four books of plays, three “non-genre&#8221 novels, three books of non-fiction, two historical novels, one western and The Iliad. There could be some quibbling over the categorization, but let’s move on to the list of Ten or Eleven Books Your Humble Blogger Enjoyed Reading in 2007.

• The thing with collections of short stories is that while some of The Chewing-Gum Rescue deserves to make or even top the list, some of the stories don’t. Still.


• Decca was wonderful, fascinating and frustrating. Enlightening. Irritating. Informative. Inspiring.


• We read Igraine the Brave aloud, a chapter or so at a time, to our Perfect Non-Reader, which may be the best way to go about reading that book, but I’d have to think it would be terrific anyway.


• I don’t really remember liking The Iowa Baseball Confederacy as much as evidently I did. But I sure did.


• I am also less excited about Magic or Madness than I was at the time, but that is the fault of the sequel, or rather of having read two of the three in the trilogy in very short succession and then not reading the third one. I want to put this one on the list just so I remember I liked it.


• On the other hand, Mortal Engines is a book that I like more in retrospect than I did when actually reading it. That’s not a bad thing, is it?


• Princess Academy was a step above the other Shannon Hale YA books, which themselves are quite good.


• It’s tempting to say that The Shootist was the best Western I read this year, because, ha ha, I only read the one. But it was a very good book, so ha ha that.


• Un Lun Dun is probably my favorite book of the year. I don’t know. It’s between that and Decca. I should send a note to the author; I think he’d be amused to know that it was between him and the Red Mitford.


• I saw World War Z in paperback recently, and didn’t consider buying it, but now I’m thinking that I want to own it. I should go back. It was good, and I don’t think my Best Reader had a chance to read it.


• The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was not only very good, but sustained its very goodness much better than I expected it to.

But the really odd thing is that after reading 9 in 2004, 11 in 2005 and 5 in 2006, I read no new mystery novels in 2007. Have I stopped reading mysteries? Not really; I re-read a bunch (all right, nine by a quick count) of them, mostly Dick Francis books. And if I had seen the new Dick Francis at the library, I would have picked it up. I will undoubtedly pick up the new Sara Paretsky (although it appears to have a Red Heifer) and the new Laurie R. King (although … um, although nothing, I’m looking forward to it). But those three are the only mystery novelists that I will particularly look for on the New Books shelf, and I haven’t (for whatever reason) picked up any old Erle Stanley Gardner this year. And I haven’t picked up a new (to YHB) mystery writer, either. And I’ve found lately that I’d rather take a chance on a specfic novel I know nothing about at all than a mystery.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.