10 Best Books: Non-Fiction

After hitting 10 years of book reviewing, I've been listing my 10 worst fiction books, my ten worst non-fiction books, and my ten best fiction books.  Here's the final list: 10 best non-fiction books from the past 10 years.

1. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (original review here)

A first hand authentic narrative of the Spanish Civil War would have been invaluable just in and of itself.  But the literary skill that George Orwell brings in re-telling his account make this book not just informative, but a pleasure to read.  Right from the opening page, you know you're in the hands of an author who can suck you in completely with his prose.


2. The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham (original review here)

Who would have ever thought that you could make an engaging narrative history about the Scramble for Africa?  It covers 30 years, involves a cast of thousands, and two whole continents, several wars, and changing allegiances.
And yet, Thomas Pakenham pulls it off brilliantly.  I was sucked into all his stories: the search for Doctor Livingstone, Gordon defending Khartoum, the mysterious Emin Pasha (long rumored to be holding out somewhere in the Sudan with one of Gordon's lost regiments), Cecil Rhodes and his mad ambitions, Catholic missionaries facing off against brutal tribal chiefs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
The best narrative history book I've ever read.

3. The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (original review here)

I don't agree with absolutely everything Paine says.  (And in my original review, I wrote at length on exactly where I disagreed with Paine.)
But there are large sections of this book which just make such clear sense to me--the section on the nature of revelation, and hearsay, and why it's ridiculous that God would choose to reveal himself only to a few people and then rest of history would just be stuck with this book recording those supposed revelations--those sections were just such clear common sense.  You feel like you've finally woken up to the absurdity of religious claims after reading this book.

4. Revolutions of 1848 by Priscilla Robertson (original review here)

Like The Scramble for Africa, this is another subject that you wouldn't think would lend itself to a narrative history.  Over 50 revolutions in several different countries--each separate revolution with it's own cast of characters, it's own version of moderate reformers, radicals, and conservatives.  And yet Priscilla Robertson pulls it off.  She tells great stories in which you feel the romanticism and the idealism of the early days, and also bitterly feel the disappointment and disillusionment of the end.

5. Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross (original review here)

This book has 3 things to recommend it.
1. Every one should read it so that every one knows exactly what war crimes Nixon and Kissinger committed.  (It is an obscenity to justice that Kissinger is still walking about as a free man enjoying his retirement as a respected statesman instead of in jail for war crimes).
2. Every one should read this book so they know how the government works.  (The secret bombing of Cambodia, and the government surveillance of US citizens has all too many parallels to the drone strikes and NSA surveillance of today.)
3. Every one should read this book just because it is so well-written.  Shawcross is a journalist, and he knows how to make his history flow like a story.  It's a fascinating read.

6. Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman (original review here)

When I went to college at a conservative Christian school, I discovered a strange thing there--the professors in the religion department knew all sorts of things about the Bible that were completely different than what I had been told every week in Sunday School for the first 18 years of my life.
That huge disconnect--the disconnect between what scholars actually know about the Bible, and what is taught every week in Sunday School--is what inspired Bart Ehrman to try and write a book to bring modern biblical scholarship to a mass audience.  He also examines the problem of why all this stuff never makes it into Sunday School, even though the pastors all learn about it in seminary.  A fascinating read.

7. At War With Asia by Noam Chomsky (original review here)

“The Pentagon will gladly supply, on request, such information as the quantity of ordnance expended in Indochina. From 1965 through 1969 this amounts to about 4.5 million tons by aerial bombardment. This is nine times the tonnage of bombing in the entire Pacific theater in World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki—“over 70 tons of bombs for every square mile of Vietnam, North and South…about 500 pounds of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam.” The total of “ordnance expended” is more than doubled when ground and naval attacks are taken into account. With no further information than this, a person who has not lost his senses must realize that the war is an overwhelming atrocity.” (p. 225)

Oh wow, just....wow...

8. The Fall of Paris by Alistair Horne (original review here)

Every time I mention this book, I have to distance myself from the politics of the author.  (He's a conservative historian writing about the most influential event in leftist mythology).
But oh, what great story-telling abilities Alistair Horne has.  Whether you're a conservative or a liberal, you can't help but get sucked into this story.  The whole drama of the Franco-Prussian War, and then the whole drama of the Paris Commune.

9. The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker (original review here)

When judging favorite books, sometimes a book is valuable not only for the reading experience itself, but what you take away from it afterwards.
This book is like that.  I struggled through parts of it, but I've found the knowledge I gained from it invaluable.  It's like a quick little crash course in the past 50 years of modern linguistics.  (Admittedly not everyone agrees with Pinker, but reading this book will still give you a sense of where the debate begins.)

10. George Orwell: Essays (original review here)

Agree with him or disagree with him, Orwell is always a pleasure to read.  There were several essays in this collection in which I disagreed with Orwell (or didn't have a dog in the fight either way--his criticisms of boy's weekly magazines in England in the 1940s, for example) but I still enjoyed following his arguing style.
That, plus Politics and the English Language, The Sporting Spirit, and Notes on Nationalism should all be required reading for everyone.

Honorable mentions
A couple years ago, I posted a list of all my favorite narrative history books.  Which arguably makes this list somewhat redundant.
This list is slightly different--it attempts to rank the books, and it's not limited simply to narrative histories, but also includes essays, political polemics, books on religion, and books on linguistics.
But, okay, it's largely the same list.
Anyway, not all the books from my favorite narrative history book list made it on my top ten, but they all get honorable mentions:

Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport (original review here)

For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions by James R. Gaines (original review here)

Karl Marx: A Life by Francis Wheen (original review here)

The Great Upheaval by Jay Winik (original review here)

The Judgment of Paris by Ross King (original review here)

Three Empires on the Nile by Dominic Green (original review here)

Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (original review here)

The Insurrectionist by Jules Valles (original review here)

Monarchy by David Starkey (original review here)

The World that Never Was by Alex Butterworth (original review here)

Rubicon by Tom Holland (original review here)

A World on Fire by Amanda Foreman (original review here)

Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman (original review here)

Moving away from history books to political polemics, I also really loved The Truth With Jokes by Al Franken (original review here).  As with all political polemics, however, it hasn't kept it's topicality well--everything in it is now 10 years  out of date.  But it was a great book for it's time.

Also, I've already mentioned one Bart Ehrman book in the list above, but if you have time for two Bart Ehrman books, than Misquoting Jesus is also pretty good (original review here).

I have a love-hate relationship with The Age of Revolution by Eric Hobsbawm (original review here).  I really hate the academic style it's written in, but I have to admit I learned a ton of interesting stuff from it.  

Alright, and that finishes off all my best-of and worst-of lists.  From tomorrow, this blog will return to its regularly scheduled programming.

Link of the Day

Noam Chomsky with David Barsimian, Conversation, 18 March 2015

10 Best Books: Fiction

So, after hitting ten years of book reviewing on this blog, I posted a list of the ten worst fiction books I'd read, followed by the ten worst non-fiction books I'd read.  Now, here comes my list of the ten best fiction books over the past ten years--starting with the best first, and working outwards from there.

1. The Masters of Rome Series by Colleen McCullough (review of Caesar here, review of The October Horse here).

Okay, first off, I acknowledge I'm cheating slightly on this one.  It's a whole series of books instead of one book.  But since it all tells one continuous story, to my mind it's all one big long book.
Secondly, of the 7 books in the series, I only reviewed two of them on this blog.  (The first 4 books I read back in my youth in the 90s, long before I started this blog).
Thirdly, there's no denying these books have their faults.  McCullough has been criticized for writing Roman history as if it were a soap opera.  (The sex lives of Roman aristocrats get more attention than the intense class-warfare which characterized the last 100 years of the Republic).
Related to the above point, McCulllough misses of the most interesting parts of the period.  Some key events happen in the years between books (and just get summarized briefly in the author's introduction) and even within the text, McCullough drops the ball and gives short-shrift to some key events (for example the Catiline conspiracy or the gang warfare between Milo and Clodius).
Also I've never really been a big fan of McCullough's dialogue, and when it comes to prose style, and she's not my favorite narrator in the world.
The early books have an obvious bias in favor of the Populare faction (W) in Roman politics.  As the books progress into the age of Julius Caesar, the author develops an almost embarrassing infatuation with Caesar.
But of course these books are going to have their flaws.  They're some 7,000 pages long covering an epic sweep of 80 years of history.  Of course they're going to have all sorts of flaws.  Of course it's going to be super easy for someone like me to sit back and nit pick, and say "Hmmm, well, she didn't get this part exactly right."
But what an epic ambition these books have.  And, despite all her flaws, McCullough tells the story skillfully.  (Bad dialogue aside, she writes characters you really remember.)  Most of my historical knowledge of the Roman republic comes from these books.

2. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (original review here)

Satire usually loses its relevance as it ages, so you wouldn't expect a book this old to still be funny.  But it's hilarious.  Laugh out loud funny in parts.

3. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells (original review here)

So delightfully creepy, and the central mystery of the story is teased out so expertly.

4. An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (original review here)

Historical Fiction at its finest.  All the twists and turns of the Dreyfus Affair expertly laid out in the form of a novel.

5. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (original review here)

A co-worker of mine is currently struggling through this book, and talks to me occasionally about his frustrations--the plot isn't going anywhere, it's all people sitting around and talking in ballrooms, and for a book entitled War and Peace, there's very little battle scenes.
I counsel him as best I can--just accept that the plot isn't going to go anywhere anytime soon, and that the whole point of the book is to just hang out with the characters and get to know all about them, and all about their lives in every detail.
If you can do that, it's a wonderful book.  (How often do you get to just "hang out" with the characters, with no expectations of a plot getting in the way?)  If you can't do that...well, maybe this book isn't for everyone I guess.
The characters are some of the most well developed characters in all of literature--they feel like real people, they rationalize their actions to themselves like real people.  (Even when a character does something foolish or bad, you understand exactly why they are doing it.)
And then, when the Napoleonic Wars finally do come crashing into this novel, you experience so much more keenly all the disruption it caused because you're so invested in the lives of all of these characters.

6. The Once and Future King by T.H. White (original review here)

I had a number of problems with this book (all of which I detailed in my review), but on the whole a fascinating story that T.H. White is able to bring to life for modern audiences.  I might never get around to reading the original Le Morte D'Arthur, but I at least know the story now thanks to this book.

7.  Burmese Days by George Orwell (original review here)

This isn't Orwell's best fiction, but this list is strictly limited to recounting only the books I've reviewed in the last ten years.  (1984 and Animal Farm I read before starting this book review project.)
Like War and Peace, this is another novel in which the plot  moves very slowly, but the main purpose is to hang out with the characters.  And I think Orwell created some great characters.  Maybe I'm just biased because I identified so strongly with the main character.
Also, a great literary picture of the nature of colonialism, that in some ways makes this book more valuable than any history textbook.

8.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (original review here)

Considered the greatest American novel for a reason.

9. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (original review here)

I'm not generally a huge Hemingway fan, but I loved this book.  Hemingway expertly milks all the tension, isolation and claustrophobia of a group of guerrilla fighters all alone up in the mountains who all start out on the same mission, but end up increasingly spending all of their energy arguing more and more with each other

10. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (original review here)

As I mentioned in my original review, the anything-for-a-gag format of the book can be a bit exhausting at times.  And sure, about half the jokes are real groaners.  But so many jokes fly at you so fast that you just can't help but smile at some of them.
The real strength of the book, though, is how it draws you more and more into its bizarre logic, until by the end of the book, you're not quite sure what is rational and what is absurd anymore.  Is Yossarian insane, or is it the world?

Honorable Mentions

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (review here)
Admittedly, I lost my patience with this series as it went on and got more - and - more - tedious - with each sequel.  But the first book in the series is absolutely perfect--tightly plotted, quickly executed, and non-stop action and adventure from beginning to end.  The historical details are also interesting for us history nerds.  Just try to ignore all the repulsive pro-monarchist politics of the book, and you should be alright.

Funeral Games by Mary Renault (review here)
A really epic Game of Thrones style story about several different characters struggling for power.  Mary Renault allows you to follow the rise and fall of several interesting characters in this book.  If this had been a stand alone novel, it probably would have made my top ten.  But in order to fully appreciate all of these characters, you need to read the first two books in the trilogy first.  And I was underwhelmed by the first two - books.

Babbitt (review here) and It Can't Happen Here (review here) by Sinclair Lewis
Sinclair Lewis was ahead of his time as a humor writer.  (His bizarre take on the oddities of suburban life would be right at home in episodes of The Simpons or Family Guy).
I like It Can't Happen Here generally as an entertaining book, but as political satire I think it misses its mark slightly.  (The over-night conversion to fascism shown in this book is unrealistic in American society.)  And for that reason, Sinclair Lewis doesn't quite make my top ten.  But still an entertaining author.

The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler (review here)
I'm not sure why I never went back and read more Raymond Chandler.  (I guess I have nobody but myself to blame for missing out on more great books.)  But if you want to see an author take the pulpy exploitative genre of the hard-drinking private-detective story, and turn it into an art form, read this book.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (review here)
Perhaps judged simply as a story, this isn't the best book in the world.  But as a creator of a sort of modern mythology, Robert Louis Stevenson is brilliant.  He fully creates this whole world of pirate lore and pirate mythology.

The Golden Compass Trilogy by Philip Pullman (reviews here, here and here)
I started these books fairly cynical--typical YA fiction, I thought, typical child-hero protagonist.  Typical fantasy world.
But then the second book introduces the concept of multiple universes, and all of a sudden the possibilities and imagination in these books kicks into overdrive, and I was hooked.

The Flashman Series by George MacDonald Fraser (list of reviews here)
I hesitate to recommend these books for all of the reasons listed in my reviews.  (They can be misogynistic, imperialist, racist, and they have a lot of dark humor).  But, I  have to admit they are entertaining.  They certainly kept me coming back for more and more.
The obscure historical notes make these books a delight for any history nerd.  Anyone who's not a history nerd can give them a pass.

The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
A friend of mine recently discovered these books, and read through all of them from beginning to end.
"Didn't it get boring reading so many books from the same series at once?" I asked him.
"Not at all," he said.  "I loved the way Pratchett just kept spinning this world out further and further with each book."
I've been somewhat intrigued by this, and someday have ambitions to read the whole series like he did.
At the moment, however, I've only read a handful of the Discworld books.  Nevertheless, I can recommend all the books that I did read.   Guards! Guards! , Soul Music , The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, The Truth , The Color of Magic , Thief of Time , Night Watch , Interesting Times , Monstrous Regiment , and Going Postal.

Other Notes, Disclaimers, and Addendums

* Just to be clear, this is not a list of my top 10 favorite books of all time, but rather just the top ten since I started regularly reviewing books on my blog in 2006.  I was already 27 by that point, and past my most formative years. All of the books which really made a big impression on me were books I read before the age of 25.

* Nor is this a list of my best book reviews.
In fact, since I have a rather limited vocabulary, I tend to resort to the same few adjectives every time I like a book (fascinating, interesting, brilliant).  And so the books I like the best are also usually the ones I describe with the least skill.  (I think I'm better at articulating why I don't like a book than I am at putting my finger on exactly why I like particular book.  So I tend to be happier with my negative reviews than with my positive reviews.)

* I've mentioned before the flaws inherent in a list like this, but perhaps it bears repeating.  First of all this is just my own subjective tastes--which is why so many books about history and historical fiction tend to rank so high.
Secondly, even within my own subjective tastes it's flawed in the sense that I have difficulty quantifying my feelings, and that my feelings change from day to day.  Ask me how I feel tomorrow, and you may well find a completely different list.
And then over the passage of ten years, the memory fades somewhat as well.  There are a few books that I think I enjoyed reading well enough at the time, but just don't remember enough to put on this list.
Consider this as just kind of a fun attempt to sort out my favorite fiction books from the past ten years, rather than a definitive list.

* I'll admit, this list is double-dipping a bit, because I have already done two favorite lists of fiction in the past: my list of all the classic books which are fun to read, and my list of my favorite historical fiction.  (I cheated in my list of historical fiction, because I decided that I liked them all.)  If you read those lists, you'll find a lot of the same books repeated here.

Tomorrow, the top ten non-fiction books.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky - "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding"

10 Worst Books: Non-Fiction

In the previous post, I tackled the 10 worst fiction books I'd read in my ten years of book reviewing, followed by a long-long list of dishonorable mentions.  As it turns out, I actually disliked a lot of the fiction I'd read.
But fiction is a difficult form to pull off.  The reader expects to be magically transported into a completely new world inside the book, and this is very hard to do.  Or to put it another way, it's very easy to know when I'm not being entertained.
Non-fiction I'm much more forgiving of.  Even if the book is boring, even if it's not particularly well-written, if I learn a few things at the end of it, I count the book as time well-spent. And perhaps for that reason, I'm struggling to even get 10 books for this list.
The first 5 books on this list are truly awful, and deserve their place here.
But by the time we get into 6,7,8,9 and especially 10, then we're getting into books that I mostly enjoyed, but just had a few quibbles with.  (Because this book review project is mostly pleasure reading, I don't tend to finish that many books that I hate.)
As with before, I'm counting up, starting with the absolute worst books first, and then moving out into the "not quite as bad" territory.

1. The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel (original review here)

Part of the problem with religion is the amount of hucksters and snake-oil salesman that the field attracts.  It makes it incredibly hard to have an honest discussion of the issue.
The book is blatantly dishonest.  Given Lee Strobel's legal background, he must know what he's writing is blatantly dishonest.  And yet, like every true con-artist, he knows that there's another sucker born every minute, and that's all he cares about.
I could get really angry when I think about this, but what's the point?  The history of the world is filled with such con-men.  They're just a fact of life.

2. Globish: How English Became the World’s Language by Robert McCrum (original review here)

First of all, the title is absolutely misleading.  It is decidedly not about the phenomenon of Global English.  It should just be called: "random thoughts on the English language by some guy who couldn't be bothered to organize his thoughts into a coherent argument."

But then the many, many factual errors!  An embarrassment for any major publishing house to publish a book with as many factual errors as this!  The proofreader should be fired!

3. Introducing Chomsky by John Maher and Judy Groves (original review here)

Was this book proofread at all before it was published?  Perhaps not.  But if it was, I strongly suspect the following conversation took place:

"So, this book is supposed to introduce Chomsky's theories to the average person who doesn't have a background in linguistics, right?"

"Yep, that's why people will buy it."

"But it's completely incomprehensible.  Nothing is explained, the book just throws around linguistic concepts which are never clearly explained or defined for 120 pages.  Nobody in our target audience is going to understand a word of this."

"Don't worry.  When they see the book in the bookstore, they'll just see all the pictures and illustrations.  By the time they figure that out that the whole thing is gibberish, they'll already have bought the book, and we'll be laughing all the way to the bank."

...Well, they got my money out of me.  So well-done guys, I guess.

4.  A History of Malaysia by Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya [Second Edition]  (original review here)

Ugh.  Just boring, boring, boring.
To quote from my 2012 review of this book:
 I wish I could say it was fun to read but unfortunately the thing reads like, well…. a textbook. It’s filled with dry prose that seems almost designed to put you to sleep. The authors seem more concerned about avoiding controversy than advancing any interesting arguments. It contains very few interesting stories, but is packed with statistics, figures, and analysis. The reader is overwhelmed with strange names, most of which appear briefly on the page, and then never re-appear again. Or worse yet, sometimes a name does reappear again several pages later, leaving the reader to try to remember which of the many characters this was. (The authors usually assume the readers have just memorized all these strange names they have been throwing at them, and offer the reader no help in remembering when one of the many names randomly reappears several pages later.)

5. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie (original review here)

So, all due respect to Donald Richie (one of the foremost experts on Japanese film) but just listing directors and films does not make an interesting book.  Maybe it would be tolerable as a reference book, but I would not recommend anyone try to actually read this thing like I did.

6. A People's History of the World by Chris Harman (original review here)

At this point in the list, we're beginning to move away from books that I absolutely hated and into the books I have mixed feelings about.  I can't bring myself to completely hate this book.  There were one or two things it did well (I mention the positives at the end of my review).  And, I'm thankful to this book for introducing me to the Leveller movement.  (I probably would never have read this book or this book if Chris Harman hadn't introduce me to the Levellers first.)
But all of that doesn't excuse the many problems of this book:
Incredibly boring.
Written by a doctrinaire Trotskyist who was very dismissive of any other brand of leftism that didn't fit into his narrow ideological outlook.
And worst of all it's a history of the world written by someone who clearly wasn't interested in anything that happened before the modern period, and had a very limited understanding of anything that happened outside of Europe.

7. The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns (original review here)

Another book that I didn't completely hate.  It has the beginnings of an honest conversation.
In order to have an honest conversation about Christianity, we need to start out by acknowledging all the problematic areas of the Bible, and then work from there.  (In contrast to the blatantly dishonest Lee Strobel, who spends all his time trying to convince his readers that there are no problematic areas of the Bible.)
So I give Peter Enns credit for at least understanding the problem.
But his solutions are just gibberish and nonsensical.

8. Forged by Bart Ehrman (original review here)

I like Bart Ehrman a lot, so it pains me a bit to put one of his books on this list.  But this book had some problems.
In order to maintain good faith between the publishers and their reading public, a book's title should reflect what the book intends to cover.  If you violate this rule, you lose the good faith of your reader.  In this case, the book's subtitle, "Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are", does not accurately reflect the book's content, which is largely just a survey of apocryphal literature.
The parts of the book that do pertain to the canonical Bible are interesting, but most of the key information is just repeated from Bart Ehrman's earlier book Jesus, Interrupted.  Read Jesus, Interrupted instead, and give this book a pass.

9. Culture Smart! Cambodia by Graham Saunders (original review here)

Boring.
As I said in my original review: The author is trying to convey a lot of information to you in a short amount of space, but you get the feeling he's not really enjoying what he's doing, and that this is just another chore for him.
And it's written by someone who, according to the publisher's own biography, never even lived in Cambodia, but just stopped by there from time to time.

10. Cambodia's Curse by Joel Brinkley (original review here)

Okay, I'll be honest, I largely enjoyed this book.  (Sorry, I guess I just didn't have enough books I really hated to fill out this list of ten).  But it did have some problems that really irked me.  At times,the author allowed his devotion to his thesis to cause him to lose perspective on what were actually complex issues.

And then, this part, which still makes my jaw drop one year later.  "His sense of humor was rare among Cambodians. In fact, it was quite rare to see Cambodians laugh at all. Given their desperate situation, they seldom even smiled.” (p.189)  It would have been an outrageous generalization applied to any ethnic group, but it's particularly egregious when applied to Cambodians, who are actually famous for their laughing and smiling.

A Note on Readability As Criteria
When I taught academic writing in Cambodia, I would have the students peer-edit each other's papers before I corrected them myself.  My main criteria in peer-editing was readability-- Can you understand what the author is trying to say?
One of the problems I would have with this exercise is that students were reluctant to criticize their peers for problems of comprehensibility.  Instead, they would assume that if they couldn't understand a sentence, it was a problem with their poor English, and not with their classmate's writing.  As a result, I would got tons of largely incomprehensible papers handed in to me at the end of every term.
So, I started really trying to emphasize this in the peer-editing process.  "If you can't understand something, never assume it's your fault," I would tell the students.  "Maybe you're a poor reader.  But it doesn't matter.  It's never the reader's fault.  A good author should have the ability to write something that everyone can understand."

And this is more or less my philosophy on reading in general.  I have little patience for the overly formal academic style which seems to be trying to actively punish the reader for attempting to read it.  (Oh, how I hated all the academic articles I had to read in graduate school--but that's another rant for another post.)

Whenever I get to the end of a book that I struggled to understand, I never feel like it's my fault for not being smart enough--I feel like the author was at fault for not writing in a clearer, more engaging style.

All that being said, however, readability is only one criteria out of many.
There are some authors whose writing style I really hated, but they didn't make it onto this list because I found their content interesting enough.  There are many examples of this, but the most obvious one is Eric Hobsbawm.  I really struggled  to read him.  And yet, the ideas contained in his book were fascinating.

Conversely, Lee Strobel, Robert McCrum, Peter Enns, Bart Ehrman and Joel Brinkley are all very talented writers, and all write very readable prose.  But because I reacted badly to their content, they get placed on this list.

Anyway, this is the end of all my negativity.  Tomorrow we'll start getting into the "best of" lists, starting with my top ten fiction books.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky on Free Will

10 Worst Books: Fiction

As I noted in yesterday's post, I just past ten years of book reviewing on this blog.  So I thought I'd try to pick out what were the ten worst fiction books I've read during that time.
Lists of these kinds are a fun little exercise, even if they're doomed to failure.  It's easy for me to say that some books I liked, and some books I disliked.  But it's much more difficult to try and assign quantitative values to feelings.  All the more so since feelings are inherently unstable.  (Catch me at this time tomorrow, and I'll probably have changed my mind about all of these rankings, and come up with a new list.)
Nevertheless, I've done my best to rank these in the order I disliked them.  Number 1 is the absolute worst, and then it gets progressively less bad (but still pretty bad) from there.  (I'm following Vince Mancini's strategy of counting up, rather than counting down.  I start out with the books I'm absolutely sure about, and then move out into the more ambiguous territory from there.)

1. The Regime By Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (original review here)

I know, I know--it's my own fault for reading this book, so I can't really complain about it.
That is what you were thinking, right?
Okay, point taken.  I should have been smart enough to avoid picking up this book in the first place.  But that doesn't change the fact that this is, by far and away, the worst book I've read over the past 10 years.  So I'm obliged to put it on this list even if picking out the faults in this book is all too easy.

Despite the fact that certain areas of the church have been doing a lot of modernizing in the past 50 years or so, books like this are a reminder that the old-timey fundamentalist religious thinking is still alive and well.
According to that old-fashioned view of religion, the primary problem in the world today is not war or poverty or ecological disaster. No, the biggest problem is that not everyone professes the correct confessional creed, and that not everyone is attending church regularly.
If that's what some people are primarily concerned about, fine, but you can't ask me to get involved in a novel in which the only dramatic stakes are whether or not certain characters are attending church on a frequent enough basis.
That, plus this book labours under all the limitations of a prequel--nothing exciting is allowed to happen, because the entire purpose of the book is to just get all the characters set up in the right positions before the series proper takes place.
I know, I know.  It's my fault for reading the blasted thing.  What was I thinking picking up a Left Behind Prequel!!!!  But if it's my fault for reading it, it's also their fault for writing it.  What were Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins thinking when they wrote a prequel series to Left Behind? (Oh yeah.  They were thinking of what an easy paycheck this whole thing would be.  Duh!)

2. Shanghai Baby by Zhou Wei Hui (original review here)

A book which is the semi-fictionalized story of the author.  Also known as: "Narcissism: The Book".  If you enjoy reading 300 pages of someone bragging about how attractive, stylish, and intelligent they are, then have at it.
Again, what can I say? It is my own fault for reading it.  I got hooked in by the publisher's blurb claiming that this was the Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller of China's new generation.  But of course the publishers are going to say that.  It costs them absolutely nothing to make those claims, and there's a sucker born every minute who's going to be stupid enough to believe them.  And like a sucker, I handed over my money for this book.

3. Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson (original review here)

The whole plot revolves around our love interest, Catriona, throwing temper-tantrums, and our hero constantly having to win her back around again and again.  I would have gotten sick of the whole thing and just left her, and I wish the protagonist here would have done the same.

4. The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer (original review here)

Admittedly, books that fall into the category of "So Bad That They're Good" are kind of hard to classify.  On the one hand, you want to say, "I love this book.  It's so bad that's it's actually a parody of itself.  It's pure cheesy, pulpy enjoyment."
But on the other hand, you also want to say, "Yes, but the fact it's so bad it's good doesn't change the fact that it's bad."
Okay, I admit that I do have some fondness for the pure pulpiness of this story.  It also was a big influence on Ian Fleming, and a lot of today's other pulp hero classics.
But the vile racism that drips off of every page is hard to forgive.  What a sick, twisted, hateful little man Sax Rohmer must have been!
There should be a special place reserved in hell for people who write books aimed at children in which the primary purpose of these books is to get the children to start hating the right people at a young enough age.

5. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (original review here)

Another book whose purpose is to get children to start hating the right people from a young age.   But whereas The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu was at least kind of fun, this book is just so boring.  Nominally it's an adventure story, but it's an adventure story in which most of the adventuring happens off-screen, and is just recounted at ball-room parties.  The entire plot revolves around a mystery which is not all that interesting to begin with, and with which the modern reader already knows the answer to anyway.
(From a story-telling perspective, this book is worse than Sax Rohmer.  But because it lacks the racial hatred of Sax Rohmer, I'm placing it after Fu-Manchu).

6. The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks (original review here)

In any just world, a barf bag would accompany the sale of this book. It's so sickly sweet you just want to throw up.  It's like a hallmark greeting card got extended to novel length.
(Lots of people actually liked this book and the movie, though, and some wrote into the comments to tell me so.  So chalk this one up to subjective tastes, I suppose.)

7. The Magicians by Lev Grossman (original review here)

A lot of people really liked this book, so I guess this is another case where subjective taste maybe comes into play.  But I thought it was pretty unimaginative and under-whelming, and didn't entirely make sense--for all the reasons that I detailed at considerable length in my original review.

8. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (original review here)

This isn't a novel.  It's a morality play that goes on for 800 pages.  Nobody who writes characters this badly has any business writing novels this long.
That, plus the author was a complete hypocrite.  She spent her entire life writing books like this which railed against the weak people who rely on handouts from society, but then eventually ended up claiming social security and medicare when she eventually got old and sick.

9. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein (original review here)

It starts off strong, with an exciting action sequence that shows what a good science fiction writer Robert Heinlein can be when he wants to be.  But then unfortunately it just degenerates into several right-wing political rants and the story part of this book just gets completely dropped.

10. Ilium and Olympos by Dan Simmons (original reviews here and here)



I'm putting these together as one entry because they're essentially the same book spread out over two volumes.
I enjoyed these books well enough as I was reading them, but that was partly because I was willing to put up with the more ridiculous aspects of the story as long as I had faith that Dan Simmons knew what he was doing, and that it was all leading to a satisfying conclusion.
Only to finally get to the ending, and discover that Dan Simmons didn't have a clue what he was doing all along.  (Had this been a shorter story, I would have forgiven a lot more.  But it was really disappointing to wade through both of these huge books, and only then realize Dan Simmons didn't know how to tie all his plot threads together.)
That, plus all the mistakes he made with classical mythology, which neither he nor his proofreaders could be bothered to pick up on.

Dishonorable Mentions

Some of these books just barely escaped getting named in my top 10 worst.  (And perhaps, if you caught me in a different mood on a different day, they would be).  Others are books I didn't really hate, but that kind of left me feeling "Meh!"  In no particular order, here is my long list of all the dishonorable mentions.

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng (review here).  An author trying way too hard to show how literary he is.

The Stand by Stephen King (review here).  All that build-up for such a disappointing end.  What was the point of all that?

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (review here)  This was a hard book to get into, but I worked hard to get immersed in it because I thought maybe it was going somewhere interesting.  And then, what an anti-climatic ending!

The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay (review here).  A new author who's got a lot of potential, but this book isn't quite there yet.

U.S.! By Chris Bachelder (review here).  An ambitious satire which probably seemed quite funny when it was a new idea floating around in the author's head, but didn't end up being nearly as funny on the written page.

Rabbit Redux by John Updike (review here) Old Man John Updike writes a book complaining about how those young people won't get off his lawn.  And also how young teenage girls love to have sex with middle-aged men.

Magician by Raymond E. Feist (review here). I've got to admit this book has some impressive world building going on here.  But there are so many plotlines to keep track of, and then so little pay-off for any of them.  Plus such awful, awful dialogue.

Podkayne of Mars by Robert Heinlein (review here) So admittedly Heinlein can write well.  He has engaging prose, and he's good at world building.  But then what to make of that ending?  It's like Heinlein suddenly forgot what themes and main characters he had been following this whole time.

Peace Breaks Out by John Knowles (review here) John Knowles completely forgets what made his original book A Separate Peace so wonderful, and tries to compensate with over the top characters and drama.  All the wonderful subtlety of the original is gone here.

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (review here) I don't know.  Maybe I'm just a philistine.  But I thought the philosophizing in this book was all lazy and simplistic.

The Gunslinger by Stephen King (review here) Well this book didn't make any sense.  At all.  Presumably if you read all the sequels, it will start to make more sense, but...I can not be bothered with all that.  I don't mind sequels for following on the characters to further adventures.  But I hate reading a book, and finding out that it's not a complete story in and of itself.

The Butterfly in Amber by Kate Forsyth (review here) As with The Gunslinger, I'm also going to complain here about the story not being self-contained.  Especially since this book is so short, there's no reason why it should have been split into 6 separate volumes, other then that the publishers got greedy.  That, plus the afterward at the end betrays the author's royalist biases.  She claims that Charles II  was better than Cromwell and worked well with Parliament, and completely omits the part where Charles II dissolved Parliament and ruled without them at the end of his reign.

The Man and the Iron Mask by Alexander Dumas (review here) I loved the original Three Muskeeters, but by the last book in the series, I was beginning to lose my patience.  The plot should have been moving at a fast pace, and instead everything happened so slowly.

The Vampire Blood Trilogy by Darren Shan (review here)  As I wrote in my original review: What kills this book is the infantile style. Maybe it’s unfair to harp on a children’s book for stylistic concerns, but even when compared with other young adult books like “Harry Potter”, it really falls flat. The characters in “Vampire Blood Trilogy” talk like they’re in a book. Especially the children characters, all of whom have extremely flat dialogue. The principal characters often do stupid things apparently just for the point of creating conflict and advancing the plot.  
...But these books appear to be popular with their target audience of young adults (two of whom wrote into the comments to let me know how much they enjoy these books), so what do I know?

Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (review here) Some classic books are worth reading just so you can catch all the references people make to them--if you're the kind of person who cares about that.  And this is probably one of them.  I'm glad I read it just so I can catch all the references.  (This book is more well-known in Britain than in America, and I've discovered British people use this book title as a short-hand way to just reference all the old-style public school traditions.)  But as far as the story and literary quality go, I'm in absolute agreement with P.G. Wodehouse's critique of this book.

The Dragon and the George by Gordon Dickson (review here) A fantasy comedy book, in which the comedy wasn't funny, and the fantasy wasn't interesting.

King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard (review here) I can't hate this book completely.  There was some charm to it.  But for the most part, the slow pace of the action bored me.  That, plus all the polemics against inter-racial marriage firmly push this book into my list of "dishonorable mentions".

1632 by Eric Flint (review here) Dramatic tension is usually created by having the heroes struggle against the odds.  But if you give the heroes overwhelming firepower superiority against the enemy, then where is the drama in the narrative?  There's nothing left but the schadenfreude of watching the enemy get blown away so easily. Which, admittedly, this book does deliver on.

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton (review here) Great for adolescents, but I do not recommend for adults.

Other Notes: Novels Based on Comic Book Superheroes

I mentioned in my previous post how embarrassed I am now to have read all those novels based on comic book superheroes:  (52: The Novel, Infinite Crisis: The Novel, Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Novel, DC Universe: Inheritance, Justice League of America: Superman--The Never-Ending Battle, Justice League of America: Exterminators, Kingdom Come: The Novel, Challengers of the Unknown.)  I suspect if I were to re-read any of these now, I would probably be constantly rolling my eyes.  And yet, I enjoyed them well enough at the time.  Even the ones I criticized for their literary shortcomings (like Inheritance), I still said I enjoyed.

So I guess it would be unfair to go back now and put them on my list of dishonorable mentions.  They all get a pass.

Historical Fiction

I have yet to come across a historical fiction book I didn't like.  Even when the prose is clunky, even when the characterization is bad, I still like the fun of learning history in the form of a novel.  That's why when I put together my list of favorite historical fiction books a couple years back, I just decided to include all of the historical fiction I've read.  They were all my favorites.

But that's not to say these books don't have their flaws:

I thought the hand of the narrator was too heavy in Imperium by Robert Harris  (review here).  He just described what all the characters were like, instead of letting the readers see these characteristics for themselves.    Granted I was much more generous to his follow-up book.

I enjoyed the history in To Kill a Tsar by Andrew Williams (review here) but I thought the characterizations were awful.

I was underwhelmed by the first two - books in Mary Renault's Alexander the Great Trilogy (even though I absolutely loved the third one.)

And I enjoyed learning the history from Valerio Massimo Manfredi's Alexander - the - Great Trilogy, but I thought his prose was just appalling bad.

Well, that's all for today.  Tomorrow I'll do the 10 worst books in Non-Fiction.

Link of the Day
Why Marijuana is Illegal and Tobacco is Legal?

10 Years of Book Reviewing

On October 14, 2013, I passed my ten years of blogging mark, and jotted down a few thoughts about the whole experience.

Today marks 10 years since I started regularly reviewing books on this blog.  (It's taken me a few years to figure out exactly what this blog is best suited for, so I didn't start regular book reviews until I was a few years into my blogging.)

So, I thought I'd write down a few notes on this project as well.  Starting, with a list of all the books I've reviewed:

1. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky January 26, 2006
2. All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque January 28, 2006
3. The Debacle by Emile Zola February 5, 2006
4. I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe February 7, 2006
5. Going Postal by Terry Pratchett February 12, 2006
6. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo February 18, 2006
7. The Truth With Jokes By Al Franken February 20, 2006
8. Monstrous Regiment by Terry Pratchett February 22, 2006
9. A Series of Unfortunate Events: Book 1 A very Bad Beginning By Lemony Snicket February 23, 2006
10. On Writing Short Stories by Tom Bailey February 26, 2006
11. Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett February 27, 2006
12. The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald March 9, 2006
13. The Iron Heel by Jack London March 16, 2006
14. Tristram Shandy (abridged) by Laurence Sterne March 24, 2006
15. In Search of British Heroes by Tony Robinson April 3, 2006
16. The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger by Stephen King April 8, 2006
17. Harry Potter And the Goblet of Fire By J.K. Rowlings April 10, 2006
18. The Notebook By Nicholas Sparks April 11, 2006
19. The Gods Will Have Blood by Anatole France April 12, 2006
20. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain April 13, 2006
21. Vampire Blood Trilogy by Darren Shan April 14, 2006
22. The Stand by Stephen King (Complete and Uncut Edition) April 15, 2006
23. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling April 16, 2006
24. This Gun for Hire by Graham Greene April 16, 2006
25. The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle April 20, 2006
26. East of Eden by John Steinbeck April 26, 2006

27. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling April 27, 2006

28. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner April 29, 2006
29. Shanghai Baby by Zhou Wei Hui May 9, 2006

30. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller May 12, 2006

31. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett June 10, 2006

32. Babbit by Sinclair Lewis June 11, 2006

33. U.S.! By Chris Bachelder June 18, 2006

34. Seek My Face by John Updike  June 19, 2006
35. Karl Marx: A Life by Francis Wheen June 20, 2006

36. The Regime By Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins June 21, 2006
37. Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney July 2, 2006

38. Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain July 7, 2006

39. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway July 12, 2006

40. Paris Babylon by Rupert Christiansen July 19, 2006

41. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow July 21, 2006

42. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein July 30, 2006
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand August 7, 2006
44. DC Universe: Inheritance by Devin Grayson August 12, 2006
45. Rabbit, Run by John Updike August 16, 2006
46. Thief of Time by Terry Pratchett August 23, 2006

47. 1632 by Eric Flint September 3, 2006
48. Rosa by Jonathon Rabb September 20, 2006
49. Crisis on Infinite Earths by Marv Wolfman September 27, 2006
50. Caesar by Colleen McCullough September 30, 2006
51. Peace Breaks Out by John Knowles October 2, 2006
52. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein October 10, 2006
53. The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer October 19, 2006
54. Rabbit Redux by John Updike October 31, 2006
55. It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis November 1, 2006
56. The Dragon and the George by Gordon Dickson November 2, 2006
57. Infinite Crisis by Greg Cox November 8, 2006
58. The Color of Magic by Terry Pratchett November 9, 2006
59. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy November 30, 2006
60. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis December 4, 2006
61. The Revolutionary by Hans Koningsberg December 5, 2006
62. The October Horse by Colleen McCullough December 7, 2006
63. Imperium by Robert Harris December 8, 2006
64. Perelandra by C.S. Lewis December 19, 2006
65. Crash by J.G. Ballard December 22, 2006
66. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro December 28, 2006
67. Becoming Madame Mao by Anchee Min January 1, 2007
68. The Martian Tales Trilogy by Edgar Rice Burroughs January 3, 2007
69. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse January 4, 2007
70. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories Volume 1 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle January 9, 2007
71. The Time of the Dragons by Alice Ekert-Rotholz January 14, 2007
72. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain January 17, 2007
73. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis January 18, 2007
74. The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E. Howard January 19, 2007
75. Ilium by Dan Simmons January 22, 2007
76. Watership Down by Richard Adams January 29, 2007
77. Revolution and Reaction: The Paris Commune 1871 by John Hick and Robert Tucker February 17, 2007
78. Olympos by Dan Simmons February 28, 2007
79. Karl Marx: His Life and Environment by Isaiah Berlin March 7, 2007
80. The Truth by Terry Pratchett March 18, 2007
81. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev March 25, 2007
82. The Insurrectionist by Jules Valles April 14, 2007
83. The Child by Jules Valles April 20, 2007
84. History of the Paris Commune by Prosper Oliver Lissagaray April 27, 2007
85. Justice League of America: Exterminators by Christopher Golden May 14, 2007
86. Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo May 22, 2007
87. Magician by Raymond E. Feist (New Revised Edition) May 23, 2007
88. Louise Michel by Edith Thomas June 12, 2007
89. Justice League of America: Superman--The Never-Ending Battle by Roger Stern July 11, 2007
90. Karl Marx: An Intimate Biography by Saul Padover July 13, 2007
91. The Voice of the People by Jean Vautrin July 20, 2007
92. Hearts in Atlantis by Stephen King July 21, 2007
93. Challengers of the Unknown by Ron Goulart July 22, 2007
94. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling August 5, 2007
95. 52: The Novel by Greg Cox August 18, 2007
96. The Long Good-Bye by Raymond Chandler August 25, 2007
97. The Outsider by Albert Camus September 29, 2007
98. Kingdom Come by Elliot S. Maggin October 28, 2007
99. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins December 13, 2007
100. The Life and Times of Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson December 14, 2007
101. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman December 15, 2007
102. The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett  December 19, 2007
103. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson January 7, 2008
104. The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman January 9, 2008
105. The Last Card by Hans Hellmut Kirst January 22, 2008
106. Osugi Sakae: Anarchist in Taisho Japan by Thomas Stanley January 23, 2008
107. The Last Shogun by Ryotaro Shiba January 24, 2008
108. Shinsengumi by Romulus Hillsborough January 26, 2008
109. Samurai William by Giles Milton February 6, 2008
110. The Plum-Rain Scroll by Ruth Manley February 12, 2008
111. The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman March 13, 2008
112. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie March 18, 2008
113. The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson April 1, 2008
114. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson June 20, 2008
115. Soul Music by Terry Pratchett July 29, 2008
116. Fire Across the Sea: The Vietnam War and Japan by Thomas Havens  August 13, 2008
117. Shogun by James Clavell August 18, 2008
118. Learning from Shogun, edited by Henry Smith August 20, 2008
119. The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore August 24, 2008
120. Robespierre by S.L. Carson August 29, 2008
121. The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy August 31, 2008
122. Danton by Frank Dwyer September 2, 2008
123. Napoleon by Leslie McGuire September 8, 2008
124. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett September 17, 2008
125. Bakunin, An Invention by Horst Bienek September 19, 2008
126. Paine by John Vail September 23, 2008
127. Clemenceau by Ted Gottfried October 3, 2008
128. Talleyrand by Robin Harris October 12, 2008
129. Lenin by John Haney October 22, 2008

130. The Judgment of Paris by Ross King October 31, 2008

131. A People's History of the World by Chris Harman November 8, 2008

132. Queen Victoria by Deirdre Sherman December 1, 2008

133. The Great Upheaval by Jay Winik December 13, 2008

134. Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke January 1, 2009

135. For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolutions by James R. Gaines February 16, 2009

136. Revolutions of 1848 by Priscilla Robertson February 28, 2009
137. Getting What You Came For: The Smart Student's Guide to Earning a Masters or Ph.D. by Robert L. Peters Ph.D. March 17, 2009

138. Napoleon's Egypt by Juan Cole March 24, 2009

139. Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography by Francis Wheen April 2, 2009

140. The First Total War by David Bell April 6, 2009

141. Wagner: A Documentary Study edited by Herbert Barth, Dietrich Mack, Egon Voss May 15, 2009

142.  Napoleon by Felix Markham May 24, 2009

143.  The Fall of Paris by Alistair Horne June 23, 2009

144.  The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 by Eric Hobsbawm July 10, 2009

145.  The Greek War of Independence by David Brewer September 9, 2009

146.  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy October 25, 2009

147.  Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris January 1, 2010

148.  Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton by Edward Rice January 8, 2010

149.  The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson February 19, 2010

150.  Three Empires on the Nile by Dominic Green March 10, 2010

151.  The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker March 20, 2010

152.  Down Under by Bill Bryson March 24, 2010

153.  Introducing Chomsky by John Maher and Judy Groves March 31, 2010

154.  Kim by Rudyard Kipling April 7,  2010

155.  Monarchy From the Middle Ages to Modernity by David Starkey April 25, 2010

156.  Flashman by George Macdonald Fraser May 2, 2010

157.  Royal Flash by George MacDonald Fraser June 23, 2010

158.  The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope July 12, 2010

159.  Flash for Freedom by George Macdonald Fraser July 27, 2010

160.  Tom Brown's Schooldays by Thomas Hughes August 3, 2010

161.  Flashman at the Charge by George Macdonald Fraser September 1, 2010

162.  The Butterfly in Amber by Kate Forsyth September 29, 2010

163.  Flashman in the Great Game by George MacDonald Fraser January 19, 2011

164.  Turn Right at Istanbul by Tony Wright [Abridged] January 23, 2011

165.  King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard January 25, 2011

166.  The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg (Abridged) January 27, 2011

167.  King Richard III by William Shakespeare January 31, 2011

168.  Flashman’s Lady by George MacDonald Fraser February 2, 2011

169.  Free-Born John by Pauline Gregg March 17, 2011

170.  Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser March 29, 2011

171.  Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell April 4, 2011

172.  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll April 21, 2011

173.  Culture Smart! Cambodia by Graham Saunders May 2, 2011

174.  Flashman and the Dragon by George MacDonald Fraser June 12, 2011

175.  The Scramble for Africa: 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham June 25, 2011

176.  To Kill a Tsar by Andrew Williams July 11, 2011

177.  The Roots of French Imperialism in Eastern Asia by John F. Cady July 18, 2011

178.  The Game by Neil Strauss October 27, 2011

179.  Conspirator: Lenin in Exile by Helen Rappaport November 3, 2011

180.  The French Presence in Cochinchina and Cambodia by Milton E. Osborne November 10, 2011

181.  Charles Dickens: Best Ghost Stories published by Wordsworth Classics February 22, 2012

182.  Flashman on the March by George MacDonald Fraser March 2, 2012

183.  A History of Malaysia by Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya [Second Edition] March 27, 2012

184.  The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng April 10, 2012

185.  God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens May 14, 2012

186.  Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson June 13, 2012

187.  Colonial Cambodia’s “Bad Frenchmen”: The Rise of French Rule and the Life of Thomas Caraman, 1840-87 by Gregor Muller August 24, 2012

188.  The Magicians by Lev Grossman September 26, 2012

189.  Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne November 6, 2012

190.  Flashman and the Angel of the Lord by George MacDonald Fraser December 18, 2012

191.  The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton January 1, 2013

192.  The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox January 27, 2013

193.  Flashman and the Tiger by George MacDonald Fraser February 9, 2013

194.  The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine February 16, 2013

195.  Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are by Bart D. Ehrman February 23, 2013

196.  Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener [Second Edition] March 2, 2013

197.  Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis April 17, 2013

198.  Understanding Second Language Acquisition by Lourdes Ortega May 1, 2013

199.  Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman May 3, 2013

200.  Procrastination by Jane B. Burka, PhD and Lenora M. Yuen, PhD [25th Anniversary Edition] June 5, 2013

201.  Globish: How English Became the World’s Language by Robert McCrum June 9, 2013

202.  Jesus, Interrupted by Bart D. Ehrman June 24, 2013

203.  Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia by William Shawcross August 5, 2013

204.  From Reader to Reading Teacher by Jo Ann Aebersold and Mary Lee Field August 11, 2013

205.  The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame August 12, 2013

206.  Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser August 16, 2013

207.  Mr American by George MacDonald Fraser September 11, 2013

208.  SLA Research and Language Teaching by Rod Ellis October 13, 2013

209.  Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne October 19, 2013

210.  The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (Revisited) November 8, 2013

211.  Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas November 10, 2013

212.  Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing by I.S.P. Nation November 13, 2013

213.  Destination Cambodia by Walter Mason November 21, 2013

214.  At War With Asia by Noam Chomsky December 3, 2013

215.  Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore December 11, 2013

216.  Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens—Retold by Richard Rogers December 25, 2013

217.  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley Retold By Margaret Tarner December 27, 2013

218.  Kings and Queens of Britain by Tim Vicary December 29, 2013

219.  Ireland by Tim Vicary December 31, 2013

210.  Mutiny on the Bounty by Tim Vicary January 2, 2014

211.  Tales of Horror by Bram Stoker Retold by John Davey January 3, 2014

212.  Pocahontas by Tim Vicary January 5, 2014

213.  Second Language Learning Theories by Rosamond Mitchell and Florence Myles [Second Edition] January 7, 2014

214.  The Vicomte De Bragelonne by Alexandre Dumas January 17, 2014

215.  Henry VIII and his Six Wives by Janet Hardy-Gould January 27, 2014

216.  The English Verb by Michael Lewis February 10, 2014

217.  Black Ajax by George MacDonald Fraser February 14, 2014

218.  The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper—Retold by Coleen Degnang-Veness February 28, 2014

219.  The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997 by Piers Brendon March 5, 2014

220.  An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin, Robert Rodman, Peter Collins, and David Blair [Third Edition] March 19, 2014

221.  How Languages are Learned by Patsy M. Lightbown and Nina Spada March 21, 2014

222.  Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas March 27, 2014

223.  Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson March 29, 2014

224.  Beyond the Sentence by Scott Thornbury April 8, 2014

225.  King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by Deborah Tempest May 10, 2014

226.  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson May 12, 2014

227.  Louise de la Valliere by Alexandre Dumas May 20, 2014

228.  Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching by Diane Larsen-Freeman [Second Edition] May 22, 2014

229.  The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas June 21, 2014

230.  The Language Teaching Matrix by Jack C. Richards July 3, 2014

231.  The Once and Future King by T.H. White July 11, 2014

232.  Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein July 31, 2014

233.  The Time Machine by H.G. Wells August 2, 2014

234.  The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel August 22, 2014

235.  Sound Foundations by Adrian Underhill September 5, 2014

236.  The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents by Alex Butterworth September 7, 2014

237.  Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman September 9, 2014

238.  Kidnapped and Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson September 24, 2014

239.  George Orwell: Essays September 26, 2014

240.  Conspirata by Robert Harris September 29, 2014

241.  The Quiet American by Graham Greene October 1, 2014

242.  The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells October 7, 2014

243.  Cambodia’s Curse by Joel Brinkley October 16, 2014

244.  Hothouse by Brian Aldiss October 20, 2014

245.  The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson October 22, 2014

246.  Burmese Days by George Orwell October 27, 2014

247.  A Little Book of Language by David Crystal October 28, 2014

248.  The Malayan Trilogy by Anthony Burgess October 30, 2014

249.  An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris November 18, 2014

250.  Rubicon by Tom Holland November 19, 2014

251.  A Very Short History of the World by Geoffrey Blainey November 20, 2014

252.  A World On Fire by Amanda Foreman November 25, 2014

253.  The Way of the Kings by Andre Malraux December 1, 2014

254.  Alexander: Child of a Dream by Valerio Massimo Manfredi (Alexander Trilogy Book 1) December 4, 2014

255.  The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay December 12, 2014
256.  Tonoharu (Parts 1 and 2) by Lars Martinson December 18, 2014
257.  The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns December 26, 2014
258.  Anno Dracula by Kim Newman January 3, 2015
259. Alexander the Great by Philip Freeman January 20, 2015
260. Anno Dracula 1918: The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman January 22, 2015
261. Alexander: The Sands of Ammon by Valerio Massimo Manfredi,February 9, 2015
262. The Natural Approach by Stephen D. Krashen and Tracy D. Terrell, March 5, 2015
263. Alexander: The Ends of the Earth by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, March 6. 2015
264. About Language by Scott Thornbury, March 7, 2015
265. The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow March 17, 2015
266. Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault March 28, 2015
267. Grammar for English Language Teachers by Martin Parrott, April 2, 2015
268. The Persian Boy by Mary Renault April 30, 2015
269. Funeral Games by Mary Renault May 13, 2015
270. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain June 23, 2015
271. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, August 10, 2015
272. Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain, November 13, 2015
273. Tom Sawyer Detective by Mark Twain November 20, 2015
274. The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse Retold by Sue Arengo and Illustrated by Kate Aldous January 9, 2016
275. Peace At Last by Jill Murphy January 12, 2016
276. Jungle School Tales (Reading Heroes) by Tina Barrett January 14, 2016
277.  My First Fairytales: The Three Billy Goats Gruff Retold by Gaby Goldsack and Illustrated by Kim Blundell January 15, 2016

And Some Random Thoughts
* The actual number, 277, is misleading, and makes me look way more literary than I actually am.  In reality, within this 277 are several graded readers, two graphic - novels,  several short novellas, lots of children's books (including 7 Books in the "World  -Leaders: Past  - and  -Present" Series --a series of picture books about world leaders intended for children) and lots and lots of audio books.

* Given how little I actually read, I sometimes feel guilty about maintaining a blog dedicated to book reviews.  "Who do I think I'm kidding?" I sometimes ask myself.  "I'm trying to appear cultured and literary by maintaining a book review blog, but I barely get through a book a month!"  (Although most likely I'm the only one who's losing any sleep over this issue.)
On the other hand, if I was the kind of person who knocked off a book every few days (like some of my friends are) then I would never have time to write detailed book reviews on each one.  So in that sense, this type of blog is only possible for someone with my reading habits.

* I discovered audio books in my early 20s, and I've had a number of positive experiences with them (both before and after starting this book review project).  A number of books I've done only by audio book, and yet I feel like I've absorbed them every bit as well as if I had read the actual pages.  In some cases, I think I might even get more out of the book if it's an audio.  (My eyes can tend to glaze over sometimes when reading the printed page, but a skilled voice actor can bring the words to life.  And also something about the spoken word tends to stick in my mind more than the written word.)
However, over the years my opinion on audio books has evolved, and I've decided that they're not ideal for every situation.
There are external factors that can detract from audio books of course (how noisy it is outside, how distracted I am).
But there are also just some books that can't be absorbed as easily orally--books where the author's prose isn't so straightforward and simple, for example.  Also books with lots of characters to keep track of.
There are a few books on this list that I did on audio book that I now have to admit I got very little out of.
The one I feel most guilty about is Anna Karenina .  I did it as an audio book back in 2006, and today I can remember just about zero of it, and I feel really guilty having it on my list of books that I've read.  I haven't really absorbed it, so I shouldn't really be claiming that I've read it.  At some point, I need to go back and re-visit that book.  Until that point, I'm living a lie by having that book on my list.

As time went on, I started to get more anal retentive about my audio books.  Instead of just listening once and writing a review, I would try to listen to them 3 or 4 times before I truly counted them as "read".  But even in this case it should be noted that there are certain authors I still have trouble absorbing audibly, even after 3 or 4 listens.
I've also decided to try to be more forthright about which books I did as audio books, and to make this explicit in the review now.  (Something that was absent from the first few years of this project.)

* In my 10 years of blogging retrospective post, I mentioned how embarrassed I am by all the bad writing on this blog over the years.
This is true with my book review project as well.
As I type the words onto the screen, I think everything I write is absolutely brilliant.
When I re-read old posts after a few years have gone by, I'm appalled by how clunky the writing style is.  I often have difficulty following my own train of thought, because the sentences are so mangled, and the transitions between ideas are unclear.
And all the typos!  So many typos!
There's also the problem of a intelligent commentary--or lack thereof.
When I first started this book review project, I didn't have a lot of intelligent things to say about the books I was reading.  For example, my review of The Postman Always Rings Twice is so vague and aimless as to be pretty much just a waste of cyberspace.  (I can't imagine anyone getting anything out of that review.)
In more recent years, I think I've gone to the opposite extreme, and started writing way too much about the books I've read.  There are several examples of this, but I guess the most infamous one is my review of The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, which totals 46,375 words.  That's an exceptional example, but there are plenty of others.  This review on The Age of Reason was pretty dense.  This one on At War With Asia went on forever.  And many more examples.

* I like having all the books listed in order of date read (as opposed to alphabetically) because they form a bit of a biography over the last 10 years.  As my interests and ambitions changed, so did my reading list.
When I thought I was going to go to graduate school in Japanese studies, my reading list was all books about Japan.
When I thought maybe I would go to school for modern European studies, my reading list was all books from this period.
As with most people who like history, I like pretty much all of it, and I do kind of skip around from period to period.  But the area that I thought I wanted to specialize in was early modern European history.  At my Alma Mater, the early modern period was defined from the start of the French Revolution to the First World War, and I've kept those dates (1789-1918) as a rough guide for my history reading.  Also, since literature and history or always very inter-related, I tried to tackle a lot of literature from the same period.
Now that I've decided my career is in English Teaching, I've been trying to read lots of books related to the English Teaching Profession.
When I first started this book review project, however, I still had literary ambitions--I wanted to be a writer.  And I was under the influence of Stephen King's book On Writing (A).
I never reviewed it on this blog (I read it a few months before I started the book review project), but it influenced my reading choices for the first few years of book reviewing.
In his book, Stephen King wrote at length about the importance of reading for anyone with ambitions to be a writer.  All writing comes out of reading, and if you're not constantly devouring books, King said, you'll never make it as a writer.
What to read, then?  Anything and everything, King said.  All written works can help you develop your literary technique.  A good book shows you what to do.  A badly written book, however, is equally as valuable, because you can get a very clear sense of what not to do.
In other words, there is no such thing as a book that's a waste of time.
 "If you're looking for permission to read all those trashy books that you've always wanted to read, but that you thought were a waste of time, then I'm giving you that permission," King said.  (Or something like that.  I'm paraphrasing because I'm quoting from memory.)

For someone of my temperament (a geek) the idea of being able to read all sorts of trashy pulpy novels AND get to feel like I was being productive at the same time was a gift from heaven.  And so I jumped head first into all those wonderful trashy pulpy novels: Vampire Blood Trilogy, The Stand, Harry Potter, The Left Behind series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Starship Troopers, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The Princess of Mars, Conan The Barbarian, Magician, The Golden Compass, Ilium & Olympus, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Eventually, I dropped my literary ambitions.  Much like my flirtations with going into graduate school for history, or for Japanese studies, it was just not a realistic career path.
(And much like graduate school for history, or Japanese studies, it took me far too long to realize this.  Boy, is it embarrassing to realize how long it took me to grow up!)

So, for the most part, the pulpy sci-fi/fantasy books that dominated the early part of this book review project are over now.  Although, (once a geek, always a geek), I still relapse back into them once and a while.  (Just last year I reviewed Anno Dracula, and Hothouse for example.)  And I'm still enough of a geek to enjoy the sheer imagination that comes from the better writers in this genre.

The one thing that I am really and truly over, however, is superhero comic books.
10 years ago when I started this book review project I still had a fondness for the comic books of my youth.  I had long ago stopped reading them because they seemed like a huge waste of time.  But, based on Stephen King's advice that this was no longer a waste of time, I dove back in to comic books in the form of tie-in novels based on the DC Universe (52: The Novel, Infinite Crisis: The Novel, Crisis on Infinite Earths: The Novel, DC Universe: Inheritance, Justice League of America: Superman--The Never-Ending Battle, Justice League of America: Exterminators, Kingdom Come: The Novel, Challengers of the Unknown.)
Sure, I knew they were terrible, but I loved the pulp cheesiness of the superhero world.
Now, however, I'm tired of it all.
It's a bit hard to pinpoint exactly where my disillusionment with comic book superheros began.  And, as with all ex-lovers, once the spark has gone out of the relationship, it's hard to identify what went wrong, because the question changes from "Why did I stop loving her?" to "What did I ever see in her to begin with?" And it's almost impossible to get back into that old frame of mind to remember what the original attraction had been.
It's possible that after an extended adolescence, I just finally grew up.  (I usually think of myself as fully cognitively mature at 27, but maybe tastes can still change between 27 and 37).
It's possible that with all the superhero overload in the media the past few years, I just got sick of the whole thing.
It's possible that with all the resets and reboots in the comic book publishing world, the thing that attracted me to comic books in the first place was no longer valid. (I used to be fascinated by the idea of one long continuous story going all the way back to the 1940s.  But in the past 10 years alone DC comics has reset it's continuity several times.  It's now clear that any advancements or developments that happen in any issue is just temporary until the next reset a few years later, and that takes all the investment out of the story.)
But whatever the case, I'm over it.  Comic book superheroes seem stupid and juvenile to me now.  And to be quite honest, I'm embarrassed to have these book reviews in my blog archives.

**************************

Anyway, those are all my thoughts on this project in general.
Over the next few days, I'll post some top ten lists:
Top Ten Worst Books: Fiction
Top Ten Worst Books: Non-Fiction

(I'm doing the worst books first because it's very easy to identify the books I hated.  Because this book review list is mostly elective pleasure reading, I don't read a lot of books I don't like.
The books I really enjoyed, on the other hand, are so numerous that it's going to be difficult to pick favorites, but I'll give it a try.)

Top Ten Best Books: Fiction
Top Ten Best Books: Non-Fiction

Stay tuned for all that.