Year End Book Round-Up: 2011

[coprime]

Every year when I look back, I get sad that I haven't read more books than I did and resolve to do better. This year, I made a really good push in the first half of the year and then discovered I could easily put AO3-hosted, book-length fanfic on my ereader. And that kind of killed my reading in the second half of the year, haha. Thirty-three books from January to June, eleven from July to December.

Oh well. Something to note for the upcoming year: make an effort to read those paper books you keep buying and ebooks you keep downloading.

* means I loved it, + means I liked it, = means I was neutral, - means I disliked it

= Shana Abe - Intimate Enemies
* Kozue Amano - Aria v1
* Zoe Archer - Blades of the Rose #1: Warrior
* Zoe Archer - Blades of the Rose #2: Scoundrel
* Zoe Archer - Blades of the Rose #3: Rebel
* Zoe Archer - Blades of the Rose #4: Stranger
+ Kelley Armstrong - Otherworld #8: Personal Demon
+ Kelley Armstrong - Otherworld #9: Living with the Dead
+ Jacqueline Carey - Kushiel #5: Kushiel's Justice
* Jacqueline Carey - Kushiel #6: Kushiel's Mercy
+ Jayne Castle - Harmony #7: Midnight Crystal
+ Agatha Christie - Partners in Crime
+ Ellen Datlow (ed.) - The Coyote Road
= Jasper Fforde - Thursday Next #5: Thursday Next: First Among Sequels
+ Lynn Flewelling - Nightrunner #0: Glimpses
+ Randall Garrett - Despoilers of the Golden Empire
+ Julie Garwood - Prince Charming
- Craig Halloran - The Darkslayer
= Bisco Hatori - Ouran High School Host Club v14
+ Tanya Huff - Blood Books Omnibus #3: Blood Debt & Blood Bank
+ Dave Kellet - Literature!: Unsuccessfully Competing against TV since 1952
+ Derek Landy - Skulduggery Pleasant #3: The Faceless Ones
+ Derek Landy - Skulduggery Pleasant #4: Dark Days
+ Donna Leon - Commissario Brunetti #14: Blood from a Stone
+ Scott Lynch: Gentleman Bastards #2: Red Seas under Red Skies
+ Kelly McCullough - Ravirn #5: SpellCrash
* Yuki Midorikawa - Natsume's Book of Friends v1
* Pati Nagle - Coyote Ugly
* Pati Nagle - Pet Noir
+ Ryan North (ed.) - Machine of Death
+ Patrick O'Brian - Aubrey-Maturin #6: The Fortune of War
+ Patrick O'Brian - Aubrey-Maturin #7: The Surgeon's Mate
+ Cyril Pedrosa - Three Shadows
= Pocket Juno Books (ed.) - Scary Fairies: Four Fearful Tales of the Fey
- Tim Powers - Last Call
+ Terry Pratchett - Discworld #22: The Last Continent
+ Terry Pratchett - Discworld #23: Carpe Jugulum
+ Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials #3: The Amber Spyglass
+ Matthew Reilly - Shane Schofield #4: Hell Island
+ R. J. Silver - The Princess and the Penis
* Linnea Sinclair - Dock Five #4: Rebels and Lovers
* Yuki Urushibara - Mushishi v8/9/10
+ Heather Webber - Lucy Valentine #2: Deeply, Desperately
= Deborah Wheeler - Northlight

My favorite was probably Zoe Archer's Blades of the Rose series. I devoured the entire series as soon as I got them. I haven't enjoyed a romance series that much in a while -- it had about everything I could ask for: interesting heroines and heroes, plot, magic, lots of action, fun sex, exotic locations. Even now, it makes wish for more in the series in any form I can get. The only complaint I had was that once each novel's couple started having sex, they had sex a lot, to the detriment of moving the plot along sometimes.

Worst was probably Craig Halloran's The Darkslayer, although someone who's not me might love it. It wasn't badly written, but it felt like someone decided their tabletop RPG was so cool it needed to be made into a novel. And I don't really care about someone else's D&D campaign.

Best new-to-me author was Pati Nagle. Both of her books I read this year were copies of books I won via LibraryThing, and I enjoyed both immensely. Coyote Ugly is a collection of short stories of hers that spans about ten different genres, though scifi/fantasy is the most common, and Pet Noir is a fleshed-out novella of one of the stories in Coyote Ugly about a genetically-altered cat who's on the police force of a space station.

Also of note, I finally finished the His Dark Materials trilogy, after reading The Subtle Knife four years ago.