It’s that time of year again. Took me a little longer to do it, but I did it: I chose the 10 best and 10 worst books that I read last year. You can view their respective lists by following the links below:
Part of the reason for the delay was that I finally decided to bite the bullet and attempt to import all of my Goodreads reviews en masse. It actually worked out fairly well, so now constructing book lists is a less troublesome endeavour.
Book lists still don’t have a comment feature yet, so as always, I invite you to comment on my selections on this blog post—oh, and tell me what were some of the best and worst books you read in 2011.
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After reading your review of Chicks Dig Time Lords, I‘m now wishing that I had a copy last year, when I was (being a big fan of the new series myself) writing a thesis on gender, cyborgs and Doctor Who. The Magnet and Smith essay sounds like it would have been useful. Also - in reference to your review of Dune - I’ve never understood the snobbery towards science fiction and fantasy as “genre” fiction, even if I did participate in that snobbery when I was younger (it was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that completely changed my mind about mindlessly disliking genre fiction). It definitely exists in academia, where professors do run courses on science fiction and fantasy but departments classify them as general, not honours, courses. Even contemporary novels that sell well are looked down upon - one of my classmates told us that her professor laughed at a syllabus for a grad course that contained a lot of contemporary novels.
Personally, I think the snobbery towards “genre” books is nonsense, given the fact that a lot of them contain better writing than you’d find in a lot of “literature.” Don’t get me wrong, I love books classified as “literature” too - I just think that the dividing line is utter nonsense.
As a side note - Persuasion and Fifth Business are wonderful books, particularly Persuasion. I was not a big fan of Jane Austen when I first tried to read Pride and Prejudice, even though I thought that she was a good writer. A few years later, I read Emma and loved it, then went back and read the rest of her work and loved it too - including Pride and Prejudice. I agree that Persuasion is much better than Pride and Prejudice, but I think I’d have to go with Emma as my personal favourite.
Friday, January 13, 2012 at 1:06 AM