Good Books Devoured in 2011

Last year was a great year, reading-wise. Of the 26 books I read last year, here are four you might like, in the order I read them.

A Game of Thrones

Sprawling. Dense. So, so many characters. But there’s plenty of action in this epic, and without all the moral clarity of Tolkien’s characters. Game of Thrones is like Lord of the Rings if you took out the non-human races and added an HBO miniseries worth of sexytimes and decapitations. Which, coincidentally, HBO did. (Great show, by the way.) I’m not going to bother with a plot summary.

There are billions of characters.

Unbroken:
A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption and Oh God, Enough with the Long Subtitles, Nonfiction Publishers

An amazing, true story. This book feels like it should end about halfway through, and then just when you thought this guy’s story couldn’t get any more insane, whoops, now he’s in a prison camp for two years. A lot of the stories along the way seem unbelievable, but Hillenbrand seems to have backed up most of the more outlandish assertions with solid corroboration from Zamperini’s fellow inmates and/or crew.

 

The Gun Seller

This book really doesn’t fit into a genre. Spy spoof? Thriller? Whodunnit?  A freelance British soldier-of-fortune type is offered a sum of money to kill a rich American, and he instead decides to warn his intended mark. He, er, mostly regrets this.

Apparently, besides affecting a terrific American accent on House, Hugh Laurie is also extremely adept with a witty turn of phrase. This book is exquisitely written. I don’t mean that in the sense that every sentence and paragraph is syntactically and positionally handed down from the gods; no, I mean that with his word choice, literary devices, and his gift for detail, this dude had me laughing out loud and immediately re-reading passages. Quite often. And not even mainly at the dialogue. The real gold in The Gun Seller is in the descriptions of scenery, characters, interactions, and subtext.

For example:

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage operas, hold cycling races, and have an absolutely cracking game of frisbee, all at the same time, without having to move any of the furniture. It could rain in a room this big.

11/22/63

Stephen King obviously doesn’t care about SEO. The title to this book is infuriatingly hard to Google, or at least, it was right after it was published.

This was a book club book, which is generally a good sign but not a guarantee of anything in particular. A high school teacher finds a portal to 1958 in the back of a diner in small-town Maine, and discovers that no matter how long he spends in the past, he can come back to 2011 and only two minutes will have passed. So, naturally, he tries to alter the course of history. On its face, literally, it’s a book about the Kennedy assassination. But it’s really a book about time travel and love. And it had me up late two nights in a row¹ following both the love story and the assassination plot to their interwoven conclusions.

King reportedly first had the idea for this book decades ago, but never had the time to do the necessary research. Whatever made him finally write it, he certainly didn’t half-ass it in the end. I haven’t read a work of fiction with this much history baked in since Fall of Giants. It’s hard to believe anyone could expend the colossal effort required to put this kind of book together immediately after cranking out the 1000+ page Under the Dome (also great). I think this Stephen King guy just might go far as an author.

What have you been reading lately?

1. Think reading The Hunger Games in a night is exhausting? Try reading 849 pages of Stephen King in 48 hours. [↩]