I like to document what I read that is book-length so I can go back and review later. I get dogged down by reading only the Kindle samples of dozens of books because it is usually enough to get “the gist” of what the book is doing. I don’t count those. This is totally for me, but the public-facing-ness and tradition of it keeps me doing it. I don’t claim any insight as to reviewing or critiquing these, below are just notes that will help me remember these book years from now:

In 2008, I read 31 Titles, 7,967 Pages, 21.77 Pages/Day
In 2009, I read 18 Titles, 4,960 Pages, 13.59 Pages/Day
In 2010, I read 36 Titles, 11,574 Pages, 31.71 Pages/Day
In 2011, I read 30 Titles,  10,163 Pages, 27.84 Pages/Day

In 2011, I moved back to Florida so I did not have the two hour of subway riding per day which really cut into my reading time. But still, I managed a closely respectable total.

Fiction

The Damned Busters: To Hell and Back, Book One (416) by Matthew Hughes

Normally I shy away from books that are explicitly set up to be a series (And to think later in the year I’d read Game of Thrones!). I know publishers love their predictability but they tend to be a bit overextended for me. Nonetheless, I had to get this one based on my fandom of Hughes’ sci-fi work. The first third of the book was featured in novella form in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and I found it to be excellent. Chesney Arnstruther is an actuary that accidentally summons a demon, refuses to sign over his soul and causes a labor dispute in Hell. Through a series of events, he ends with his own demon two hours a day (a self-styled James Cagney) and uses said demon’s infernal powers to turn him into a masked crime-fighter. The second act is a little dull, but overall it was pretty-fun and certainly nowhere as overwrought as your John Constantine fightin’-demons tales. There’s an essential sense of humor which makes up for the sort of caricatured characters. Nonetheless, I wholly recommend.

Embassytown by China Mieville (368)

Mieville is probably my favorite author. So take my opinions on him with a grain of salt. In Embassytown, he shifts to a sci-fi milieu that reminds almost of a futuristic version of his New Crozubon stories. Whereas Kraken was all about the pulp influences mixed with the New Weird paradigm, with a couple elements removed this could be a straight-up sci-fi novel. My favorite speculative books are all about Big Ideas and Embassytown has them in spades, especially if you are interested in language. Highly enjoyable.

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott (124)

A classic I nabbed free on the Kindle. I never actually read it before. I like to drift towards Sci-Fi and Fantasy that is more philosophy than story sometimes and this scratched the itch. I was surprised at how sexist it is given modern sensibilities!

The Grendel’s Shadow by Andrew Mayne (140)

I found this for 99 cents on Kindle and the reviews made it seem highly enjoyable. I found the universe the author created to be interesting (I searched only to find that he has not written any other books in this universe) but the actual story to be dull. Without enacting spoilers, there is one major plot point that is just completely forgotten and never resolved. There is very little in the story that ends up being surprising. Since everything was so straightforward, I was waiting for The Big Twist only to be disappointed. It’s competent but not particularly compelling.

Penny Arcade, Book 7: Be Good Little Puppy (128)

You know, you either like Penny Arcade or you don’t.

A Song of Ice and Fire: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (720)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (784)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin (1008)
A Song of Ice and Fire: A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin (784)

I know I said that I don’t like series, but I cracked this one open and got addicted… Yes, the quality does trail off in Book 4, but I think it picks up again brilliantly in Book 5. The series breaks a lot of “rules” with regards to storytelling, so it is illustrative as a writing lesson despite its flaws. Rarely do I find something this popular that I devour so insatiably. The fifth one is about half-done as the year ends. I don’t think I’ll be able to keep my enthusiasm to wait for a new tome.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson (464)

Normally, I am less enthusiastic about science fiction as I am about fantasy. SF has fewer degrees of freedom; it has to be both internally consistent and consistent with the world we know where as fantasy only has to be the former. But every once in a while a book has a “What If” that is just as compelling as anything else out there. In Spin, one night the stars go out – or so it seems. Satellites fall from the sky, looking as if they had been in orbit for hundreds of years. The premise gets even more surreal after that, but always stays in the realms of consistent internally and without the use of magic. Wilson leaves great cliffhangers, peeling back the onion further and further with every chapter. Only Mieville’s The Scar did that as masterfully to me. What finally is most interesting to me is that in a market recently saturated with post-apocalyptica this novel shines as a sort of pre-apocalyptica: humanity knows it is the last generation, what will they do about it? Less dystopic than Children of Men, but still seemingly at task. Excellent read. Don’t read too many reviews of it or you will get spoilered.

Nonfiction

250 Indie Games You Must Play (280) by Mike Rose

IndieGames.com’s Mike Rose gives an overview of a number of indie games. I was disappointed in this. The analyses pretty much always covered the game’s setting and visual theme but rarely did it cover what was mechanically interesting about the game. It contains such insightful analysis as “the story is nice and long.” I’ve seen enough indie games to know that story generally isn’t the selling point – it is how the mechanics work in inventive ways. This didn’t need to be a book. It could have been one long web page.

How to Do Things With Videogames by Ian Bogost (180)

Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows I’m a big Bogost supporter. How to Do Things… is a great collection of essays about the different areas games can address, but I found the title and form misleading. The book should be called What Video Games Can Do since it answers what and not how. The essays are mixed in quality, but I found that the ones that connect hit it out of the park. Others are less of the form: “Did you know video games can tackle so and so?” and fit more as decent Gamasutra articles. While a little unfocused, it is still full of great insights and clued me into a number of projects of which I’d never heard.

Marching Bands Are Just Homeless Orchestras by Tim Seidell (80)

Barely a book, this is a collection of Tim Seidell’s (better known as Twitter’s @badbanana) Handy-esque quips. Hilarious, but you can get the same quality for free by following his Twitter account.

The Making of Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner (330)

I wrote about it here. No book this year made me sadder or feel less alone.

Propaganda by Edward Bernays (168)

I was a bit disappointed in this. It’s a tract from the 1920′s that is essentially an apologia for propaganda. I was hoping this would be a little more intriguing as to the how-to but this is mostly about things that we consider as basic PR these days. It was a bit repetitious and a chore to get through, honestly.

The Rape of the Mind by Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo (320)

Wow, where to begin? Dr. Meerloo was a prolific Dutch psychologist and Dutch resistance member during the Second World War. Under the Nazi occupation, he witnessed firsthand the methods of brainwashing and mental torture and became one of the world’s leading authorities on totalitarian mind control. Provocatively named, The Rape of the Mind hits on a lot of topics: freedom, philosophy, nature of Man, politics, advertising, faith, authority and strategy. I even picked up a little on design in there. It’s a timeless book with more to digest than you could grasp in one read. I plan on saving it.

The Revolution by Ron Paul (208)
Liberty Defined:  50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom by Ron Paul (352)

Yeah, go ahead start judging me on politics. This one is a campaign book from his 08 run. It’s honestly a little slapdash, not as convincing of a libertarian argument or as organized as Browne’s Great Libertarian Offer. It’s great if you already buy into what he is selling, but he does a poor job of providing supporting materials in comparison to Browne. Liberty Defined is the same way, but better structured, although it never sufficiently defines liberty. I suppose what causes his books to be more about principles than evidence is summed up in his chapter on Statistics and their drawbacks. While I didn’t find either of these to be too convincing, he does keep a good bibliography for further reading.

Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness by George “Fat Man” Sanger (528)

I’m torn on this one. One, I’m forever in debt to the Fat Man for starting project Horseshoe which I now go to every year. I now understand so much of its origins just by the stories that Sanger loads this book with. There’s a lot of folksy abstract storytelling in here and if you get easily distracted, you will lose him in the first third of the book. He spends a lot of time on this persona of his and it’s tough to give a shit about any of it until you get a “why” you should give a shit. For some reason, whoever formatted this for Kindle liked to highlight phrases and words with light grey text making them nearly impossible to read on my Kindle 2. The last third of the book (except a wonderful excerpt in the Appendix) is only of real value to audio guys, a cohort of which I do not identify. But if you peel back that first third and last third, that middle juicy core is full of wonderful philosophy about living a creative life. Whether or not you have the patience to peel away the irrelevant stuff is really a testament to how much you want what is in the core.

Instapaper / Longform

I discovered Instapaper and Longform.org this year. The latter collates high-quality bits of longer-form journalism from around the web. The former converts those articles into a handy, Kindle-readable form. When I reach 20 articles or so, I dump them into a .mobi file and there I have the most interesting magazine I could possibly find. Unfortunately, I’ve been using Instapaper to save far more than my ability to read all the saved articles. Since these don’t have a normal page count, I’m dividing words by 350 to get pages.

Instapaper Compilation #1 (362)

Instapaper Compilation #2 (309)

Instapaper Compilation #3 (304)

Instapaper Complication #4 (370)

Other (Graphic Novels, etc.)

Achewood Vol 3. Worst Song Played on Ugliest Guitar by Chris Onstad (136)

Achewood’s fallen off in recent years strictly on a quantity basis (but has just resumed), but if you digged (dug? dig-dugged?) the strips of the 2002 era when characterization was just knocking on the door (really the hallmark of the series next to the Mexican Magical Realism which is forthcoming) then these are the first strips that matter. What gets you to buy the book is the great commentary bits and the essays written in character. Top notch stuff.

Book-Length Magazines

Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 11-12/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 1-2/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 3-4/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 5-6/2010 (260)
Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine 7-8/2010 (260)

I’m reading this great book about brainwashing from the 1950s with a provocative title: “The Rape of the Mind” by Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo. The whole of the document is online but I bought the physical print version because I didn’t know better. I picked it up just because it sounded interesting and it is with its oscillation between philosophy, psychology and sociology. But I was surprised to find some passages that are pretty influential in regards to the dichotomy between metrics-based design and intuitive design:

The world of tomorrow will witness a tremendous battle between technology and psychology. It will be a fight of technology versus nature, of systematic conditioning versus creative spontaneity. The veneration of the machine implies the turning of mechanical knowledge into power, into push-button power.

And:

The devaluation of the individual human brain, replacing it by mechanical computers, also suggests the totalitarian system for which its citizens are compelled to become more and more the servile tools. The inhuman “system” becomes the aim, a system that is the product of technocracy and dehumanization and which may result in organized brutality and the crushing of any personal morality. In a mechanical society a set of values are forcibly imprinted on the unconscious mind, the way Pavlov conditioned his dogs.

And:

In a technocratic world every moral problem gets repressed and is displaced by a technical or statistical evaluation. The problems of sound and speedy mathematics serve to overthrow ethics.

And:

Technology based on this concept is cold and without moral standards of living, without faith and “feeling at home” in our own world. It continually stimulates new dissatisfaction and the production of new luxury without knowing why. It stimulates greediness and laziness without emphasizing restraint and the art of living.

It’s really a remarkable work.

I’m going to fire this off now and count anything else I read for the next two weeks in my 2011 list. I do this every year – a short review of the things I’ve read over the year – so that I can keep track of what I read and hopefully share some of the better stuff with folks of similar tastes.

This year was a sharp upward spike in reading thanks to: 1) a daily hour and a half ride in a subway from January to August and 2) the purchase of a Kindle. While I was skeptical of e-readers at first, it markedly increased my reading consumption. As you will see, some of my choices are out of mainstream and being able to sample and instantly download something rather than ordering it on Amazon, buying something else to get the free shipping and waiting a week and a half for it to arrive makes my particular reading tastes satiable. I add anything to the list that one would consider a book, including comics collections if they are substantiative or long rulebooks that I read cover to cover. That may be cheating, but it’s my list, so shaddup.

Also, since there was so much this year I loved, I’ve highlighted my absolute favorites in BLUE.

In 2008, I read 31 Titles, 7,967 Pages, 21.77 Pages/Day
In 2009, I read 18 Titles, 4,960 Pages, 13.59 Pages/Day
In 2010, I read 36 Titles, 11,574 Pages, 31.71 Pages/Day

Fiction

Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (416)

You know what is ironically vogue? Steampunk. You know what else sells now after nerds crooning for it for the past ten years plus? Zombies. Put that chocolate in that peanut butter and you get Boneshaker, which is as far as I can tell the first acclaimed wide-release steampunk zombie novel. The story is about a young man’s trip to find himself by breaking into a walled off city full of zombies in the hopes of finding out about his dad, the great inventor and the cause of the zombie infestation. His mother, destitute and resolute goes in after him. It’s a standard rescue story with a very interesting setting that Smith is continuing in later novels.

The Devil’s Alphabet by Daryl Gregory (400)

Some of my favorite stories are mundane except for one very unusual circumstance. That’s a good way of describing The Devil’s Alphabet. Paxton comes back to his childhood town of Switchcreek. It is like any other southern rural town with the exception of a genetic mutation that triggered ten years back that turned some of the residents into giants, some into asexually reproducing alien women and some into massively obese strongmen. Say what? Paxton comes back for his best friend’s funeral but soon gets caught up in the intrigue surrounding her death. What do the mutated clans of the town have to do with it? I picked up the book simply because I didn’t know what to read next and I was triggered by its Hugo nomination and interesting blurb. Any other year this would have been in my Top 3, but I read so many good books this year.

Dreadnought by Cherie Priest (400)

A sort-of sequel to the above-mentioned Boneshaker, Dreadnought fleshes out Priest’s “Clockwork Century” universe a bit more. This time, we follow a southern nurse on the Union war machine Dreadnought as she rides across the West to visit her dying estranged father in Washington.

When I read fantasy, I generally want the story to be undupliacatable in another genre – the fantasy elements need to be front and center. Here is where Dreadnought lacks for me. With a few exceptions at the start, the first two-thirds of the book could easily have been an alternate history. It picks up steam by the end, pun intended, but it is missing the hooks of her earlier book in the series. Recommended only if you were totally for Boneshaker.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer (352)

After buying Boneshaker, I kept getting recommendations for this book, probably because people who buy one steampunk book buy them all. This was a debut novel and it has problems – the protagonist is unlikable, some scenes are too clever by half, some scenes nothing happens at all, the characters do not change, too many dream sequences. The book isn’t bad, but I’ve read so many good books this year that it comes off a bit sour. As an example: There’s a scene towards the end where the main character runs into a character from earlier in the book who gets cut off getting a parking space by an old lady. He then keys her car, shoots her dog and then throws a vial of acid on her face. A vial of acid! It is explained in the story later why he has that, but come on! Scenes like this seem to be trying too hard to establish a spectacle without actually adding to the plot or character development. The scene is throwaway. Nothing happens to the main character, the acid wielder doesn’t show up again. It is worthless.

The book actually gets legs in the final quarter where you meet some interesting characters but they only live for a scene or two. It could have been a compelling novella if reworked. I’d pass unless you really dig a soup of steampunk, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Tempest.

Dune by Frank Herbert (544)

I’d actually never read Dune before this year. The world building contained within makes me so depressed that I’ll never create something as compelling. I hear mixed reviews of other books in the series, so I may just leave it at that. My one complaint is that Paul just isn’t an interesting protagonist. The story that is memorable is the political story, not Paul’s. He’s a messiah and hence also pretty flawless which is boring. Otherwise, I liked this a great deal.

Fishyfleshed by Carlton Mellick (220)

It is easy to slip into hyberbole, so I try my best not to. But I can say without equivocation that this is the worst book I’ve read in at least the last five years. The first twenty pages are gibberish. The book is littered with scribbles and the rest is double-spaced 14pt font like a kid trying to cheat at a school essay.

The book was written, as it says in the forward, as a stream of consciousness. It shows. There is little subtlety and the imagery has nothing behind it. The form is dreadful. There are little flashes of interesting topics, only to be brushed aside and forgotten.

It is just a stupid work. I’ve seen him do better, but maybe it was just a fluke. I cannot recommend this to anyone.

Flatlander by Larry Niven (360)

This was given to me as a Christmas gift and I let it sit on the shelf collecting dust for far too long. I came onto this in my pre-Kindle part of the year when I was looking for a small paperback to cram into the subway with me. This is a collection of short stories about Gil “the Arm” Anderson, a future detective with a psychic third arm. Quite hard-boiled in its own way and Niven is one of the masters of science fiction. Hard sci-fi normally isn’t my genre, but he keeps the mysteries so fluid and dynamic that none of the stories in the collection is a dud, which I find to be a rare occurrence.

Hespira by Matthew Hughes (220)

Disclaimer: I’m a big Matthew Hughes fan. I’ve read all of his Archonate work of which this is the final volume of the Hengis Hapthorne saga which has spanned three books and a collection of short stories. Some find him to be a bit too droll but I find it suits his main character, a futuristic interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, to a T. This was sort of a whimper to go out on. Hespira isn’t the strongest of Hapthrone novels, although it is quite entertaining, and while most of his previous Hapthorne stories end with some major shift in the character’s circumstances. Hespira ends in a milquetoast manner. If you’ve read Majestrum and Spiral Labyrinth, by all means pick this up. Otherwise,Template or his upcoming Hell and Back series would be better recommendations.

Kraken by China Mieville (528)

I was a bit split coming into this. I absolutely loved Perdido Street Station and The Scar(the latter being my favorite fiction book tied with House of Leaves). Iron Council left me a little wanting, but was still good. I found his non-Bas Lag stuff I had read a bit trodding. And unfortunately Kraken starts slow. It has to because it is a normal-man-finds-there-is-a-second-world-of-magic story so the author needs to provide some contrast. I almost gave up. Luckily I didn’t. Once one pair of the many antagonists in the story, Goss and Subby, unfold themselves (literally) from a delivered package then the book really picks up. Mieville’s strong suit is his use of weirdness that somehow fits his worlds. Once he creates his ur-London full of talking tattoos, sentient seas and so forth, he really hits his stride. Kraken’s a page-turner, but not Mieville’s best. However, Mieville’s second-tier is better than most author’s first tiers.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi (320)

Scalzi has a popular blog and all the social connections that matter in being a geek, so I’ve heard a lot of praise for Old Man’s War. It has a compelling premise: 75-year-old humans are recruited to fight in a war that the recruitees know nothing about and powered by technology that does not exist on the home planet. The book slides along thanks in part to Scalzi’s witty dialogue and punctual prose. The plot owes much toStarship Troopers and Scalzi admits as much in the acknowledgements. I probably won’t be reading the later entries in the series. For one, the premise doesn’t really tie in to the action or the climax. There’s really no reason the recruits need to be old men and women isolated from the technological future brought to the present by the CDF except for that it makes for a good introduction to the universe for the reader. I was a little disappointed by that. The action was fast paced, but I don’t feel there is much change in the world by the end. I can see why others like it. The story just wasn’t my bag.

The Passage by Justin Cronin (762)

As you will see from the page numbers on this list, I generally like my books to be in the <400 page range. I find longer books to be very out of focus (hi, Stephen King) or full of filler (hi, Tolkien) and that their characters wear out their welcomes. Maybe most authors just don’t have deep enough plots or characters to keep something going that long so they either drag (hi, Children’s Hospital!) or repeat. This is why, despite glowing reviews, I kept The Passage on the shelf for as long as I did. What a shame that I did as this was the most page turning fiction book I read all year. I want to shy away from spoilers but here is the book in a nutshell: there is a government conspiracy (yawn) to make super-soldiers (yawn) but the failed test subjects escape (yea, so) and start the Apocalypse. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. The “virals” are crosses between vampires and zombies, and luckily you won’t see any Meyer sparkling here. And despite their brutality, there is still a shred of the souls they once had.Cliche cliche cliche, right? But where the book shines is the characters and world building. The world as it settles after the virus is startlingly consistent and progressively more and more intriguing as you shy away from the Colony. If there were any critiques I could levy against it is would be that 1) it is not clear from the cover that this is the first in a series, 2) early in the book is a bit melodramatic as it seems that everything that can possibly go wrong in a person’s history goes wrong to every character in the book and 3) the climax ends up involving some minor characters and so you end up feeling a bit misled. I’d recommend this to anyone that loves a page-turning horror book. Five imaginary, now visible stars. This would make an incredible TV miniseries.

Template by Matthew Hughes (245*)

As I note above, I’m a big big Hughes fan. He had mentioned on his website of this story Template and how it was being published in Canada, but not the US. So I emailed him asking how I could get a hold of it here in the states and he thanked me for my interest and emailed me the entire manuscript! Awesome! This was two years ago and it sat in my email box since because reading a novel on my PC screen just hasn’t been ergonomic. But now that I have a Kindle, it is perfect. I downloaded that over to the device and went to town.

Template is Hughes’ best work. Conn Labro is an indentured fighter on a planet that essentially is a very libertarian Las Vegas where everything is a transaction, a contract and has a price. Many authors would provide some sort of scoffing social commentary here, but instead Hughes sets it up and let’s it play by its own rules instead of thrusting his politics into the story. Conn’s boss and only friend are killed which sets off a story where he must find who wants him dead and why. He is contrasted with Jenore, a woman from an Old Earth sect that is just the opposite of Labro’s “transactionalism” – her society frowns entirely on using money. But her people are not communists – their society is based on family and respect.

Hughes’ dialogue is always very matter-of-fact and many find it overly droll and stiff. I enjoy his unique tone. The story was compelling to the very end and dovetails nicely with his other Archonate stories.

In the two years since, Template has found a publisher, so it can be bought without wheedling with the author. Yay! His upcoming series strays from the Archonate universe, so this is a great sending-off.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon (443)

This was another Christmas gift which explains the out of genre selection. Chabon is an excellent writer though and he doesn’t need to be genre to be compelling, although with this book he enters a realm of Alternate History which sort of tickles that itch. Instead of Israel, Jews settled in a province of Alaska called Sitka and instead of anti-Semitism boiling off, it raged on. Sitka is set to expire and be given back to the US and all the Jews must go somewhere else. This isn’t the plot, but only a backdrop element which serves to lend a sort of apocalyptic tone to the story. What it is at its heart is a detective story, with rabbi mafioso and loose cannon cops. Thanks to a heaping helping of conjured Yiddish-Alaskan patois the book gives off a very unique sheen. I dug it.

Nonfiction

The Black Swan (2nd Edition) by Nicholas Taleb (480)

I don’t tend to re-read books. They stick with me pretty well, so I get bored on second readings. However, The Black Swan was both so important and so dense with information that I plan on giving it another read through before too long. Taleb’s main premise is Socratic in nature: we are overconfident in what we know. We base our predictions of the future on the past which is horribly irrelevant in the case of events that have never happened before. He rails against academics in quite a pompous way that would have turned me off if he didn’t seem to be so damn correct. The titular Black Swan is an event which is an outlier with extreme impact that we humans tend to give explanation to post facto as if it were predictable beforehand. He spends a lot of time defining the difference between “Mediocristan” variables – things that can be modeled by bell curves and standard operating procedure and “Extremistan” variables that are Mandlebrotian and in the realm of the Black Swan. I could try to further summarize here, but the book is too full of interesting arguments and too layered in its approach for me to do justice to it. Instead, I encourage you to pick it up. It has radical consequences for anyone who does business, makes predictions or votes. It is my Book of the Year.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (320)
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (309)
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (301)

Yeah, I hit up the whole trilogy this year after starting and quitting Tipping Point in 2004. His books are formulaic and scientifically suspect, but are generally entertaining and interesting. So if you manage your expectations thoroughly (throw rigor to the curb), you will likely enjoy them a bunch as well.

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall (304)

Running and me aren’t friends. I get shin splints and have more or less chronic ankle pain from repeated injuries. I discovered Vibram Fivefingers shoes a year ago and fell in love with them as they helped alleviate some of that aforementioned pain. When I was doing research on the shoes (they are expensive for what they are), I kept seeing references to this book. McDougall takes a thoroughly uninteresting subject (running) and explores its odd side (ultras) with enough crazy characters that I don’t know why this isn’t a movie yet but Blind Side is. I recommend this both as a story and as something providing some fundamental insight to an activity that we all do from time to time.

The Cult of the President by Gene Healy (312)

A year might as well be a century in the world of books about current politics. This one was released into the wild as a free e-book by the publisher and I picked it up on a whim. It is a refreshingly well-researched book on the ascension of executive-branch power from the founding to 2008. Unlike most I’ve sampled, it isn’t left vs. right – pretty much every modern president is skewered by history. If you are concerned with a Presidency that can wage war or shut down the internet on a whim, maybe you could download it and give it a read, too?

Drive by Daniel Pink (256)

I may add this to my essential game designer’s library. While it isn’t scientifically conclusive, it provides enormous consequences for everything from how a game designer creates motivational cues for players to how studios organize to actually finish a project. The impetus for reading this came from Chris Hecker’s GDC talk. We haven’t heard the last of this topic. Be familiar with it or ignore it at your own peril.

Extra Lives by Tom Bissell (240)

I already gave my impressions on this one here.

Foundation Game Design with Flash by Rex van der Spuy (586)

This is my third attempt at learning actionscript. I tried around 2000 and it was a gross mess. I tried around 2006 when it was Actionscript 2.0 and I still couldn’t make sense of the stage, library, etc. what with code running in objects and on frames and when does x do y? Actionscript 3.0 seems to be the answer because with this book I’m finally starting to get it. I actually read this cover to cover and while some of the sections were pretty noob, it didn’t spend three chapters on “a variable is like a box” like many other books do. The tone was a little juvenile at times, but it did just the right amount of hand holding for me to get started again and move on to a more substantiative tome.

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner (352)

This was the first book I downloaded to my Kindle. It had been on my wish list for so long that it was turning bituminous. After reading it, I find it hard to remember any of the central tenets. It was interesting as I went for cool psychological/economic experiments, but it was mostly throwaway and the style is done better by Gladwell.

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo (256)

If you haven’t read Presentation Zen, slide:ology and/or Brain Rules, then maybe you will find some interesting bits in this book. I can’t complain about the messages in this book – everyone needs to learn how to be a better presenter. But like many business books, the twelve rules here could have been done in a long article instead of a short book. Then at least the author could have embedded video. There’s a lot of fluff or irrelevant content (pictures of Jobs, tables of talk transcripts) that do little but pad the book. I’m a big Apple fan, but large parts of this book reads more like a Jobs love-fest than a presentation how-to.

Steve has a luxury most don’t: he controls everything about his presentations and has the resources to present in the manner he finds will best get his message across. The vast majority of us do not have those luxuries. While there are a lot of great rules in the book, unless you are presenting something that is highly visual and have the artistic resources to procure vivid imagery, a lot of the particulars of the keynote’s will be irrelevant.

There are simply better books on this topic elsewhere.

Yes! 50 Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Goldstein, Martin & Cialdini (272)

I loved the format of this book. It is presented as fifty short magazine style pieces each summarizing a piece of research from the realms of psychology or decision science. Carnegie Mellon was/is a bit of a decision science research hub, but I was still surprised to read of one study where participants watched either a sad or control video, had to write about it and then were offered to take a small amount of money or a nice set of highlighters for their time. This study was designed to evaluate whether people will spend more money for the highlighters when sad. But what stuck with me from it was that I was a test subject in that study. In my intro to psych class, we were required to participate in a number of studies for credit and I distinctly remember that experience. I don’t remember if I chose the highlighters or the money, but I do remember watching the sad clip. I never knew what they were measuring until I read this almost a decade later. Back to the book – it doesn’t delve deep (it doesn’t try to) but the skimming overview would be very interesting for anyone interested in the subject and the book offers takeaways for each principle.

Other

Gamma World Rules (160)

Haven’t played D&D since 2nd edition, but I picked up Gamma World on a lark via the Penny Arcade recommendation and blazed through the rules. It’s a very interesting gateway D&D. If only I had the people to play with, it might be a regular thing.

Book-Length Magazines

Fantasy & Science Fiction 10-11/2009 (260)
Fantasy & Science Fiction 12/2009 (260)
Fantasy & Science Fiction 1-2/2010 (260)
Fantasy & Science Fiction 3-4/2010 (260)
Fantasy & Science Fiction 5-6/2010 (260)
Fantasy & Science Fiction 7-8/2010 (260)
Fantasy & Science Fiction 9-10/2010 (260)

Clearly, I subscribe. It is the best bimonthly collection of speculative fiction out there, though I do find they rely way too heavily on certain authors. There is so much new good stuff out there, there is no need to have Reynolds or Reed (or both!) in every damn issue.

Mostly Illustrated But Most Having A Good Deal of Text As Well

Dapper Caps and Pedal-Copters by David Malki (96)
The Halls Below by Holkins and Krahulik (136)
The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade by Holkins and Krahulik (164)

These are all webcomics collections. I try to support my favorites by buying their collections since they give me joy every week for free. The Splendid Magic Penny Arcade book is more of a behind-the-scenes at the wild success of all the PA guys’ ventures. I got it signed when they came into town. We had a very brief chat where I thanked them as a developer for not speaking bullshit like the rest of the press. When Jerry asked me what I worked on and I told him a Facebook game, I watched his interest fade out of his eyes as if I told him I was a tax accountant. Sigh.

Extra Lives’ subtitle is “Why Video Games Matter”, which is sort of inappropriate because the text itself does a fairly poor job of making any kind of argument. The book is at its best in the early chapters, particularly the one about Resident Evil, exercising what is awkwardly called “The New Games Journalism”. Bissell unfortunately plays up to the stereotypes of gamers: underachievement, mixing real and artificial relationships and addiction (the tepid Grand Theft Auto IV chapter also details his addiction to cocaine).

The book is essentially a collection of essays, one of which was published in The New Yorker and which I complained about last year upon reading it for being too gee-whiz. His chapter on Braid falls for the same sort of fetishism, but the Far Cry 2 chapter which interviews Clint Hocking is surprisingly adroit at addressing what was unique about the underrated title.

If the thesis of the book is “Why Games Matter”, then it is only touched upon in a very meta way. Indeed, the quality of the prose in the book is vivid. If game reviews read like this, I’d be more apt to actually read them. A better subtitle might have been, “Why Games Are Trying to Matter”, because the pathetic swings at trying to rationalize his addiction leaves a sorry-feeling miasma over the whole book. But I don’t think the book was for me. It was for non-gamers. So perhaps I am unqualified to take his book as a softcore polemic towards the Eberts of the world.

I’m being hard on it.The book is entertaining at times and I found myself highlighting all over the early chapters for its more general insights.

Here, on my arch-nemesis, tutorials:

It would be hard to imagine a formal convention more inherently bizarre than the video-game tutorial. Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book.

On Resident Evil and utterly stupid stories:

[It] helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation and characterization [...] But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

On quantity of detail not being the definition of story:

For many gamers [...] and game designers, story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise creative achievement of any number of games.

When the author tries to dig deeper and find some interconnecting bonds, he fails. Perhaps the author is too ashamed of his addiction that he is desperately trying to attach meaning to it in oblique ways. Overall, the work is entertaining despite not really addressing a core thesis in a meaningful way.

You would think being unemployed would have given me a lot more time to read, but obviously this wasn’t the case. Whereas 2008 gave me two of my three favorite books of all time (Perdido Street Station and The Scar), I had no such luck with gems in 2009. Iron Council didn’t live up to the previous two (and is probably why Mieville took a hiatus from Bas-Lag novels), I spent some energy on business-y books (Kawasaki, LeBouef, etc.) and Fantasy and Science Fiction cut down their magazine to a 150% sized bi-monthly format to cut costs. Regardless, I’m still behind. Liar’s Poker was a great find and recommended. Here Comes Everybody could have been contentless but certainly wasn’t.

Last year: 31 Titles, 7,967 Pages, 21.77 Pages/Day (2008 was a leap year)
This year: 18 Titles, 4,960 Pages, 13.59 Pages/Day

Fiction

• Achewood – Worst Song Played on Ugliest Guitar by Chris Onstad (Graphic, 136) Hopefully the first in a long line of director’s cut styled Achewood anthologies. The best thing on the Internet, now in dead tree form.
• Flight – Volume 5 (Graphic, 363) – I didn’t buy volume six. The art is just remarkable, but I don’t find myself coming back to any of the stories anymore. Stopping my auto-buy of Flight anthologies was simply a cost-cutting measure.
• Iron Council by China Mieville (564) – By any measure, this is a good “New Weird” fantasy novel. But after his previous two, there was such high expectations that simply weren’t met here. A good read if you devoured his first two Bas-Lag novels.
• Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (297) – Wow. I read the titular novella in Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2005 (?) and loved it. Having not really read anything else of hers since, I saw this collection and tried my luck. No one-hit wonder, there is barely a flat note in the whole collection. Her other works now line my Amazon wish list.

Non-Fiction

• Art of the Start – Guy Kawasaki (217) – Bootstrap. There. I saved you 217 pages.
• Enough – John C. Bogle (255) – I love Bogle and this is a great semi-autobiographic book about avarice in the financial industry. Not too heavy and if you know Jack Bogle at all, it is pretty predictable, but it has a great message.
• Football Official’s Guidebook (Crews of Four and Five) High School Mechanics 2009 (262) – I wish this book would have been required of me my first year officiating. Fantastic and filled many of the holes left in my training.
• Here Comes Everyone - Clay Shirky (304) – I commented about this above. A great book on living and working in a crowdsourced world. I need to read it again since it was the first book I read last year and I’m a bit foggy on the details.
• 2009 High School Football Rules Simplified and Illustrated (181) – This was essentially useless.
• Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis (249) – Fantastic autobiographical look at 1980s bond trading that is waaaay more entertaining than you would think the subject matter would be. Lewis shows his skills as a writer that would make him famous with The Blind Side and Moneyball. Love it.
• The New New Thing by Michael Lewis (269) – Picked this up right away after finishing Liar’s Poker. Same style, but the subject matter is the go-go Internet bubble and one of it’s biggest personalities – the founder of Netscape and two other billion dollar companies.
• The Perfect Business by Michael LeBoeuf (224) – Okay, but not what I was looking for.
• Ignore Everbody - Hugh McLeod (159) – If you read McLeod’s blog (and I did), then you get most of this book from his “Rules for Creativity” post. I stopped following him on blog and twitter because he became nasty and when that personality veil falls, it is tough to get back. Still, the words in this boo are wise and you can read it standing in a Barnes & Noble pretty quickly, not that I condone that.

F&SF

• Fantasy & Science Fiction 02/09 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 03/09 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 04-05/09 (260)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 06-07/09 (260)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 08-09/09 (320) – There were a lot of great stories in F&SF this year, but since all my copies are in boxes right now, I can’t crack them open and reference. They don’t have enough new authors, but the quality is quite consistent.

I’ve had this post in my drafts folder for a while, mostly because I don’t think anyone particular cares but also because it is kind of long. But I’ve really not been feeling games recently, so now’s the time to bring it out. As you see, I keep a tally of what I’ve read in the year on my sidebar. Here’s what I read in 2008, with some short annotations so if you are interested in the genres or subjects that these titles cover, you can at least get a brief, honest opinion on them. If you aren’t interested in that, consider yourself given fair warning.

Remember, friends, the Book It! reading program a lot of schools did back when? You would get a sticker on a button for every book you read and when you had five stickers, you could go to Pizza Hut and get a free pepperoni (!) personal pan pizza. Awesome. I just did some searching and it still exists! I’d like to trade this list for six personal pan pizzas, please.

Non-Fiction
8 Titles, 2,122 Pages.

• The Anatomy of Story – John Truby (464) – This is a book that was recommended to me about story structure and out of the dozen or so of these books I’ve read in the last decade, I found this one to be the most useful. While Truby addresses the subject from the vantage of a screenwriter, it still offers a lot of prescription for those in other media. I say ‘prescription’ because a lot of these books simply analyze stories after the fact and don’t help much with how to actually construct one. While I found it to be a little long-winded, it was definitely a positive read.
• Brain Rules – John Medina (301) – I think I picked this one up off a mention on Garr Reynolds’ blog. Medina writes about how the brain works in very down-to-Earth even-a-business-school-student-could-understand tones. Surprisingly, and this is why I picked up the book, there are a lot of lessons for game designers in regards to how the brain directs attention and how it can handle simultaneous events.
• Fail Safe Investing – Harry Browne (176) – Browne was my idol once I read his book that accompanied his 2000 presidential run. But he was also a gifted mind when it came to investing. Eschewing the precious metal speculating that made him his fortune, he instead creates a investing philosophy based on the almost Socratic idea that nothing is certain and that no “system” will make you rich. With the financial meltdown of the past year, I was prompted to pick up this work of his from days-gone-by. While I think it is a little too dogmatic at times, following his advice sure would have made us lose a lot less money in this recent downturn. Next to the Boglehead’s Guide to Investing, this probably the most important investment book to read.
• How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy – Orson Scott Card (137) – I bought this on a whim browsing at a local Barnes & Noble. It is a short, entertaining read, but it honestly doesn’t offer much useful advice.
• The Last Lecture – Randy Pausch (206) – Unless you were under Iraq for the past year, you’ve heard of Randy Pausch’s emotional final journey. I’m not one for “self-help” books, because I’ve always thought that “seizing the day” was pretty common knowledge. Throw that notion out the window and beg, borrow or steal Pausch’s book. My wallpaper on my phone is a brick wall so that I am always reminded of Randy’s stated purpose of brick walls. I’m not a particularly emotional person, but I cried at the end of this, and I don’t think that is just because I had the blessing of briefly knowing Randy when he was alive. This is in my Top 10 books of all time, and I hope I still have it to give to my kids some day when they get to the age to go out into the world.
• Made to Stick - Chip & Dan Heath (304) – This sort of a Tipping Point lite whose main conceit is that ideas are “sticky” if they follow the acronym of SUCCESs: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. That I remembered the SUCCESs acronym is testament to the stickiness of that idea. This is the sort of book you would pick up in an airport bookstore to tide you over on a cross-country flight. It includes some great examples, but it isn’t something I’d use as a textbook.
• Presentation Zen – Garr Reynolds (240) – This is The Book regarding making Powerpoint presentations. If you are frustrated having to read people’s talk notes on the screen in the ugly default template while they stammer along, this is the book for you. I followed Garr’s great blog after reading this book and am now a devoted follower. He’s a nice guy, too! Warning: his method is seen as blasphemous at many places like my former employer where they expect your slides to be a document that is read verbatim to the audience.
• Slide:ology – Nancy Duarte (294) – I was kind of jazzed off of reading Presentation Zen and so I picked up this book by the lady that turned Al Gore’s science fiction story idea into an Oscar winning film presentation. This book seems to rely more on the visual presentation of information as opposed to the more philosophical approach of Presentation Zen. It was alright, but I recommend Presentation Zen a lot more.

Fiction
8 Titles, 3,221 Pages.

• Fragile Things – Neil Gaiman (416) – This collection of short stories turned me off on Gaiman. Yes, yes, internet blasphemy, I know. There were a few real gems in here like the story of how a man spends his punishment in Hell (which could have been trite in lesser hands), but most of Gaiman’s stories follow the same beats with the same characters and the same isn’t-this-whimsical tone. That doesn’t make Gaiman a bad writer (clearly not as he is raking it in), it just makes me tired of his work.
• McSweeney’s Quarterly #26 (228) – I’ve been a subscriber to McSweeney’s since college, but I’ve found the quality to be going downhill. As such, this is the last issue I’ve read and I don’t even remember the issue’s theme. I have issues #27-#30 sitting on my to-do shelf and I just don’t have the momentum to get into them. Perhaps the backlog gets back into stride, but I’ve found other sources (like F&SF magazine) to be sources of much more compelling content.
• The New Weird (320) – After reading Perdido Street Station (see below), I was compelled to find more fantasy like it and came across this anthology of a new school of speculative fiction that dovetails with what Mieville was doing in his work. The anthology is hit or miss and I found the analytical pieces to be dreadful, but overall it gave me a short list of new authors to check out, Simon Ings and Paul DiFillipo in particular. Strangely, I found Mieville’s story to be lacking.
• Perdido Street Station – China Mieville (640) – I was entranced by this novel. I don’t even know what to say without ruining any of it. It got me excited about speculative fiction again and spawned the reading of a lot of the items on this list. Much like my opinion in the video game field, I am so tired of the Tolkien notes in fantasy story writing that I had given up on the entire genre. Well here happens a new entry that trades rural, woodsy, magical charms for urban, gritty and sort-of-Enlightenment era science without losing that air of anything being possible that keeps fantasy interesting. Add to that the relevant social issues facing the world and the characters and you have a universe that is wholly original and interesting. It would be my fiction book of the year…
• The Scar – China Mieville (578) – This is a sort of pseudo-sequel to Perdido Street Station in that it takes place in the same world with events that reference events in the first novel.  Not only does it recreate the wonder of the first novel, but it exceeds it due to a much tighter structure with reveal after reveal and twist after twist without any deus ex machina (literally) or less than believable characters as in the first. Not only is this my fiction book of the year, but it is my fiction book of all time dethroning House of Leaves. I plan on someday returning to this book just to write out the pacing and timing of the story so I can mimic it myself in the future.
• Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (408) – I’m a fan of anthologies because you get a lot of different voices under one roof. This was a pretty good collection, but I honestly struggle to remember any particular stories, so it couldn’t have been that great.
• Wild Seed – Octavia Butler (279) – I picked this up simply due to the glowing references to it in Card’s book about writing science fiction and fantasy. It is a superbly crafted story, but I felt it went on too long with too little payoff. The idea is brilliant, but I found the actual read pretty brutal.
• World War Z – Max Brooks (352) – Zombies. I’m such a sucker. I get dragged in by anything with zombies that someone tells me is good. World War Z gets points on its use of format: a journalist’s series of interviews after the fact, but as far as originality, the stories themselves are pretty standard zombie tropes, with the exception of the story of decimation in the Russian army which actually correctly uses the term decimation. This is the “popcorn flick” of the list.

Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine
12 Titles, 2000 Pages

If you like short speculative fiction, here’s the magazine of choice. There’s only been one issue in the past thirty or so where I didn’t find at least two stories that I thought were fantastic. I wasn’t planning on putting magazines or other short-form things on this list, but since each issue is a 160 or 240 page anthology, these might as well be books.

I’m sort of upset that they are going to a double-issue bi-monthly format because one of the great perks of the magazine was that it could (just barely) fit in my jacket pocket when few other books could.

• Fantasy & Science Fiction 1/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 2/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 3/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 4/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 5/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 6/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 7/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 8/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 9/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 10-11/08 (240)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 12/08 (160)
• Fantasy & Science Fiction 1/09 (160)

Graphic Novels
3 Titles, 624 Pages

These are sort of cheating, so I am putting them at the end.

• Flight – Volume 4 (352) – “Flight” is a fantastic anthology of mostly one-off graphic stories. They tend towards the cute and whimsical but some can contain startling power. The anthology always has a wide variety of art and narrative styles, so if you are looking for something not too challenging, this is probably it.
• Girls - Volume 4 (168) – The Luna Brothers are great artists and have come up with an interesting premise that peters out by these final issues. At least I was disappointed.
• The Great Outdoor Fight – Chris Onstad (104) – Achewood is the best comic on the Internet and this is one of the best arcs in the history of the strip. I’m pretty sure that if you don’t already get Achewood (and it takes a while to get) that starting here won’t exactly be the best idea. Nonetheless, I recommend the whole strip and bought this anthology to support the creator.

Grand total:
31 Titles, 7,967 Pages, 21.77 Pages/Day (2008 was a leap year)

I haven’t posted any real content in five days, so mea magna culpa.

I’ve been busy. I’m excited about the new title I am working on, if we actually get to make it how it looks in my head. That’s all I can say. I’ve found the hardest part of game design to be the interpersonal relationships involved in communicating ideas and eliciting trust.

I’ve been reading the book Brain Rules after seeing it recommended on Garr Reynolds’ blog and it is a fantastic read. It is everything you wanted to know about how we understand the brain but didn’t know you wanted to know. The author keeps a very light-toned James Burke sort of style, teasing in the following section at the end of the current one. It’s a fantastic tool for anyone who has to present anything to any sort of audience – which is most of us, but it is of great use to game designers. I may make a Library section some day soon with all the books that have been helpful to me thus far in my career. The list would be small now, but it’s expanded by two this year alone.

I’m still suffering through GTA4. Every day, I uncover a new bug that makes me unhappy. There are some simple usability tweaks that R* could have done to this game that would allow me to put up with them (save anywhere, jump to a place you’ve been before as in Oblivion, make the cops less omniscient) but as such every time I get killed thanks to the targeting reticule deciding against targeting the guy with the shotgun 10 feet in front of me and instead focusing on the guy a hundred yards away, I have to grind out the getting a taxi / driving halfway across the world and it gives me plenty of time to stew over what I don’t like about the game.

I like to read, but haven’t really had the time lately. So last week I polished off McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #23 and I’m now working on my three backlogged issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. The June issue has a story with the following opening sentence which instantly renews my desire to write again:

“So we’re sitting at a table in a Starbucks, and the beefy guy in the Hawaiian shirt says to me, “Yeah, after the colostomy, I had them put an eyeball in my anus – seemed like a good idea at the time.”