Chaos Reading discussion

Thought it might be fun and bring up some interesting reads if we look at our 2015 books vis GR stats (instructions below if you're uncertain how to easily find this info)...

How many books did you give 5 stars?
Which one do you think other Chaos members might most enjoy?

How many books did you give 1 star (or the lowest rating you gave in 2015)?
From which one would you like to save other Chaos members?

------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOW TO FIND THIS INFO
- Go to "My Books" on GR
- Scroll down toward the bottom of the left column and click "Stats"
- Choose "Details" to the right of "2015"

Cool idea, Marc!!

Of 112 books, I gave 33 5*! Funny how it never feels like that, huh?
Some great indies, like the work of Rupert Dreyfus, Harry Whitewolf, Arthur Graham and MJ Black. Plus I finally read a Bradbury that I liked: The Martian Chronicles, and learned what a fix-up novel was (dense and cool!)

For how much I enjoyed hating A Little Life, and the many fellow haters with whom I subsequently connected, maybe I can recommend it! What with indies, terribles, classics and contemporaries, each present their own unique type of accessory joys that extend beyond the text proper :D

Wow--33?!!! That's fantastic. I'd call that a good reading year, Leo. Always fun to discover new authors, too. Some books are more fun to bash on than others--sounds like A Little Life is a stellar GR pinata.

I gave 5 stars to 12 books (I'm stingy with my 5-star-ratings!). I think The First Bad Man or How to Be Both might appeal to this group.

I gave 1 star to a single book (I almost never give out only one star). It was Selected Poems and Four Plays by Yeats (it was a gift and I think I read it out of obligation and really didn't warm to it... ever... I tried... )

Agreed, cool topic!

The star rating is always a difficult proposition. My lowest rating was 2 stars for A Wrinkle in Time. Probably unfair since I was mainly driven to distraction by the overt Christian messaging. Had it been a book by a lesser-known writer, I would have refrained from rating it entirely since it's really a case of 'not a book for me'. I don't have any other 2's or any 1's. I'll give up on a book that I think is that bad. Had I finished A Little Life, it would have been a 2 as well.

I like Miranda July’s films, didn’t know about the books. And Leo’s choices are of course far more esoteric than my cultural awareness typically extends.

Of 54 books I read, I gave 5 stars to 13 of them. I think the stand-outs for uniqueness were City of Saints and Madmen, In the Night Garden, and The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq. For anyone with any interest at all in YA, or who thinks it’s the same book over and over, I highly recommend Shadowshaper.

I didn't get through many thanks to the huge life change of becoming a full time funeral director and being on call or fretting about a cremation or suicide instead of diving into a book

so I only read 21, and I can't say I finished all of them. the mantra of life being too short for a shit book gets more volume every year for me

the good ones were Ghostwritten, A Brief History of Time and Johnny Cash: The Life. i'd recommend all three for being just immersive rewarding experiences

the bad ones were Yes Please and Anansi Boys. god they were awful. and The Book of Strange New Things did the unforgivable - it was boring. there is no excuse for writing a boring book and man was this monotonous turgid. staid. it's wet mud printed.

there were a few in the middle books. The Girl with All the Gifts being the one that sticks out for having potential but falling back on so much rip off material

and it's a cheat but I started in 2015 and finished in 2016 I Am Pilgrim and it was flat out fantastic. a brilliantly written thriller with characters you believe in and motivations you can understand and no james bond megalomania bad guy. so so good

Great idea Marc! I had a shocking reading year in 2015 (life stuff, you know) and only read 13 books.

Somehow I managed to read 3 5-Star books amongst them though: American Elsewhere, The Waking Engine and Railsea.

My lowest book rating was 3-Stars, so even those I enjoyed to some extent. They were the second two books in Mira Grant's Parasitology Trilogy and Total Chaos, which was just a little testicular for me, but still very well written.

I read 55 books.

13 I gave 5 stars.

26 I gave 4 stars.

10 I gave 3 stars

there is one 2 star and one 1 star

My favorites were : Soon I Will Be Invincible, Lilith's Brood and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. I could easily re-read them.

Please don't read The Lover. Watch the movie. It is FAR better.

Sounds like I've been holding out on some gems: City of Saints and Madmen, Ghostwritten, and Railsea are all in a to-be-read pile by my bed (which I keep burying with books from the library). I started this thing where if I see a book I've been meaning to read and it's free or at the library, I grab it. I hope to get to all of Butler's books eventually and Lilith's Brood is one I haven't read yet!

I think I was 12 when I read A Wrinkle in Time...

I didn't expect everyone to have so many 5-star selections--that's awesome :D

There were 4 books in 2015 I rated 5 stars. Two of these were books I had read before (and had rated highly). Two others were first reads that immediately warranted 5 stars. That is unusual. If I think a book is a 5, I usually read it again to be certain.

Bringing me to the thirteen 4 star books for 2015. There are two that will probably be 5 star eventually. One is a history/memoir and the other is the Pulitzer Prize winner for its year.

As usual my 3 star ratings are for the majority of title I read and reviewed.

My two star ratings include at one that in my review I describe why it got two and not one star.

No one stars, yet. I'm still thinking about promoting two of the no stars to a one star ranking and writing an appropriate set of comments.

Some of my favorites for the year were:
-> The Martian
-> Circling the Sun
-> Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli -Divide
-> All the Light We Cannot See.

The book that took the brunt of my fury this year was:
->Go Set a Watchman
the reasons for it being two and not one star is contained in the review. By all my normal criteria it should be rated between zero and one, if that was possible.

53 books in 2015. Good, bad, and ugly!

I read 82 books and a couple of the best were All Quiet on the Western Front and 11/22/63. I couldn't even get through The Cuckoo's Calling but I will confess my guilty pleasure of Valley of the Dolls. Even though it was a fluff book, it did help me through a dark time over the summer.

Cora wrote: "I read 82 books and a couple of the best were All Quiet on the Western Front and 11/22/63. I couldn't even get through The Cuckoo's Calling but I will ..."

Sometimes 'fluff" are the best books ever.

Marc wrote: "Sounds like I've been holding out on some gems: City of Saints and Madmen, Ghostwritten, and Railsea are all in a to-be-read pile by my bed (which I keep b..."

Lilith's Brood, I was gobsmacked. I could not stop reading the books. My library had a copy that had all three novels in it. The world stopped for me.

Jennifer wrote: "The world stopped for me."
I'm more than sold!

I hope you enjoy it Marc. I found myself telling my reading co-workers to read it. Thankfully they seemed to understand my babbling.

Leo wrote: "Of 112 books, I gave 33 5*! "

I don't have 33 five star books... ever!

91 books.
3 *****: but two of those were rereads, that I'd already given 5 stars to
39 ****: much higher than my normal. I'm getting soft in my old age
30 ***
15 **
4 * : which means I didn't finish it (though one was a protest for 2015 on Goodreads—it's apparently OK for GR staff to create reviews for books that don't exist, but it's utterly verboten for the rest of us!)

Whitney wrote: "For anyone with any interest at all in YA, or who thinks it’s the same book over and over, I highly recommend Shadowshaper."

I'll take you up on that. I have an interest in YA and I think there's an awful lot of "the same book over and over".

So, my only new 5-star read was Three Parts Dead. I know you've all read that by now, but for the one person who didn't: do!

Richard, I do wish you hadn't said that about Anansi Boys. I've probably owned it for two years now, and still haven't got around to it. Since your rating skills are obviously excellent (I totally agree with you about I Am Pilgrim), I doubt Anansi Boys is going to get any closer to the top of the heap.

CD wrote: "The book that took the brunt of my fury this year was:
->Go Set a Watchman"

I figure anyone who disliked that has only themselves to blame ;-) It was, at Lee's own request, published without editing, and it wasn't good enough to be published when To Kill a Mockingbird was published (at least in Lee's opinion: I don't think a publisher ever saw it). It's an important work, but that doesn't mean it's a good one.

Cora, I think you're the second or third person I saw who read and thoroughly enjoyed All Quiet on the Western Front last year! Nothing wrong with fluff--even master chefs admit to liking McDonald's french fries :p

CD, All the Light We Cannot See almost made the 5-star rating for me. I'm pretty sure Leo was a fan of The Martian, too!

Derek, your review of Three Parts Dead got me to check it out of the library (I'm whittling my way down to it through my borrowed pile).

Graphic novel-wise, Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes and Wuvable Oaf were my favorites from 2015. You can enjoy some of the artwork from Wuvable Oaf in my review.

Marc wrote: "Derek, your review of Three Parts Dead got me to check it out of the library (I'm whittling my way down to it through my borrowed pile)."

I had to actually win it from Goodreads to get around to it! I already owned the second book, which I'd been putting off until I got to the first.

Cora wrote: "I read 82 books and a couple of the best were All Quiet on the Western Front and 11/22/63. I couldn't even get through The Cuckoo's Calling but I will ..."

Cuckoos I didn't mind as a read but the mystery was buried in characterisation and peripheral detail. The follow up was even more so. I like the characters but I haven't gone back for book 3.

Derek wrote: "Whitney wrote: "For anyone with any interest at all in YA, or who thinks it’s the same book over and over, I highly recommend Shadowshaper."

I'll take you up on that. I have an interest in YA and ..."

II came to Gaiman late with The Graveyard Book and Ocean At The End of the Lane. With both of those books he has mastered brevity. Wading into his earlier work the brevity isn't there. Anansi felt over written to me. It was good writing but just too damn much of it.

Like trying to read Stephen Hero by Joyce, it's too much, too long and too self indulgent

I keep trying to like Gaiman... It's not that I dislike him, I just don't think he merits as much of the fuss as he gets (no offense to any fans). This is after reading American Gods, The Graveyard Book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane... I should probably try The Sandman series.

I've read quite a bit of Gaiman, and I set Anansi Boys aside, just wasn't doing it for me.

I started on Gaiman with Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, which was before he was Neil Gaiman and was just that guy who wrote a book with Terry Pratchett.

Then I read the Sandman series, which made me a life-long Gaiman fan, as well as getting me to pay a little more attention to graphic novels. All this by way of saying give Sandman a go.

Agreed. I have the whole sand man series. I've only read volume 1 - 5 at the mo but it's nice knowing I can read the rest any old time

Whitney wrote: "I've read quite a bit of Gaiman, and I set Anansi Boys aside, just wasn't doing it for me."

There it goes, sliding further down the pile.

Whitney wrote: "I've read quite a bit of Gaiman, and I set Anansi Boys aside, just wasn't doing it for me."

I remember reading it 10 years ago (wow lol) and thinking @17 it was probably a great book for younger readers. Not a waste of time then but wouldn't recommend it now :/

Will you stone me if i said I have only ever read The Ocean at the End of the Lane? Which was a fine story. But I just don't feel any interest in reading anything else by him.

Good Omens--that's the one people keep recommending--thanks for the reminder, Whitney! I'll probably give Sandman a go sometime this year.

On the flip side, I think I want to like him because he sounds rather personable and interesting based on the interviews I've seen.

Derek wrote: "So, my only new 5-star read was Three Parts Dead. I know you've all read that by now, but for the one person who didn't: do!..."

I think I'm that one person who didn't!

Marc wrote: "Good Omens--that's the one people keep recommending--thanks for the reminder, Whitney! I'll probably give Sandman a go sometime this year.

On the flip side, I think I want to like him because he s..."

I understand the Neil Gaiman ambivalence. I started with American Gods and loved it. I promptly sought out everything else he has written, but none really did it for me in the same way. He does tend to write like Pratchett, and it all just comes across as a bit.... precious, in my view.