This time, I’ve managed to let just a day pass since my last roundup of books from a given year.

2003 started slowly on the reading front; apparently The Idiot took me three months to get through. The first five months of the year saw me read just four books, an extremely low rate. I returned to a normal reading pace thereafter, with some dips and a surge in December.
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Yet again it’s taken me more than a year since the last collection of book favorites. Part of the reason for this delay is that I’ve made abortive efforts to improve the display of book information on this blog, but none of those have reached a point where I think they’re usable. So, basic text lists it is.
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I was tired and stuck in my seat and made the poor choice of watching this awful Liam Neeson action movie. I say “awful” but I don’t just mean bad, I mean its themes and messages were highly questionable and disturbing. Spoilers will follow, but a) it’s not worth seeing and b) I’m not sure they’re “spoilers” with a movie as predictable as this.
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I mentioned Erfworld last year, and I thought I’d plug it again now that it’s moved to its own website and the first book is finished. I remain extremely impressed with it, and am eagerly waiting for Book One to come out in print form. It starts here, and is definitely worth the read.
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I came across The Front Line while surfing Netflix for heist movies recently, and decided to watch it on the basis that it was Irish, relatively well-rated, and also that I’d never heard of it. I ended up being fairly impressed, with some reservations.
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Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed won the Nebula in 1974, and the Hugo and Locus in 1975. It’s a classic of science fiction, but represents a clear break from the three preceding triple-crown winners. It’s much “softer” science fiction, with less focus on technology (even though, in a sense, a technological breakthrough is at the core of the plot) and more focus on social and political issues.
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Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007: The Gathering, Anne Enright.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007: The Road, Cormac McCarthy.
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2007: Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson.

I read The Gathering and Out Stealing Horses this month, and read The Road in August 2008.
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Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008: The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz.
International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2008: De Niro’s Game, Rawi Hage.

I read The White Tiger in December, De Niro’s Game in January, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in February.
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Isaac Asimov wrote The Gods Themselves in 1972, and it was the only one of his novels to win the Nebula award, as well as being the only one to win the Nebula/Locus/Hugo triple. I read it as a teenager, and read it again recently because of its “triple crown” winner status.
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Larry Niven’s Ringworld, written in 1970, is considered a classic work of science fiction and is the first book to have won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards (and was also the first recipient of the Locus). I read it as part of my plan to read all of the eleven “triple crown” winners this year.
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I just wrote a summary of the first book I read this year, The Fall of the Kings. It took me longer than I would have liked, at a little over thirty minutes—ideally I’d like to be significantly more succinct, and to be able to summarize in about fifteen minutes. That’s not as ridiculous as it sounds, since all I really need to do is enough so that I will recall the book, not enough so that someone who’s never read it will be given a good overview. This time, I certainly erred on the side of an overview. In any case, do not read the rest if you ever plan to read the book, since it reveals all the major plot points. Otherwise, if you’re curious about either the summary of this book or what a 30-minutes synopsis of a 510-page fantasy novel looks like, read on (oh, and while not as good as Swordspoint, I do think it’s worth reading).
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slacktivist, author of a colossal serial annotation of the first novel in the Left Behind series (here’s the first entry), has begun a series of comments on the movie.
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The following is a graph of different text types, or modes, in the David Foster Wallace story “The Depressed Person”, as published in the M. Evans and Company 2005 hardcover edition, with f representing footnotes, or rather a line of footnotes, T representing the title line (that is, the line “The Depressed Person” on the first page of the story, which is on page 31 of this, meaning the 2005 M. Evans & Co. hardcover published in New York, edition), n representing (a line of) the other text, the text that is neither footnote nor title, and whose representative letter here clearly suggests that the author, meaning the author of this post, who is definitely not David Foster Wallace, that this author grants a certain privilege to text arbitrarily placed “above the line” even though this author is very aware that this (i.e., this privilege) is highly questionable, perhaps in general and especially when dealing with the work of David Foster Wallace, but ultimately was simply unwilling to come up with another letter particularly since this letter, n, would provide an opportunity for the kind of metacommentary that the author (again, not David Foster Wallace) feels is apt when dealing with the author (this time actually meaning David Foster Wallace), the dashes signifying the bottom of the graph, and the numbers read vertically indicating the page number.
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I went to see Bill Maher’s Religulous on Friday night. The SF Chronicle reviewed it and didn’t like it, characterizing it as completely unfair and one-sided. After reading that review, I thought I might not like it, myself, since I tend to prefer fair and reasonable debate/argument.
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I’ve been reading a lot of fantasy novels recently. I tend to read a fair number of them per year, but the last several months have been almost entirely focused on that genre. I’ve read nineteen of them since mid-June, when I started Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law series.
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I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight this evening. I had mixed feelings about Batman Begins—I loved the first half of it and hated the second half. The Dark Knight was different: the parts I hated and the parts I loved were mixed together throughout the film.
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Vernor Vinge has written some excellent science fiction works, such as True Names and A Fire Upon the Deep. I thought the latter was well-plotted, had interesting characters, and had some truly fascinating technological ideas.
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I read M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series recently, and was impressed on a number of levels. The atmosphere of completely pervasive decay that he creates is quite effective, and I suspect that the series was extremely influential. I think that Mieville’s New Crobuzon would have had a hard time struggling into existence without Viriconium preceding it, and I also suspect that Harrison had a big impact on Gene Wolfe.
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I finished reading Robin Hobb‘s Soldier Son Trilogy last night. I’m a big fan of her Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies, and so was happy to find that she had another out.

However, I have to say I’m quite disappointed in this one, and wouldn’t really recommend it.
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High Geekery, this. Webcomics, one about a band of D&D characters rendered as stick figures, the other about a wargaming geek sucked into another dimension… I discovered both of them quite recently, despite friends who are into The Order of the Stick and the fact that Erfworld appears to have garnered critical acclaim.
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I’ve been re-reading Hellboy, one of my favorite comics. I got into it a few years ago and it took me a little while to figure out why I liked it.
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I’ve never seen Johnny Mnemonic, but I’ve heard bad things. Terrible things. It is renowned as an absolutely disgraceful adaptation of a beloved short story. That being said, I suspect it has nothing on the Sci-Fi Channel rendering of Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld Saga.
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Okay, finally, I’m into this millennium. I have no idea why it took me more than a year to go from 2000′s favorite books to 2001′s.

Especially since I only read 39 books in 2001, my second-lowest yearly total of the years I’ve kept records.
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