2011.Book36 - The Steel Remains (Morgan)

Very good epic fantasy, with a surprising amount of gay alien sex.

2011.Book35 - Forgotten God (Chan)

Pretty good.

2011.Book34 - Black Man (Morgan)

Good SF.

2011.Book33 - Small Gods (Pratchett)

Pretty good Pratchett. He often seems to lose it a bit in his finales, but pretty good.

2011.Book32 - The Outsider (Wilson)

Very interesting stuff.

2011.Book31 - Quarantine (Egan)

Excellent SF. Maybe the worst thing about the Copenhagen interpretation being bogus is that it would wreck the plot of this novel.

2011.Book30 - The National Dream (Berton)

Good Canadian history.

2011.Book29 - The Heroin Diaries (Sixx)

Drugs are boring. Skips recovery.

2011.Book28 - The Pale King (Wallace)

Very good Wallace. Typically digressive, smart, a little funny, sad, inspiring.

2011.Book27 - Julian Comstock (Wilson)

Excellent. Fantastic post-apocalypse-nineteenth-century story. Wow.

2011.Book26 - Reflex (Gould)

Very good thriller masquerading as SF. A little button-pushing

2011.Book25 - Jumper (Gould)

Excellent SF/thriller. Not really SF by the Ken MacLeod definition (humans using tools), but it is by the R. Scott Bakker definition (an expanding world)

2011.Book24 - Wyst (Vance)

Pretty good SF.

2011.Book23 - Marune (Vance)

Pretty good SF. Good story obscured by pedantic style (annoying footnotes -- and I love footnotes)

2011.Book22 - Trullion (Vance)

Good old-school SF. More about characters than environment or tools, so maybe not "echt" SF.

2011.Book21 - The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov)

Very good weirdo fantasy. Lots of jokes about Moscow literary establishment that I didn't get.

2011.Book20 - The Blade Itself (Abercrombie)

Pretty good gritty fantasy.

2011.Book19 - Kraken (Mieville)

Very good weird fantasy. Better in retrospect. The page-by-page experience is not as good as the memory.

2011.Book18 - Love Wins (Bell)

Pretty good. Hard to argue with.

2011.Book16 - The Tipping Point (Gladwell)

Pretty good. Interesting stories, don't really back up the theory.

2011.Book15 - Alices Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll)

Good. Classic, apparently. Quite silly.

2011.Book14 - Confederacy of Dunces (Toole)

Very good. Ludicrous

2011.Book17 - Kill Shakespeare (Del Cor, McCreary)

Pretty good comic.

2011.Book13 - Surface Detail (Banks)

Very good SF.

2011.Book12 - Blood's a Rover (Ellroy)

Good historical thriller. Tons of plot. Terse.

2011.Book11 - White-Luck Warrior (Bakker)

Spectacularly awesome. Wow.

2011.Book10 - Best Served Cold (Abercrombie)

Very good new-style epic fantasy. Revenge, betrayal, violence, sex, and humour.

2011.Book9 - Room (Donoghue)

Pretty good. First half's button-pushing thriller. Second half's goal-less fish-out-of-water.

2011.Book8 - John the Baptizer (Hansen)

OK. Sort of interesting, but not very interesting.

2011.Book7 - For the Win (Doctorow)

Some good stuff.

2011.Book6 - Tooth and Claw (Walton)

Excellent. Slow start, spectacular finish

2011.Book5 - The Miracle of Theism (Mackie)

Spectacular. Analytic (?) philosophy

2011.Book4 - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Decent on second read.

2011.Book3 - The School of Essential Ingredients (Bauermeister)

Pretty average. Food-concerned.

2011.Book2 - Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (Watts)

Relentlessly pessimistic short stories. The one about the whales was morbidly hilarious.

2011.Book1 - The Misenchanted Sword (Watt-Evans)

Very good "real" fantasy.

Book 51 - Faith of a Heretic (Kaufmann)

Excellent.

Book 50 - Brideshead Revisited (Waugh)

Very good. Tragic.

Book 49 - New Model Army (Roberts)

Very good SF. Kind of weird.

Book 48 - My Lady Ludlow (Gaskell)

Very good.

Book 47 - My Friend Leonard (Frey)

Very good.

Book 46 - Eric (Pratchett)

Nice little Rincewind story.

Book 45 - A Million Little Pieces (Frey)

Very good addiction recovery story. In retrospect, pretty clearly fictionalized.

Book 44 - Corrupting Dr. Nice (Kessel)

Good SF.

Book 43 - Get Real (Westlake)

Very good caper. Goes by quickly.

Book 42 - An Exaltation of Larks (Reed)

Very good. Not as weird as Jo Walton says. Some excellent ideas. Characters make the wrong choice in the ending. The turtles were right: an eternal infinite universe would be better than single finite universe.

Book 41 - The Sparrow (Russell)

Pretty average. Emphatically not SF (see Ken MacLeod)

Book 40 - Disciple of the Dog (Bakker)

Very good thriller. But would I like it so much if it wasn't Bakker?

Book 39 - Nietzsche (Kaufmann)

Excellent.

Book 38 - The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)

No comment.

Book 37 - Hero of Ages (Sanderson)

OK epic fantasy. Some cool ideas, but awkwardly written.

Book 36 - Siddhartha (Hesse)

Very good.

Book 35 - Religion in Four Dimensions (Kaufmann)

Very good. But the promised existential and comparative dimensions are in somewhat short supply. Another essay by Kaufmann had some good stuff along the line of "the Buddhist can free himself of attachment and suffering and achieve a mild benevolence to all, but the Jew can take a tragic path to sacrifice himself for all people"

Book 34 - Stealing Jesus (Bawer)

Pretty good. But Kaufmann might tell Bawer his church of love is a fantasy.

Book 33 - Autobiopsy (Rubens)

Good literary fiction. Like Isherwood, not awesome, but excellent ending.

Book 32 - The Shortest Way to Hades (Caudwell)

Very good mystery.

Book 31 - Well of Ascension (Sanderson)

Good epic fantasy. A little heavy-handed with the emotional plot.

Book 30 - The Sirens Sang of Murder (Caudwell)

Very good mystery.

Book 29 - Mistborn : The Final Empire (Sanderson)

Very good epic fantasy.

Book 28 - Down There On a Visit (Isherwood)

Very good modern novel. Last part is quite a surprising twist.

Book 27 - The Sybil in Her Grave (Caudwell)

Fantastic mystery.

Book 26 - Taliesin (Lawhead)

OK epic fantasy. Seems a little plot-less.

Book 25 - Dark Places (Evans)

Pretty good thriller.

Book 24 - The Fortunate Fall (Carter)

Super-awesome. Wow. Probably the best I've read this year.

Book 23 - Storm Front (Butcher)

Good fantasy/noir

Book 22 - The Road Less Travelled (Peck)

Very good self-help. Parapsychology and synchronicity a little hard to swallow

Book 21 - Small is Beautiful (Schumacher)

Good economics.

Book 20 - A Clash of Kings (Martin)

Good, in the same vein as its predecessor

Book 19 - Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (Balmer)

Very good. I've lived some of it.

Book 18: A Generous Orthodoxy (McLaren)

Average. The spirit stuff is very weak and disappointing. Like, that's all you get?

Book 17: David Copperfield (Dickens)

Excellent.

Book 16: The Reason for God (Keller)

Average. The unbeliever has nothing to fear from this.

Book 15 - The Girl Who Played With Fire (Larsson)

Another very good thriller.

Book 14 - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Larsson)

Very good thriller.

Book 13 - Things Fall Apart (Achebe)

Really good story about Nigerians.

Book 12 - Mao II (Dilillo)

Meh. Kind of boring.

Book 11 - A Game of Thrones (Martin)

Very good epic fantasy. A little lower than Bakker.

Book 10 - Guitar (Brookes)

Pretty good history of guitars and some modern boutique guitar-building. Brookes is more interested in guitars than music.

2010 - 9 - The City and the City (Mieville)

Excellent. Police thriller wrapped in weird fantasy.

2010 - 8 - Infidel (Ali)

Good stuff

2010 - 7 - Permanance (Schroeder)

Pretty good SF. Similar universe and ideas to Watts' Blindsight (consciousness rare, though not a disadvantage), but sunny and cheery instead of bleak and hopeless.

2010 - 6 - Zoe's Tale (Scalzi)

Very good SF

2010 - 5 - Blindsight (Watts)

Excellent. Philosphically like Scott Bakker, but grimmer.

2010 - 4 - Postwar (Judt)

Excellent. Beyond my competence to comment.

2010 - 3 - Jesus for President (Claiborne, Hay)

Very good. The only acceptable Christianity.

2010 - 2 - The Great Emergence (Tickle)

Awful. Historically ignorant, philosophically incoherent, sociologically fanciful.

2010 - 1 - 2666 (Bolano)

Excellent. Huge and weird.

Book 50: A Brief History of Time (Hawking)

Interesting stuff.

Book 49: Pushing Ice (Reynolds)

OK SF. Some cool ideas, but protagonists were annoying power-loving heirarchs.

Book 48: Half a Crown (Walton)

Very good conclusion to the series.

Book 47: The Prefect (Reynolds)

Very good standard SF. No singularity: no real AI.

Book 46: Swiftly (Roberts)

Pretty good. Weird sex made it icky.

Book 45: The Warrior Who Carried Life (Ryman)

Wow, really strange and cool.

Book 44: Titans of Chaos (Wright)

Meh. In love with the system.

Book 43: Salt (Roberts)

Very cool SF. Anarchists and fascists.

Book 42: Peer Gynt (Ibsen)

Weird modern-ish play.

Book 41: Yellow Blue Tibia (Roberts)

Fantastic science fiction.

Book 40: Fugitives of Chaos (Wright)

Good fantasy. In the struggle of art v. ideology, art wins, but ideology pokes its nose in occasionally.

Book 39: Humpty Dumpty (Knight)

Weird. Well-written but very confusing, as probably intended.

Book 38: Twenty-Piece Shuffle (Paul)

Wealth and poverty.