The Year in Reading 2011

Over on LibraryThing, there’s a discussion going on about the five best books everyone has read in 2011. (The discussion was inspired by the Millions’ great series, A Year in Reading.) When I looked back through my 2011 reads, I was surprised to find that there were exactly five books that I rated 5 stars. Usually, I am lucky to read one 5-star book in a year. Of course, three of these books were rereads, so the high rating is kind of a given. Still, I think they represent a good cross-section of what I like to read, and all of them are terrific books.

My favorite reads of 2011 were:

• Five Great Short Stories by Anton Chekhov — classic literature
• The Church of the Dead Girls by Stephen Dobyns — thriller (reread)
• Brighten the Corner Where You Are by Fred Chappell — gentle fabulist fantasy (reread)
• A Room With a View by E.M. Forster — classic literature (reread)
• And my favorite book of the year: The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (science fiction)

There were many books that just missed out on getting 5 stars; call them high 4′s. I would definitely recommend any of those books as well, so here they are:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King
• 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
• All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
• Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• Into the Wildby Jon Krakauer
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Ruins by Scott Smith
• The Shipping News by Annie Proulx
• Tinkers by Paul Harding
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
• The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin

What were your favorite reads of 2011?

Writers Write About Climate Change

Here’s an interesting project. Some of my favorite writers are contributing to a book of stories about climate change, including Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Kim Stanley Robinson. The book apparently was inspired by Ian McEwan‘s remarks that not enough authors are writing about climate change.Science fiction must have addressed this issue. Of course, there is Robinson’s egregious Science in the Capital trilogy, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Octavia Butler‘s Parables have climate change as one of the factors in the disintegration of society. Earth by +David Brin also imagines the near-term effects of climate change. Any other suggestions?

 Top writers tackle climate change in short stories

Authors from Margaret Atwood to David Mitchell will contribute to Verso collection imagining impact of global warming

Worth Reading: Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

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Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson (2009)

Recently, I was sort of following a debate going on in the science fiction community about the lack of optimism in sci fi these days. Honestly, I hadn’t noticed that science fiction had been growing more pessimistic, since I tend toward downer books anyway. There is not much hope in your average dystopian or post-apocalyptic story. But it does make a certain amount of sense that science fiction as a whole would be growing more gloomy. Back in the Golden Age of sci fi, when we were just starting to contemplate space exploration and making fantastic technological innovations, the writing reflected the general mood: one of optimism and looking forward to a rosy future, where everyone gets their own jet pack or flying car. But as our cultural outlook grew more pessimistic, when we realized the havoc we were wreaking on our environment and the dark side of technology, of course the books got more pessimistic as well.

But I have to admit that Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Galileo’s Dream made me feel downright dejected. It pits science in a battle against religion, and science does not win. The projected future for humanity is very bleak indeed.

Galileo’s Dream is an intriguing blend of historical fiction and science fiction. It tells the story of Galileo’s life from when he developed the telescope — an idea that was suggested to him by a mysterious stranger — to his death. When Galileo uses his new telescope to discover Jupiter’s four largest moons, the stranger returns and transports him through time and space to one of those moons, 1,000 years in the future. (That’s the science fiction part, in case you hadn’t guessed.)

While Galileo’s life story is interesting, and Robinson pays close attention to the historical details, the scenes on Jupiter’s moons made for the most exciting reading. Robinson describes the moons with human settlements — icy Europa, sulfurous Io, rocky Ganymede — with loving precision, and the images of Jupiter hanging above them are awe-inspiring. There is also more action in the future scenes, as Galileo is dragged along by two factions fighting over how to deal with the discovery of an alien sentience in the ocean underneath Europa’s ice shell, and I wish we had spent more time there.

It is not at first clear why Galileo was brought forward into the future, but it seems that the stranger — whose name is also Ganymede — is trying to manipulate Galileo’s fate, in an endeavor to alter the course of human history. As the “first scientist,” Galileo is a pivotal figure in the development of science and the efforts of religion to suppress scientific discoveries. He was accused of heresy for supporting the Copernican view that the Earth orbits the Sun and brought before the Inquisition. Apparently, Ganymede is trying to ensure that Galileo is burned at the stake for heresy, which will in some way help the cause of science. Human history has been so traumatic that the colonists on Jupiter’s moons are suffering a permanent post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. No details are given; we don’t even know if the Earth is still habitable in the future. But Galileo’s unjust execution would result in more people accepting science and turning away from religion. For me, this story line and the reasoning behind it was somewhat muddled and hard to follow, which is the main fault I can find with this book.

Regardless, it’s clear that even with the right outcome, things won’t get better for humanity, just less bad. Humanity is so destructive, so doomed, that the horrors we visit upon ourselves can’t be avoided entirely. They can just be mitigated. This view felt overwhelmingly pessimistic to me, although I can understand where Robinson is coming from. As an advocate for scientific approaches to mitigating climate change, Robinson must feel let down by the public’s refusal to accept the evidence of global warming. Even in the early 21st century, science doesn’t get much respect.

Galileo, ironically, is the most optimistic character in the novel, even though his final years weren’t all that pleasant. He has no trouble reconciling religion and science, and he can accept the alien consciousness on Europa because he already believes in and respects higher beings. In science and mathematics, Galileo clearly sees the hand of God at work — in the beauty of the simple ratios that occur naturally again and again. He relishes the act of understanding the natural world as a religious experience. Yet he lives in a brutal, uncertain, superstitious time.

Galileo’s Dream is a meaty book that may require more than one reading to fully digest. I haven’t even touched on the philosophizing about time and dimensions that goes on, which is all fascinating. But the net effect of reading it was so depressing that I’m not sure I’ll go back for seconds.

For more:

• Wikipedia article
• Kim Stanley Robinson on Galileo’s Dream
• The bright side of science fiction
• Optimism and pessimism — where did it all go right?

Top 10 Books and Movies of the Decade

Everybody’s doing it, so why not me? Top 10 lists are always fun, so I present to you my completely biased, non-authoritative lists of my top 10 books and top 10 movies of 2000-2009.

Books

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
3. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon
4. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
5. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
6. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
7. Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham
8. The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
9. The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson
10. Blue Angel by Francine Prose

Please note that 8 of these books could comfortably be classified as science fiction/fantasy. One is nonfiction (Omnivore’s Dilemma), and one is literary fiction but it’s about writers, one of my favorite subjects, if done well (Blue Angel).

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order): The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz; The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh; Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill; Just After Sunset by Stephen King; Mystic River by Dennis Lehane; No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy; The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger; 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley

Movies

1. No Country for Old Men
2. The Children of Men
3. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
4. Zodiac
5. Little Miss Sunshine
6. Mystic River
7. Adaptation
8. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
9. Unbreakable
10. There Will Be Blood

Honorable Mentions: Donnie Darko; Red Dragon; Serenity; Napoleon Dynamite; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Star Trek; The Dark Knight; The Royal Tenenbaums; Memento; Brokeback Mountain; District 9

Amazingly enough, 7 of these movies are adaptations of favorite books of mine. Usually, they don’t get the book to film thing right.

Worth Reading: The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

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The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson (2002)

Five stars!

One of the the most complex, multi-layered and absorbing novels I’ve read, which would definitely benefit from multiple rereadings.

Set in an alternate history where the Plague wiped out 99 percent of Europe’s population instead of just one-third — effectively decimating white, Christian culture — the novel follows 700 years of history as Arab, Asian and Native American cultures flourish and the religions of Buddhism and Islam spread throughout the world. One assumption the novel makes is that reincarnation is real, so the same set of characters (a jati, or group of souls linked by fate) come together in life after life and either witness or instigate the great events, scientific discoveries, political movements and philosophical writings of human history.

This novel is more than just an entertaining series of adventures, though. It has a lot to say about the human condition, religion, philosophy and history itself. How do cultures rise and fall? What small events can create or destroy empires? The section that tells the story of the earth’s world war — called the Long War and lasting more than 70 years — is one of the most harrowing depictions of war and its aftermath I have ever read. This is a weighty book, with a lot of big ideas to captivate and absorb the reader through many visits to this alternate — but very realistic — history of humankind.

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• Daily life and no Europeans: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt (tor.com)

Worth Reading: Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

Cover of Icehenge

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson (1984)

Told from three different points of view, this is the story of how an ice monolith similar to Stonehenge, made from ice taken from Saturn’s rings, is discovered on Pluto and its possible origins debated and reformulated. It is also the story of a futuristic society that has colonized the solar system and expanded the human lifespan such that people are practically immortal and memory has become meaningless.

The novel spans an immense length of time, beginning with the adventures of an expert in life-support systems; her ship is shanghaied, and she is pressed into the service of revolutionaries venturing on a manned mission out of the solar system for the first time, then released into an uprising on her home planet Mars. The story then jumps several hundred years into the future when an archaeologist discovers this woman’s journal in the remains of a Martian city destroyed during the revolution and theorizes that the ship that left the solar system built Icehenge as a monument to its achievement. Finally, the story shifts again to the point of view of an intellectual dilettante who visits Icehenge and exposes the truth — but never satisfactorily.

There is a lot to chew on here, too much to properly summarize, from grasping the nuances of life in the future solar system to parsing out the various speculations on the meaning of the mysterious monolith. Icehenge will hold the attention of the hard science fiction fan — particularly those who have already read and enjoyed Robinson’s Mars trilogy — until the final, puzzling revelations on Pluto.

Worth Reading: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson (1993)

Mars was empty before we came.

Kim Stanley Robinson is not an easy author to read or to love. Some of his novels can be counted among my favorites (The Years of Rice and Salt), and others (The Gold Coast, Forty Signs of Rain) I simply hated — or couldn’t even get through to the end (Fifty Degrees Below). Even the books I loved required a lot from me: they are thick, dense and epic, layered with so much hard science and social science that they can sometimes read like textbooks rather than novels. But with Robinson’s best books, the effort is worth it. Red Mars is a good example.

Robinson’s epic about the colonization of Mars (the first book in a trilogy on the subject) covers a lot of ground. Sure, it tackles the myriad technical problems involved in colonizing such a hostile planet, including how to build a space elevator for easier transport of settlers and exploitation of Mars’s resources. But from there, Robinson takes on even more weighty themes: the clash between those coming to Mars to try to create an entirely new way of life and those back on Earth who want to retain control; cultural conflicts among the various ethnic and religious groups spreading out to Mars; the discovery of an innovative medical procedure that greatly extends the human lifespan and the implications for an over-populated Earth; all climaxing in a planetary revolution propelled by all of these issues.

This is a ponderous book with a lot of big ideas. It may be a bit overlong — sometimes it seems as if all the characters do is drive around by themselves for great distances over the barren Martian landscape — but those sections may be excused by the action of the rest of the novel. Robinson actually helps us believe that living on Mars is something we can achieve, while showing us that these advances will probably only exacerbate our very human problems.

About the sequel: Green Mars

The sequel to Red Mars is unfortunately not quite as exciting and a bit more difficult to get through. It picks up the story 50 years after the events of Red Mars, following the lives of the remaining first colonists to Mars and their children and grandchildren.

What could be tolerated in the first book – the endless descriptions of driving around on Mars, the minutiae of Martian geology and terraforming – I was less tolerant of in its sequel, and more inclined to skip ahead. But I did enjoy the climactic Martian revolution while at the same time I was wishing for more social conflict and less hard science. The emergence of a new type of person – the Martian – as well as the evolving ramifications of the anti-aging treatments were fascinating.

I have not read the final book in the series yet, Blue Mars.

Monthly Reading: November 2007

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood — historical fiction

The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson — environmental fiction

Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman — thriller

My rating scale:

• 1 star: Abandoned before finishing. Don’t waste your time.
• 2 stars: Poor. Avoid with extreme prejudice.
• 3 stars: Average. Read it, have a good time and move on. Or not.
• 4 stars: Great. Push it on your friends and family.
• 5 stars: Excellent. Keep it, treasure it, reread it.

Disclaimer: My ratings are very personal and may have little to do with the book’s artistic or commercial merit, or its place in the literary canon. Rather, the rating reflects how the story, characters and writing spoke to me and augmented my understanding of the world.