{"id":2616,"date":"2021-01-01T03:41:27","date_gmt":"2021-01-01T07:41:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2616"},"modified":"2021-01-01T03:47:50","modified_gmt":"2021-01-01T07:47:50","slug":"fiction-books-i-want-to-read-this-year-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=2616","title":{"rendered":"Fiction Books I Want to Read This Year 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new year has arrived! I don’t think I’ll do a “Year’s Best” post for 2020. I did not see enough movies nor read enough books, and the ones I did really weren’t that great. Maybe 2021 will be a better year for new movies, but I’m not sure there’s much of interest on the horizon. I just hope some 3D movies will return to the big screen before the year’s end; the pandemic seems to have annihilated them completely.<\/p>\n

I only read 5 books in 2020. To be more precise, I only completed<\/em> 5 books. (I read a lot of miscellaneous chapters from various nonfiction books, but I’m not counting those.) These books include:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement<\/strong>\u00a0by Rich Karlgaard. A forgettable book in my opinion. “Some people achieve their greatest potential later in life.” That’s it. That’s the book.<\/li>\n
  2. A Borrowed Man<\/strong> by Gene Wolfe. A fun little sci-fi \/ fantasy mystery, my favorite read of the year (not that there’s much competition.) I believe a sequel has recently been published posthumously which I’d like to get my hands on at some point.<\/li>\n
  3. Farlander<\/strong> by Col Buchanan. An aging assassin takes on an unlikely apprentice while pursuing a dangerous vendetta. The writing is nice and the story has some interesting surprises. Fun read.<\/li>\n
  4. Dune<\/strong> by Frank Herbert. Basically it’s\u00a0The Lion King<\/em>, but on a sandy planet with prophecies, mystical powers, powerful spice, giant worms, and weird names. And it’s dull, dull, unbearably dull. I hated it.<\/li>\n
  5. Majipoor Chronicles<\/strong> by Robert Silverberg. A collection of short stories all taking place on the same weird planet. Some stories feature some interesting ideas, but most of them fluff out with stupid overly-convenient or uneventful endings. I think Silverberg does horror or dark fantasy the best; when he tries to have things end more nicely for the characters it just feels less satisfying to me for some reason.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Those are all the books I actually finished in 2020; in August I began reading Tolstoy’s\u00a0War and Peace<\/em>, and I’m still only about half-way through it. It’s a long book, and these characters are growing a bit dull on me, so I haven’t been reading it daily. (I suppose technically it’s a book series, as it was originally published serially.) Hopefully it will not take me another five months to finish the second half.<\/p>\n

    Here’s my current (non-exhaustive) to-read list for 2021, at least fiction-wise:<\/p>\n

    \"\" \"\" \"\"<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. War and Peace<\/strong> by Leo Tolstoy. Finishing the 2nd half.<\/li>\n
    2. Stands a Shadow<\/strong> by Col Buchanan. This is the sequel to the aforementioned\u00a0Farlander<\/em>. I’m actually already about 80 pages into it as I didn’t want to lug around\u00a0War and Peace<\/em> one day.<\/li>\n
    3. Fall; or, Dodge in Hell<\/strong> by Neal Stephenson. One of my favorite authors, and I really enjoyed\u00a0Reamde<\/em>, so I’m looking forward to this one as well. A long book, but his prose generally flows pretty nicely.<\/li>\n
    4. Oathbringer<\/strong> by Brandon Sanderson. This is the 3rd book in his\u00a0Stormlight Chronicles\u00a0<\/em>series. The 4th book just came out in 2020, so I’m behind. I really enjoyed the 1st book, but the 2nd book was a bit “meh” for me.<\/li>\n
    5. The Brothers Karamazov<\/strong> by\u00a0Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Been wanting to read Mr. D for a while.<\/li>\n
    6. The Talisman\u00a0<\/strong>by Stephen King and Peter Straub.<\/li>\n
    7. The Drawing of Three<\/strong> and\u00a0The Waste Lands<\/strong> by Stephen King. Books 2 and 3 of his\u00a0Dark Tower<\/em> series.<\/li>\n
    8. The Vindication of Man<\/strong> by John C. Wright. The 5th book in his\u00a0Count to the Eschaton Sequence<\/em>. Another of my favorite authors. I’ve really enjoyed this series so far; it’s at times very thought-provoking, at times complete bonkers crazy, and sometimes both. Super fun sci-fi.<\/li>\n
    9. The Kingdom of the Gods<\/strong> by\u00a0In-Wan Youn. This is the graphic novel which inspired the recent Netflix series Kingdom<\/em>, of which I enjoyed a couple episodes, although I think the book and show are quite different plot-wise. Looks like fun though.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Some of those books are a bit long, and I’m a slow reader, so there’s no telling if I can actually finish all those in a single year. And there’s of course plenty more I’d love to read, so I might change my mind about some of those in favor of others. That’s also not counting any non-fiction books, of which I have bookmarks in at least a dozen. We’ll see how it goes.<\/p>\n

      Happy New Year to all!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      The new year has arrived! I don’t think I’ll do a “Year’s Best” post for 2020. I did not see enough movies nor read enough books, and the ones I did really weren’t that great. Maybe 2021 will be a better year for new movies, but I’m not sure there’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-Gc","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2616"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2622,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2616\/revisions\/2622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}