My Reading Year 2011

Well, all in all, 2011 wasn't quite as horrible as 2010. I have a new job and will be shortly moving house, so it's all change here. A change is as good as a holiday, as they say, although having cashed-in a week of leave at my old place before starting at my new job, I have to wonder if that's true.

At the end of the year, I self-published Panoptica as an ebook on amazon, thus surfing the breaking wave of publishing phenomenon or throwing my lot in with a passing fad, depending on which way the future goes. To be honest, it's hard to imagine the impact of ereader going away. Maybe it'll all be through more—sophisticated tablet computer things, but it's clearly here to stay and has some expansion yet to do.

It's nice, however, to have it out of my hair, buried in the torrent of slurry, so I can move on to the next project. I'm not sure if my own entry comes a little late, and publicity remains a challenge, but at least it's out there. If you're a regular reader of this blog, I urge you to buy a copy – I mean, at worst it'll sit on your hard-drive harming no one. You might even enjoy reading it, but if you do, don't forget to leave a review on amazon! (A hard copy version is coming soon!)

Okay, that's the sponsorship over with. Let's get serious. Let's talk about books!

Cutting to the chase, the best books I read in 2011 are:

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft
Supergods by Grant Morrison
The Immortalisation Commission by John Gray
The Big Knockover & Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

The Big Knockover and Other Stories

Things have gotten a bit behind here at Pointless Philosophical Asides due to visiting relatives, other projects and my search for a new job. I finished The Big Knockover about six weeks ago, and so that's quite a gap between reading and blogging, but what can I say, events intervened.

This book is one I took with me on holiday in late August. I have a Kindle now, which I'd loaded up with holiday reading (although I read much less on holidays these days than I used to, a situation exacerbated this time around as we had my mother with me) but I took this hard copy book with me because I was a little nervous about the combination of a beach or pool, an expensive electronic device and my own general cack-handedness.

It was also nice, I suppose, to have an old fashioned book with me that I could turn to while I got used the New Age of Publishing. Perhaps this will be the last print book I ever review? Hm, that seems unlikely, given the growing pile of hard copy books that sits by my desk. In fact, the Kindle has just become a sort of portable pile as it fills up with bright ideas from Project Gutenberg, and sudden “oh yes, I'd love to read that!” moments on amazon.

Anyway, I've been turning to Hammett recently in my ongoing quest to get a good grip on the detective genre for a project I'm working on. Hammett's stories are great, with just the right mix of sardonic wit, real danger and human insight. It's been a while, so I won't address too much in detail, but there are few general observations that I think are helpful to me.