Books I've read so far this year...

[nekosensei]

1. The human Christ: the search for the historical Jesus by Charlotte Allen.
2. Lisey's Story by Stephen King
3. Orientalism by Edward Said
4. I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
5. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon
6. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
7. Language death: The Life Cycle of a Scottish Gaelic Dialect by Nancy C. Dorian
8. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
9. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Tranlated by Robert Pinsky.
10. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
11. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
12. Fray by Joss Whedon
13. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
14. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
15. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
16. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
17. The Bone People by Keri Hulme
18. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
19. The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
20. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
21. The Doll's House, Dream Country, and Season of Mists by Neil Gaiman
22. Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
23. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
24. A Game of You and Fables & Reflections by Neil Gaiman
25. Brief Lives, Worlds' End, The Kindly Ones, and The Wake by Neil Gaiman
26. Into the Forest by Jean Hegland
27. Endless Nights by Neil Gaiman
28. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
29. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister by Gregory Maguire
30. The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride

31. Beauty by Sheri Tepper -- This was an amazingly well written book, and it's a shame that I don't really have the energy or the motivation to write a really good review about it. Tepper gives us a new version of the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty. The starts out in the fourteenth century, takes us to the twenty and twenty-first centuries, and then brings us back again. Overall, it deals with humankind's capacity to both create works of beauty and to destroy our environment and the beauty that surrounds us. Throughout the story, Beauty works to look out for her family, save the environment, and ultimately, make sure beauty and magic survives in the world.