Minnesota Reads

My fantasy year started with the Summer of Harry, which called for re-reading all seven of the Harry Potter books. Very good prep for the Books & Bars HP meeting in July, the MPR HP Trivia game at the State Fair, and the final movie, HP 7.2. But that wasn’t all. The year held sequels [...]

Just like many pop culture nerds, I too like to impost arbitrary rules on any list I make. I think it imbibes the list with some significance, importance, or something else that lists of crap don’t have naturally. For this year’s list of Favorite Reads, I gave myself two rules. One, I couldn’t include books [...]

Either the past year in books didn’t have the same crash-bang-pow as 2010 or else I just did a meh job of finding the new and the hot to stain with my saliva. I figured out pretty early on that this list would never have the purity of being a list of just books published [...]

While I study top ten lists somewhat obsessively, I haven’t defined the qualities necessary for a book to make my own “top” list. What follows are the first ten books I thought of when I looked back over the year (in no particular order). I have recommended all of them to someone, and would do [...]

Out of the books I read this year, my top ten are almost all science fiction and fantasy, and heavy on young adult novels. It was a good year. 1. By far my favorite book of the year was A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness. I could not put down this young adult horror fantasy [...]

1. Possession by A.S. Byatt: I can't say enough good things about this powerhouse of a novel. Byatt earns every one of “Possession's” 500+ pages by deftly crafting an intricate, thoroughly spellbinding story of parallel romances � two Victorian poets and the contemporary researchers who study them. Every bit as graceful, sophisticated and elegant as [...]

I thought that I’d have a hard time coming up with five good books this year. 2010 was full crap for me, reading-wise. But looking back, it was nice to see that I didn’t hate everything. Any little thing to starve off the jaded bitterness helps. 1. The Hunter by Julia Leigh: This was such [...]

These are the books that left the most lasting impressions on me this year. In no particular order: 1. Just Kids by Patti Smith — Just beautiful. 2. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green, David Levithan — This one made me so happy. 3. Anthropology of An American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann — [...]

Making a year-end best of list is the kind of exquisite torture that nerds of all stripes love to put themselves through. Some make arbitrary rules to extend the pain, others just dive in willy nilly with nary a second thought. I’m of the willy nilly party of list making. While this makes the list [...]

I read more books than I review, but since I reviewed less than 30 books in the last year, I think it's only fair that I don't give you the top 10 of those books. Instead I'm going to give you the top 5 books I read and the top 5 books I stopped reading. [...]