Best Reads of 2014

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Jon Peterson: Playing at the World. Highly recommended to gamers!

• In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Arika Okrent 2009.
• Redshirts. John Scalzi 2012. Space opera from the viewpoint of the nameless extras.
• The Bone People. Keri Hulme 1984. This novel has great strengths in the language and characterisation. And a major weakness in the almost nonexistent plotting. Very little happens in these 450 pages, and what happens is not well motivated either from the characters’ point of view or from a technical narrative perspective.
• Little Brother. Cory Doctorow 2008. A rousing, somewhat preachy story of young people fighting for civil liberties. Similar enough to the author’s Pirate Cinema that you needn’t read both. If you’re more into privacy issues, read LB. If intellectual property issues, read PC. Both make very good gifts for bright teenagers.
• The Crow Road. Iain Banks 1992. This novel is full of cunningly constructed motif parallelism involving glass and eyes. Reader, stay alert!
• The Gentleman in the Parlour: A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong. William Somerset Maugham 1930.
• Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games. Jon Peterson 2012. As a late-80s teen, my main interests were role-playing games, choose-your-own-adventure books, boardgames, fantasy miniatures, text adventure software and fantasy fiction. I still have a love of all these things, and of history, and so it would be difficult to envision a subject matter for a book that would be better-tailored to my taste. And the execution — the scholarship in this book and the writing and the illustrations — are absolutely top-notch. Amazing stuff!
• Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. Olivia Judson 2002. An evolutionary view of how sex and procreation works in various species of animal.
• Johannes Cabal: the Necromancer. Jonathan L. Howard 2009. Humorous and otherworldly about a humourless wizard out to reclaim his sold soul from the Devil.
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Jared Diamond 2005. World-spanning investigation into why and how some societies collapse and others don’t.

Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?

Here’s my list for 2013.