Top 5 Books I Read in 2013

In 2013, I made an effort to read more than I had in the past few years.  In the three or four years leading up to 2013, I had finished two, maybe three books a year.  That’s not a lot.  2013 was the year that I tried to up that book count.  I had a goal of reading one book per month.  I succeeded in accomplishing that goal.  I read fourteen books in 2013.  Now I would like to take some time to tell you about my five favourite books from what I read this past year.  I’ll also let you in on my least favourite of the fourteen as well.

Note: These fourteen books do not include any children’s books that took about three minutes to read.  I’m looking at you, The Monster at the End of this Book.

11/22/63

I read four different Stephen King books this year.  This one was by far my favourite of the bunch.  My love doesn’t come so much from the story that Stephen King is telling in this book, which is a man who went back in time to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  That’s not what I love about 11/22/63.  The thing I truly love about this book is the small town that King was able to build in the novel.

There’s something to be said about a writer who has the ability of recreating a time and building an entire community based in that time.  All of the characters in the small town feel real.  They feel relatable.  As you read the book, you fall in love with them.  The characters in the town are all nice people and it gives you a feeling of welcome.  You feel like you have become a part of their town, as opposed to watching the events as some sort of invisible force.

Compare the small town set up in 11/22/63 to the town of Chester’s Mill from Under the Dome, another King book I read this year.  You may get to know the town a little better in Under the Dome, but many of the characters are despicable people and it is more about the event in the town than the town itself.  11/22/63 isn’t about an event in the town, but rather how this man from the future can affect what goes on.  It doesn’t set out to write a town full of heroes and villains.  Stephen King simply writes about this quaint little town in Texas.  It feels like home.

When I finished the book, I was a wreck.  It wasn’t because of the JFK plot.  It was because I was going to miss the town of Jodie (I believe that was the name of the town).  I was going to miss the characters I had grown to love.  That is a hard feat to accomplish, and King did it well in this book.

Timeline

I’ve liked Michael Crichton from a young age.  The way that he can mix scientific details into his writing and still make the exposition entertaining is something that I haven’t found in any other writer.  I was excited to get back to reading some Crichton and Timeline was the perfect book for me when I started reading it.

Timeline goes into the 1300s to tell a story of time travel (though it’s not quite time travel if you’ve read the book) involving a group of college students and a professor who were excavating the site that they are now experiencing.  I like history and I like science.  Timeline was a great mixture of the two.

One thing I picked up about Timeline is how similar all four of the Chrichton novels that I’ve read are.  Timeline, Jurassic Park, Congo, and The Lost World are all about people who feel safe in their respective careers, but are dropped into an unknown time/place due to scientific reasons.  They experience what nobody else has experienced and must fight for their lives.  That’s a very basic breakdown, but I feel that it represents any of the four Crichton novels that I’ve read.  Let me say that it doesn’t diminish my liking for any of them.  It was an interesting observation I made, which I’m sure some of you are saying is obvious.

2001: A Space Odyssey

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t buy this book because I love Stanley Kubrick’s movies.  2001: A Space Odyssey was a movie that I watched a few years ago for the first time, and was stunned when it finished.  I knew that there was a novel version of the same story, but looking into it, I discovered that they were made at the same time, but weren’t the same exact story.  This piqued my interest and I wanted to read the book.

The novel is just as much of an experience as the movie.  There are some big concepts being covered throughout the writing, and the style of Arthur C. Clarke makes it a thrilling ride the whole way through.  I liked every minute I was reading the book and I’m looking forward to the future installments in the series.

What I liked most about the book, which is true of most science fiction that I’ve read, is that it isn’t about the science fiction as much as bigger themes like life, the universe, and everything.  The science fiction is just a way to get into the material, and an interesting way to present it.  2001: A Space Odyssey plays like science fiction, but is really a long essay about what it means to be alive.  The way that it was all brought together to create the perfect mixture is something that can truly be appreciated.  I can’t help but highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to read some science fiction with deeper themes than straight action/adventure.

The Princess Bride

Now onto some plain old swash-buckling action and adventure.  The Princess Bride.  “What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince in the world—And he turns out to be a son-of-a-bitch?”  I’ll tell you.  A lot of fun.

The thing I most love about The Princess Bride is how it is written.  The book is written as though the author is abridging an old historical document.  Why does this make it good?  It gives William Goldman the ability to add humorous asides into the novel.  He will stop in the middle of telling the story and write about what he cut out of the original text in order to make it more entertaining.  He’ll go on tangents about his family and what obtaining The Princess Bride did to their relationships.  He’ll tell tales about working in Hollywood while writing movies.  Or he’ll make comments about what is going on in the story and why he finds it good or bad.  Inserting himself into the novel in such a self-referential way is something I haven’t seen too often in books.  It made me enjoy this book even more, even though I was already enjoying it.

Even without all of that, the adventure story is still a gripping one.  It’s a tale of true love conquering everything.  It’s a tale of one man overcoming his loneliness while another man overcomes a terrible thing that happened to him when he was young.  The action is well thought out.  The jokes crackle with laughter.  The prose is salivating.  There are twists and turns that will leave you breathless (if you haven’t seen the movie, which is practically identical).  If the book was twice as long, I would have enjoyed that just as much.

The Disaster Artist

I wrote about this one in another post where I attempted to do a full review sort of thing.  I won’t get into too much detail about it now.  Let’s just say that I loved this book as much as I love The Room.  That’s only fitting since it is about what went into making that movie.

The Disaster Artist simultaneously tells two stories which combine to form one full satisfying tale.  The first is Greg Sestero’s attempt to become a Hollywood star and all of the pains, misfortunes, and opportunities that came along with it.  The other is a behind-the-scenes recounting of what happened during the filming of The Room, one of the most notorious bad movies of the past twenty years.  The two stories give a good idea of who Tommy Wiseau is and why The Room ended up the way it was.

This was the only non-fiction book I read in 2013 and I have to say that it was the best non-fiction book I read in the past year.  It is structured like fiction, but is about real events.  That kind of storytelling really helped to make it a more entertaining read than it could have been.  I appreciate the effort that went into making The Disaster Artist as strong of a book as it is.

The Worst Book I Read in 2013: Rig Warrior

I should have expected it going in.  Rig Warrior is the first novel in a series of three novels about truck driving.  That’s not entirely true though.  It’s about government involvement in truck driving, and one truck driver who has had enough and fights back.  At least, that’s what the first in the series is about, and that’s the one that I have read.

I own all three of the novels.  You might be asking yourself why I own all three if I do not like the first.  They were all on sale for very very cheap when the Canadian store Zellers was going out of business.  I saw the name, Rig Warrior, saw the description, and thought I might as well check them out.  It’s a decision that I both regret all the time and don’t regret at all.

Here are the problems with Rig Warrior.  The writing is atrocious.  I don’t mean it structurally.  I mean it in a word-to-word basis.  It reads as though it was written by a ten year old who thought that truck drivers and swearing was cool.  Then there is the structure.  The ending is clearly setting up the sequels, but it feels so rushed that I was wondering where the other hundred pages of the novel went.  The transition from the story to set-up was so abrupt that I think author William W. Johnstone forgot to write an actual ending to the story he was telling.  This book wasn’t only the worst I read in 2013, but the most disappointing as well.

That sums up the top 5 books I read in 2013.  It also sums up the bottom book.  2014 is a new year and will bring new books for me.  First up is Let the Right One In.  I’m looking forward to another year of reading, and another year of discovering books I will love for years to come.  Thanks for reading this.