All the Pretty Horses

I started the year reading Demons by Dostoevsky. Seemed prophetic in a lot of ways about what was coming about 40 years later in 1917. At the beginning of the summer I read All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not into westerns, but I really liked that one. A modern classic. Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry. Such a gorgeously written book.

The full list: https://gitlab.com/rlease/Books My list lines up with a lot of books that people have recommended here, so I'll try to add a few favorites that haven't been mentioned so far. Fiction: 1. Ubik - I read a bunch of Philip K. Dick this year, but this was my favorite. It's delightfully mind bending and left me thinking about it long after the book was done. 2. All the Pretty Horses - Beautifully written. McCarthy has an uncanny ability to paint with words. 3. Cannery Row - Short, witty, and full of interesting characters. Nonfiction: 1. The Idea Factory - A dive into how Bell Labs became such an innovation powerhouse and gives a rounded picture of the figureheads that brought it so much fame. 2. Moonwalking with Einstein - A fun read about a journalist who took researching a memory competition a bit too seriously. 3. Countdown to Zero Day - A fascinating look at the development and deployment of Stuxnet -- the virus built to set Iran's nuclear program back.

The trilogy of Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, and Mona Lisa Overdrive is still my favorite work of fiction, and also, to my mind, exemplifies the kind of taut, awesome writing that I would want to do if I wrote novels. It the only series of 3 books I have read more than once. I caught these books at just the right time in my life (age 13 or 14), leading my high-school fascination with Japan and rekindled interest in computing, and probably played an inordinately large role in me ending up as a programmer who lives in Tokyo, two decades later. I like great sci fi best, but I think most of it is crap, including virtually all of the old pulp sci fi and Asimov I grew up reading (which was basically all of it), Star Wars/Trek, etc. Other than Gibson's stuff, some of the truly spectacular sci fi I have read is the very-dense-and-not-at-all-thriller-ish Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars), and the fast-paced-and-awesome Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. That led me to read all of Wilson's books, many of which are also good. Also Haldeman is an author worth reading, though not all of his books hit their mark.…

I recently reread Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. I was prompted to do so by another book discussion. Not his best book - I think Blood Meridian and The Road are better - but McCarthy is a great writer. For nerd non-fiction, I just read Jim Lovell's Lost Moon which though not a great book, is a good solid book about greatness.