For some reason this year I've started using Goodreads in earnest to track what I read. I'll try to do so here, as well. Predominantly, but not exclusively, science fiction.
1. Central Station - Lavie Tidhar - Short story collection all set around a space port located in the Middle East. 4/5
2. The Medusa Chronicles - Stephen Baxter & Alastair Reynolds - Inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke novella. 3/5
3. Stories Of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang - All good stories, but I walked away feeling like Chiang is a shitload smarter than I am. 4/5
4. Darwinia - Robert Charles Wilson - I discovered this author by trying his amazingly well written Spin, and while I love his writing, this wasn't his best book. Interesting take on alternate history, kind of. 4/5
5. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft - Stephen King - I haven't read anything of King's since high school, but damn he's one good writer. The whole thing just flowed like a Mark Twain river. 5/5
6. The Elements of Style - Strunk & White - Every grammar book needs this kind of humor. It was fascinating to read Strunk's rant-like diatribe about using "they" in the singular to avoid gender-specific pronouns. 5/5
7. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott - Not as engaging as King's book on the subject. 3/5
8. Speaker's Meaning - Owen Barfield - Dry series of lectures put to paper. Not what I was hoping for. 2/5
9. 1Q84 - Haruki Murakami - Sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring as hell. When I was 300 pages in -- roughly one quarter of the way through the book -- I realized not much had actually happened yet. 3/5
10. Revenger - Alastair Reynolds - Pirates in space. Maybe cheesy, but written for a YA audience, I think. I liked it. 4/5
11. Mars Prime - William C. Dietz - Complete garbage. The protagonist is a journalist who's had an eye replaced with a video camera. At one point the author, in trying to portray him as a bad-ass, describes him, without irony, as a one-eyed monster. 1/5 (because Goodreads doesn't allow zeroes)
12. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew - Ursula K. Le Guin - The exercises were both fun and challenging. Her discussion on the various topics covered within were wonderful to read. 5/5
13. Astrophysics: A Very Short Introduction - James Binney - Not that helpful for a layperson like me, what with too much math and assumptions about knowledge of physics. The unusual amount of typos didn't help, either. 2/5
14. Coyote - Allen Steele - Short stories collected into a coherent novel of colonization. I picked it up thinking it was a standalone book. Turns out it's the first part of a trilogy. I'll happily read more, it was so well written. 4/5
15. The Telling - Ursula K. Le Guin - Not her best work. Seems to break the rule of "show, don't tell," ironically enough. Or is it intentional? 3/5
16. Gifts - Ursula K. Le Guin - YA fantasy about people with special powers and the rules for using them. 4/5
17. Voices - Ursula K. Le Guin - Follow-up to Gifts. It's hard to put my finger on why, but I couldn't put this down. Builds nicely on the previous one. Looking forward to starting the third book. 5/5