I've not read the books you list for Neal Stephenson, Justina Robson and Paul Cornell but have read others by them and recommend them.

If you read Sleepyhead by Mark Billingham and like it, be sure to read the books in order since the characters evolve and some die. It can be confusing in that way.

Dark Eden, Eva, and the Marilynne Robinsons are my tips.

I also liked The Lacuna very much, and The Secret River.

The Hunger Games suffer somewhat from YA Logic (attempting to avoid spoilers, the thing that I thought 'no, that can't possibly be how this ends because that is way too unrealistic' was in fact how one of the books ends) - the first book is definitely worth reading, the others are entertaining but suffer a bit from feeling the need to trump the events of the first book...

In my review of the year, I listed both London Falling and A Book of Silence among the best books I read in 2012. Of the two, I think London Falling may be more to your taste, though; a lot of my enjoyment of Silence came from having had experiences similar to hers, and I don't recall you mentioning anything of the kind yourself.

I found The King's Speech much less readable as a book than it was watchable as a film, so I guess that's a disrecommendation.

I read And Another Thing, but I rather wish I hadn't.

I agree with this too.

In the last category, I haven't read any, but I checked what sounded interesting - several of those are going in my library queue!

The only one I've read is the Bellingham. My Grandmother adores his stuff and I thought it was quite good. It's a bit odd though. It also somewhat gleefully tears apart the maverick detective thing and gives the female characters something to do.

The friends that have read The Hunger Games really liked it.

One more for those who are interested in language-- The Empire of the Word, a look at how languages survive and spread. Spoiler: it's a lot more complicated than "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

Edited at 2013-01-01 03:11 pm (UTC)

Something Wicked is a classic. I read it after seeing the movie. Reamde and Captain Vorpatril's Alliance are both minor works by these authors, but oh-so-much better than many other books. I enjoyed both quite a lot. I don't remember a thing about The Magic Cup except that it was set in Ireland. It was purged from my personal library many years ago. Bitter Angels by C.L. Anderson was quite good. I hope the author sells more in this series. If you weren't aware, it's a pseudonym for Sarah Zettel. I haven't been able to get into her fantasy series, but enjoy her SF much better.

Race of Scorpions gets a thumb's up from me, but I like the Niccolo series a lot; much more than the Francis series. I seem to remember that you weren't that thrilled with Niccolo Rising. Shades of Milk and Honey got a lot of great reviews and I'd been hearing a lot about Mary Robinette Kowal as a short fiction writer. I like Regencies so had high hopes. Eh. It was good, but I felt it was overhyped a bit. I did buy the sequel in hardcover and enjoyed it more--the main character has more agency.

Another thumb's up for Flora Segunda but I have a feeling you won't like it; I'm not sure why. I read the sequel, Flora's Dare first and like it more. But then I like being dropped into the middle of a new world/culture/story and having to figure out what's up.

The Laertian Gamble (Star Trek) by Robert Sheckley - AVOID AT ALL COSTS! It's one of the worst books I've tried to read in a long time. I bought it second-hand and the only reason it's still in the house is that I keep meaning to post why it's so bad. Either the guy lost the plot in more ways than one or he hired a very, very bad ghost writer. A pity as his books have given me a lot of pleasure in the past.

[Edit] BTW there's something wrong with this poll. Only one of my answers gets recorded and I've tried twice now.

Edited at 2013-01-01 09:57 am (UTC)

I did! LJ must be playing up because I couldn't see my name in there. OK, that's all good!

I haven't read any of the books in the last section, but many of them sound interesting. I like reading analyses of stuff like Tolkien's works and Doctor Who.

You know...in case you're interested in the opinions of a complete stranger.... =)

Edited at 2013-01-01 01:02 pm (UTC)

Oh, do read Elsa Morante's Hisotry (La Storia)! We read it in my Italian lit class, and it is worth the time (it's long!). So compelling. There's also a really good film made from it.

My review of "And another thing" is here: http://moonplanet.dreamwidth.org/62146.html
I liked it.

The Hunger Games - as someone above said, the first is the best of them. I quite enjoyed it. The other fun thing about reading YA is that you don't have to work on deciphering the subtext :)

Reamde - someone told Stephenson to cut out all the cod-Platonism and historical stuff out, so this is computers and guns geekery and there's more room for the thriller. Computers and guns geekery, not a great subtext :(

How to train your dragon -- barely remembered

Kraken - I'm with Christopher Priest. Mieville could be doing better.

Thorns - written in his mad prolific early 70's period, read in the 80's period when I read loads of Silverberg, can't remember it at all

Luther Arkwright - one of the Victoriana/steampunk ur-texts

Red and the Black, Dead Souls, Eyeless in Gaza - all book club books last year. I liked the Stendhal more than most, but I think I like French fiction more than most. Dead Souls is a lot of fun in the early sections, but wherever it was going in the end was less so. Eyeless is in the 'interesting for teh wrong reasons' section

Happy New Year! My recommendations stand from previous years: the novels of Ian Watson contain his distinctive form of inspired lunacy, but as I recall you really didn't like Miracle Visitors, so you might not like The Martian Inca or The Jonah Kit either. But maybe under different circumstances?

The Far Side of the World is good, but it looks as if you are just up to Desolation Island so you have several books to go before that one, and they are best read in order, the next being The Fortune of War.

After The History of the Lord of the Rings, you'll find The Peoples of Middle-Earth to be a bit pedestrian. Lots of family trees and chronologies. The most interesting bit is "The New Shadow", the abandoned opening to a projected sequel to The Lord of the Rings.

I'm still interested to hear about Cycling in Victorian Ireland. And about whether Gavin Menzies has crossed the line from "hilariously deluded" to "full-fledged alternate universe" in his 1434: The Year a Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance (the title contains multiple falsehoods: I guess the idea is that the reader can have no excuse that they didn't know what they were getting).

And finally, a book that's not on any of your lists, but which I think you will enjoy: Jack Glass by Adam Roberts.

My whole family loves Cressida Cowell's How to Tame Your Dragon series. First, we read them aloud to our dragon-loving 7 yr old, who couldn't get enough. Then I found myself reading three books ahead (in an afternoon; they're short) because they are just that amusing. Fast-paced and funny. Ms Cowell studied English at Oxford. Her father is a Viscount. There be dragons and subtext here!

Absolutely not funny and not on your list, but beautifully written and unforgettable, and the only book I've consistently recommended to anyone all year long: We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.

Two disrecommendations, one mild and one strong, and one recommendation:
A Princess of Roumania by Paul Park is an uninteresting book. Even the person who recommended it to me admitted that the main character is pretty boring and one of the antagonists was the reason she kept reading.

Any Given Doomsday by Lori Handeland is terrible. Avoid, avoid, avoid! Bland main character, repulsive love interests, bad writing, dull plot. For a much better series along vaguely similar lines, try the October Daye series by Seanan McGuire (first book is Rosemary and Rue).

If you like distopian fiction I'd recommend the Brave New Worlds anthology. I read it in 2011 and while I don't remember much about it now I apparently thought it was a strong anthology. (I write reviews of everything on Goodreads) I gave it a 4.5/5 stars and I'm generally pretty hard on anthologies.

I reread Orbitsville fairly recently on a visit to my parents (where it's been sat on a shelf since I was a kid) because I realised I was randomly reading a lot of BDO based stuff, it's not perfect but it's a good (and fairly short) book.

i loved the conceit of Kraken, and it's well written-not a brilliant book, but a perfectly enjoyable one, and it's nice that someone is doing weird London stuff every so often. I never finished Looking For Jake because I got the hardback and moved house a few times, found it when we moved to this place and it's back on my pilke, what I did read I loved, especially the non standard format stuff, definitely one to dip in and out.

Galactiv North is nice, but I can't actually remember anything other than "I enjoyed it"-I also need to get in touch with the guy I borrowed it from about 6 years ago but....

I would love to know what you think about 1432, I read the first one and found it, um, interesting but patchy, I don't think I'll get this one but would be happy to be persuaded otherwise.

I am always surprised to discover that there are books I have read and you have not.

In the world of non-SF fiction I marked as read Stendahl's "The Red and the Black". But I would not recommend reading it as it is very dull. The lack of sympathetic characters is a big problem with it.

"Dead Souls" by Nikolai Gogol
I highly recommend this. It suffers from Gogol never having finished it, but it it is a fascinating account of a shady character at work in provincial Russia, featuring a parade of grotesques.

"The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857" by William Dalrymple
This is a great book about an age of history coming to an end.

"The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright" by Bryan Talbot
I was thinking about this today, because of Talbot winning some big prize. It is interesting and atmospheric but maybe suffers from confusing plotting and having a main character who can just develop new superpowers whenever he finds himself in a scrape. If you like alternate history stuff this may appeal. I think the sequel (Heart of Empire) is way better and I am not sure if you would need to have read this first to appreciate it.

"The Dark Tower and Other Stories" by C.S. Lewis
I read these years ago and found them interesting. I gather there is a certain level of meta-fictional interest to them as well, as it has been suggested that they are forgeries and were not actually written by CS Lewis at all.

SF of 2012:
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins 31
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury 28
Captain Vorpatril's Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold 21
Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov 14
The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones 12
Reamde by Neal Stephenson 12
334 by Thomas M Disch 9
Orbitsville by Bob Shaw 8
The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner 8
The Dark Tower and Other Stories by C.S. Lewis 7
Keeping it Real by Justina Robson 7

SF pre-2012
The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi 13
Kraken by China Mieville 13
1632 by Eric Flint 11
Conjure Wife by Fritz Leiber 10
Looking for Jake and Other Stories by China Mieville 10
Letters from Father Christmas by J. R. R. Tolkien 10
The Adventures Of Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot 9
Cyberabad Days by Ian Mcdonald 9
Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal 9
Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce 9

non-genre
Swallows And Amazons by Arthur Ransome 25
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens 17
The Far Side Of The World by Patrick O'Brian 14
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson 8
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann 8
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne 8
Race Of Scorpions by Dorothy Dunnett 7
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott 7
The Castle by Franz Kafka 7
Tintin in the Land of the Soviets by Herge 6
Eyeless in Gaza by Aldous Huxley 6
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer 6
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad 6
The Red and the Black by Stendhal 6

non-fiction
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor 20
The Monsters and the Critics by J R R Tolkien 13
Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing by Katherine Ashenburg 13
Isaac Asimov: A Life of the Grand Master of Science Fiction by Michael White 12
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 by Damien Broderick and Paul di Filippo 11
How Languages Are Learned by Patsy M. Lightbown 11
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuition Deceives Us: Or Why You Have No Idea How Your Mind Works by Christopher Chabris 11
The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal 10
The Doctor's Monsters: Meanings of the Monstrous in Doctor Who by Graham Sleight 9
Katherine Swynford: The History of a Medieval Mistress by Jeannette Lucraft 9
Doctor Who: The Visual Dictionary by Jacqueline Rayner 9
The King's Speech by Mark Logue 9


Edited at 2013-05-07 08:31 pm (UTC)

Recommendations:

X3:
1632
Housekeeping

X2:
London Falling
Luther Arkwright
Reamde
The Secret River
Jacob Have I Loved
Buddenbrooks
The Devils/The Possessed
Dead Souls
The Red and the Black
The Hunger Games

Edited at 2013-04-11 08:39 pm (UTC)