An old Year-end Review for 2005

While cleaning up my hard drive, I found files where I kept track of the books I read for a given year. Someone had given me the idea (back in the 90s, I believe) to open a text file, and add the name of the book I'd read. What follows below looks like an "end of the year" post made to a bulletin board somewhere. It's past my time on Usenet. Many of these may have appeared elsewhere in this blog, if not the entire post itself. I'll post these files one per month.

It looks like 2005 was an old year. I don't remember even having some of these let alone reading them. Quite a few were library books, particularly the political ones, which were right next to the science fiction section at my local branch.

2005: The Year in Review

Horseclans #1: The Coming of the Horseclans,

Star Trek #29: Dreadnought, Diane Carey

Big Trouble, Dave Barry

At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election,

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, K. J. Anderson

Defcon One, Joe Weber

Sword and Shadow, Anne Marston

Star Trek: the Return, William Shatner

Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America, Mark Levin

Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, Charles M. Schulz

3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

The Light Fantastic, Terry Pratchett

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J. K. Rowling

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis

100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, Goldberg

1776,

The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

Magazines Anthologies: (some old issues that I had but never read)

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2000

What strikes me is that I not only have no recollection of Horseclans #1, but I didn't even remember reading it. It was a GURPS worldbook back in the 80s or 90s, which is had I would have even been aware of it. Likewise, I don't remember reading Dreadnought, or even owning a copy, or than the pair of books I bought as a Christmas present from a friend many years before this. The 1776 entry is also a head-scratcher, especially since there's no author attached to it -- ah, a quick net search shows it was written by David McCullough. I remember that now. I remember reading the bits about the Gowanus swamp and the Battle of Brooklyn because it happened in my backyard -- LITERALLY.

Interestingly, I don't seem to have tags for Pratchett or C. S. Lewis.

Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden & Avenger (Shatner, Reeves-Stevens)

Star Trek: The Ashes of Eden, William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Pocket Books 1995

Star Trek: Avenger, William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, Pocket Books 1997

Fun, quick reads for the train. Ashes of Eden takes place before Generations and features the old cast. It starts with Kirk back on the Faragut and moves to "current day" wherean old nemesis is back. Avenger is a TNG novel with Spock. Although it is technically a sequel to The Return, the plot makes nuerous references to Eden, and sums up the plot of Return, so that it isn't necessary to be read in between. There's a blurb for another book, Spectre, in 1998. I haven't seen it in book form or on tape. I'll pass these on. Postscript:Passed them onto Thomas. Listened to The Return on tape. Would like to read it.

If I remember the sequence of events correctly, I listened to Avenger in the car first. I remember wondering how Kirk got there and why he was concerned with some strange alien woman that he was looking for. That aside -- I figured that there was something I missed -- I enjoyed the tape and thought that it tied into the original series and the movies pretty well. (So well, it was that obvious that Shatner had little to do with it.)

Since then I went back looking for Shatner Star Trek novels because they were among the better written ones. (I won't say the same for his Tek-War novels.) Pretty much, if Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens are associated with it, it's probably good. "Probably" because Paramount can always be counted on to ruin a good thing.