What’s the best book you read in 2016, and what did you like about it?
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My pick would be The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Barbery creates some unique characters, puts them in an interesting situation, and does an excellent job of describing their inner monologues, as the plot unfolds.
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I’m only halfway through volume one of Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold, but it’s pretty amazing. I’d pick that assuming we aren’t considering re-reads or poetry (good poetry always wins with me).
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“the lost time accidents” by john wray would be my “just off the top of my head” pick. i’ll have to do a little reflection and see if it stays that way. if the second half of the novel had been as good as the first half it would have been one of the 10 best i’ve ever read. as it is it’s still in the top 150-100 which is pretty good considering i’ve read close to 20,000 books so far in my life. wray puts you into an absurd situation and doesn’t baby you but instead makes you come to your own conclusions about what’s going on.
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In “I should have read these before” news, probably either Foucault’s Pendulum, or The Stars My Destination.
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Re-reads and poetry are totally legit.
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In that case going to go with something that’s both, as I’m learning a new appreciation for The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch which I didn’t appreciate when I first reads him almost two decades ago.
I always say I’m fine with living forever (preferably after aging backwards to 25 and stopping there) as long as it’s in an endless well-stocked library 
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Yup. +1.
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Organizational Behavior by Robbins & Judge. It was surprisingly interesting and contained some valuable information that will be helpful for my future workplace interactions.
No, really.
I only read one novel this year. The rest were textbooks. Really boring-ass textbooks.
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Fiction: Joy in the Morning, by P. G. Wodehouse. Published in 2016: Stiletto by Daniel O’Malley.
Non-Fiction: The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff. Great book to read and digest before dipping into some back episodes of Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast.
Which-What-Who: Humbug Volumes 1, and 2. Humbug was a short-lived humour magazine edited by MAD Magazine original editor Harvey Kurtzman. Will Elder and Al Jaffee illustrated much of Humbug. A real treasure. “Trump” humour magazine, also bound in volumes and edited by Harvey Kurtzman, was due out this year and is still on order at my library. I have a hold request on it. Just as Murricans were calling for Trump this year; next year I will be calling for H. Kurtzman’s 1960s publication: Help!
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I don’t read (edit: books I’m talking about here) … I can, just don’t … but my wife reads a lot and said “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. She warns it’s haunting.
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Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters was the best book I read this year. Glad there are other Wodehouse fans here.
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I reread American Gods since the series is coming out next year. Still think it’s a wonderful book and I love where it ends. In addition to the various mythological details, I think the whole bit about roadside attraction types places being magical is kind of neat.
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Yes, excellent book! I also thought the movie was one of the best adaptations I’ve seen.
Best book I read this year was Under the Feet of Jesus, by Helena Maria Viramontes.
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A viewpoint actually quite a bit different than my own as a white, middle aged engineer…
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Which makes your postings here all the more remarkable.
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I really did enjoy The Doomed City but that was recent and I have trouble keeping track of what I read.
I mostly caught up on a pile of Doc Savage that has been sitting for too long. I finished a collection of the Solomon Kane stories from Robert Howard and well they were fun but along with the Doc nothing mind expanding but always enjoyable to me.
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Really enjoyed The Nightmare Stacks but it’s very inside baseball for people who have been reading The Laundry Files since the beginning.
Some people take issue with some of the fictionalized accounts but Console Wars really gave me some insight into just what happened with SEGA.
Most of this year was finishing sci-fi series as I finished the Red Rising trilogy as well as the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy.
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Yeah I broke down and set one up just last week. Now I gotta remember to actually use it.
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