Favorite Books of 2009

These are those books that I read in 2009 which were my favorite reads in the past year.

The books that I enjoyed the most, or that looking back on the past year, were at least the books that I remember best as having enjoyed reading.

Apologies in advance for my slaughter of the English language, cold medicine and a head cold are book working brutally against me.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
If ever there was a book that was absolutely screaming to be made into a big-budget Hollywood production than this is the book. A wonderfully fun read from beginning to end.

It is the story of Locke Lamora, thief, con-artist, and leader of a gang of thieves known as the Gentleman Bastards and the story takes place in a faux-Venetian city known as Camorr.

If you like fantasy books at all, then you owe it to yourself to give this one a read. I’ve read the second book (of the planned seven) Red Seas Under Red Skies and it was just as good if not better than this first one. The third, Republic of Thieves, has been delayed a bit and is apparently coming in October of this year and it is one of my most anticapated books for this year.

Turn Coat (A Novel of the Dresden Files) by Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher has been the author of most sleepless nights for me than any other author I have read. Turn Coat, the 11th novel in the Dresden series, once again had me sitting down to start reading and sometime around when the sun began to come up I was finishing the book’s final page. I quite simply get lost in the Dresden books and really find myself wishing they would be released on Fridays so I could at least read them without being a complete waste of space at work the next day.

The Dresden Files are Urban Fantasy and are centered around the character of Harry Dresden, the first (and only) wizard to be listed in the Chicago phone book. Mostly they center around him working as a private investigator, being hired to find people or things or him getting involved in the supernatural politics of the Dresden’verse. The books also spawned a short-lived TV series which was less ‘based’ on the books as much as ‘very loosely inspired’ by them.

The 12th Dresden Files book, Changes, is out 2 months 2 weeks and 2 days from now and it is my most anticipated book of this year.

Infoquake by David Louis Edelman
This is one of those books where I am left wondering at the end of it whether it will be the start of a whole new sub-genre of SciFi. There are hints of ‘cyberpunk’ here and there in the story, but that just barely begins to describe it.

Where ‘cyberpunk’ typically has nodes to cybernetics or other biological upgrades, Infoquake is about upgrading the brain itself with nanotech and software. The story centers around Natch, a gifted and somewhat sociopathic programmer and entrepenneur who is obsessed with taking his company to the top of the business and sees his shot with grabbing the merchandising rights to a piece of software called MultiReal, despite not even knowing what exactly it does.

It’s hard to describe the book more fully without spoiling it (and it’s been about nine months since I read it). It is however the first book in a trilogy of which the second book, MultiReal, is already out and the third and final book titled GeoSynchron should be out near the end of next month.