It was a good year for me and books. Mostly because I quit my job to travel the world reading books and drinking cervesas. Which turns out to be less lucrative but more exciting than software development.

Actually I worked the first five months of the year and was reading books mostly while being antisocial in the Thomson Reuters cafeteria at lunch. The next six months I spent in Central America scrounging for used books and begging friends to fly down with books in tow.

Recently I have given up on paper books and started downloading them illegally to read on my phone. I had a Nook for that, but I gave it away to a cleaning lady in Panama.

Some exclusions to the list this year for brevity's sake. I read some tech books, children's books in Spanish, and parts of a popular business book about viral marketing. A one-word review: Meh.

And now once again, the books I read last year, from worst to first:

25. The Raw Shark Texts (2007) - Steven Hall

In this novel, a man wakes up remembering nothing of his previous life, and then proceeds to act in ways that make no goddamn sense at all. He later learns that he is being hunted by a conceptual shark, which could potentially destroy a computer network of cloned human psyches, and yeah, it's quite a stretch to say the least.

I also hated the dialogue between the protagonist and his apparently dead ex-girlfriend. I'm kind of surprised I finished it, but it does read fast. Some of the pages are just ASCIIish renderings of fish.

24. The Sheltering Sky (1949) - Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky is a novel about three ignorant American travelers in the era immediately after World War II who travel to Northern Africa as tourists. It's supposed to be an existential thriller, but for me the strange turns of the plot and narrative perspective left me more perplexed than thrilled.

In Latin America I have not encountered malaria, which is featured in this novel, but I did contract Montezuma's Revenge (the shits) my first day in Mexico. I was sick three more times throughout the summer, but my stomach has since grown accustomed to the bacteria of America Latina.

23. Javascript: The Good Parts (2008) - Douglas Crockford

The only tech book I'm including on my list this year. It's actually an excellent book that covers advanced topics of core Javascript. But it's not particularly poetic or moving or otherwise worth reading unless you're trying to build a javascript-powered website. Which I did in 2017.

According to my Github repos I committed 121,000 lines of code to thistroll.com in 2017. Course I deleted 108,000 lines as well.

22. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Long Way Home (2007) - Joss Whedon & Georges Jeanty

I dated a Buffy fanatic briefly in 2017. After we broke up I bought her this compilation of Buffy comics. Before I gave it to her I read the book. After I gave it to her I inked a deal with her in which I promised to watch Buffy if she watched Battlestar Gallactica.

At years end I have knocked out 4 seasons of Buffy. Season 4 was kind of dumb but all in all I'm a fan. It's also nice to be on good relations with exes. Took me a lot of life to figure that one out.

20-21. Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (1865-1871) - Lewis Carroll

These were the 3rd and 4th books I read in Spanish. As soon as I picked up Alicia en el Pais de las Maravillas I started seeing Alice everywhere. I even wrote a blog about it, so enough on that.

The Wonderland books are imaginative and full of clever wordplay. For instance Alice says she sees nobody on the road and the king is impressed because at that distance he can barely spot real people, let alone Nobody. It's entertaining but the characters and plot won't draw you in like a good modern novel.

19. Swamplandia! (2011) - Karen Russell

Swamplandia is a story about three children who live at an amusement park specializing in alligator wrestling. Their mother has just died and the park is in decline.

It contains colorful scenes and some really tense moments. My biggest criticism was that I found the characters unbelievable - especially the secondary characters, many of whom come across as caricatures of American teens.

18. The Lost and Found (2011) - Patrick McGreer

This book is objectively not all that great, but I enjoyed it because I was travelling in Panama at the time I read it and it's about travelling in Panama.

It's a novel written by a guy who owns a hostel in Panama, and it is somewhat about the hostel. The author is a Freemason, and it's kind of about that too.

The male characters in the novel skew on the sexist side, the female characters skew on the undeveloped as characters side.

But it did make me examine my own privilege as a white American in Latin America, and it also inspired me to hike 28km up and down a volcano.

17. The Heroes (2011) - Joe Abercrombie

The 5th book set in the First Law universe. I enjoyed this but it was probably my least favorite of the series. Partly I wanted more female characters, and partly I felt like the plot was a tad constrained and predictable.

The theme is classic Abercrombie. It's all about one battle that takes place on a hill with large stones atop it called "The Heroes." The novel explores what it means to be a hero, and if being a hero is the same as being a good person. Spoiler: it's not.

16. Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967) - Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson spent a year researching the Hell's Angels at a time when they were the bogeymen of popular American culture. Much of this book is about how the media made the Angels into what they were.

Although he criticizes the exaggerations of the media, there are still some brutal moments in the book - particularly a gang rape scene at an Angels party.

The book ends with Thompson falling out with the Angels. A group of Angels gang stomp him after he criticizes one of them for beating his wife, which for me redeemed HST somewhat after using a casual tone to depict the sexual violence associated with the Angels.

15. Just Kids (2010) - Patti Smith

Just Kids is a wild autobiographical ride through Patti Smith's childhood and young adulthood. It centers around her relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe.

They live in NYC in the late 60s and early 70s. They are poor and deadly serious about their art. Robert is a visual artist who evolves from collages to sculptures to photography. Patti is a poet who dabbles in paintings and eventually becomes a world famous rock star.

Here she writes about her life before stardom. She dates the playwrite Sam Shepard and rubs shoulders with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, etc. She made a fan out of me.

14. On Beauty (2005) - Zadie Smith

After White Teeth was my #1 book last year, I decided to check out what else Zadie Smith has to offer. This was a solid novel, but nowhere near as good as White Teeth.

It centers around a mixed-race family in a fictional universtity town in Massachusetts. The father is an art history professor and much of the plot revolves around intrigue at the university.

The overarching theme is the nature of beauty - what makes a work of art beautiful? And how about people?

13. Coraline (2002) - Neil Gaiman

A wonderful story about a creative girl trapped in a dull family who stumbles upon a world that appears to be a darker and more exciting version of our own. In the other world she has an other mom and other dad. Her other family has buttons for eyes and loves to play. But do they have other motives?

I read 85% of this book in Spanish but then I lost the book somewhere. So I watched the movie at some hostel in Nicaragua. The book is better.

10-12.The Earthsea Trilogy (1968-1972) - Ursula K. Le Guin

The original Earthsea trilogy was Ursula K. Le Guin's first crack at fantasy. The editions I read included an essay by her explaining how she had attempted to subvert the genre. Normally an author having to explain what they were trying to get across would annoy me, but I admit she convinced me that her books are cooler than I had originally thought.

The most striking differences between Le Guin's stories and those of say Tolkien are that her protagonist is brown-skinned and that there are no armies. The wizards in her novels are seeking balance rather than victory.

My favorite of the trilogy was The Tombs of Atuan, a story told from the perspective of a girl chosen to serve in a cult of female priests. All of the novels can be read on their own and don't need to be read in order.

9. Perdido St. Station (2000) - Chia Miéville

Rad sci-fi story set in a fictional world with early industrial technology, subtle forms of magic, the rarest hints of demons, an interdimensional spider, bipedal humanoid insects, giant moths that feed on dreams, and a hive-mind of household appliances. It's quite vivid and fun.

8. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) - Michael Chabon

An epic novel spanning the lifetimes of two comic book men in the Golden Age of comics. The novel starts with Joe Kavalier arriving as a Czech refugee in New York, continues through World War II, and ends with the Kefauver Senate hearings in which prominent comic book artists were interrogated about their sexual orientation. It won the Pulitzer.

7. Best Served Cold (2009) - Joe Abercrombie

All of Joe Abercrombie's books are heavy on male characters, but the chief protagonist here is a woman mercenary dead set on exacting revenge for the murder of her brother. She recruits a party including a master poisoner, a simple murderer obsessed with numbers, a famous drunk, and a burly Northman who has come South looking to be a better man. I tear through all the Abercrombie books, and this one I especially enjoyed.

6. Stardust (1999) - Neil Gaiman

I wasn't super into the first Neil Gaiman book I read, but I'm starting to get the hype now. Stardust is an exceptionally crafted fairy tale written in a traditional style. The plot centers around a half-faerie young man who travels into the land of faeries to retrieve a fallen star. He is fetching the star to impress the prettiest girl in his village, but much happens along the way to change his priorities.

5. The Broom of the System (1987) - David Foster Wallace

This was DFW's first novel, and it's somewhat more conventional than for instance Infinite Jest. You still have a lot of jumping around in time, voice, and format, but there's a more or less straightforward plot. Which is something along the lines of: a bunch of old people have vanished from a nursing home and must be located as they are key in developing an intelligence-boosting baby food formula that has transformed a heretofore reticent parrot into an evangelical television celebrity.

The Broom of the System has laugh out loud moments, deep thoughts on the relationship between words and self, and some sort of an ending (as opposed to the no sort of an ending for Infinite Jest).

4. In the Woods (2007) - Tana French

This is a murder mystery set in modern Ireland. It's a gripping page-turner with some truly gut-wrenching moments.

The protagonist is a detective who as a child was the sole survivor of an unsolved incident in which his two best friends went missing in the woods. Twenty years later he and his partner are assigned to the case of a 12-year-old girl murdered in the very same woods.

I've never been much of a mystery novel guy, but I will definitely be reading more Tana French after this one.

3. The Orphan Master's Son (2012) - Adam Johnson

Another Pulitzer prize winner, this novel takes places in North Korea. It follows the life of an orphan who through service to the state and circumstances I'd hate to spoil ends up in rooms with a United States senator and the dear leader himself, Kim Jong Il.

This novel really got me thinking about the plight of the North Korean people. It also got me arguing on Facebook with a radical leftist who was writing about how the United States is just as horrible to live in as North Korea because of our prison industrial complex.

I'm pretty out of touch with the far left these days. I still believe in worker control of the workplace. I still espouse unpopular opinions like random selection for choosing congresspeople. And I've recently been flirting with ideas about a world beyond the USA and Mexico in which we share some form of government.

But when during the past year on social media I would see a leftist reaction to a liberal position, I generally sided with the liberals. I think it's okay to have a pussy march, for instance, even if not every oppressed person has a pussy. And I think all Americans are lucky to live in the USA and not North Korea.

2. From Here To Eternity (1951) - James Jones

There's a lot to take issue with in this novel. It's set on an army barracks in Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor. The main characters are all macho guys - which is my #1 turnoff in literature. Violence against homosexuals is dealt with casually, although some of the main characters regularly date gay men. A secondary character who Joyce depicts as a good guy espouses white supremacist ideology, although Prew the main character finds common cause with Southern blacks.

In the end though, this book just hit me really hard. The depictions of love-crazed misery and drunken rage rang true for me. The picture painted of army life is not a flattering one. But you can't help feeling for the people.

When I visited the Frida Kahlo house in Mexico City, From Here To Eternity was the only American novel I saw in her book collection. I guess Frida liked it too.

1. City of Thieves (2008) - David Benioff

After selecting novels by women about women as my #1 book two years running, this year I'm going with a novel by a guy about two young Russian men during the siege of Leningrad.

In City of Thieves, two men are charged with finding a dozen eggs for the wedding of a Russian colonel's daughter. The city of Leningrad is starving and eggless, which drives the men out into the cold behind enemy lines.

The characters are phenomenal, and the depiction of Leningrad during the siege as seen through their eyes is chilling and memorable. I actually cried when I read the last line of the novel, which I don't remember ever doing before. Were they tears of sadness or tears of joy? You'll have to read the novel to find out.

That'll do it for this year. I'm currently eating leftover cheese plate at an AirBnB I'm sharing with an old union friend in Bogotá, Colombia. I plan on reading books in South America for a while yet. But who knows, by the end of 2018 I may be avoiding coworkers and reading books during lunch again. I'll keep you posted.

Hasta luego and happy reading in 2018!