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[notquitethere]

Spoiler: 1/52 (click to show/hide)

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothuss - 650 pages and he doesn't even leave the bloody university.

[Sirus]

Spoiler: 3/52 (click to show/hide)

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney by Folks at Capcom
Not technically a book, but a Visual Novel. It has well over 80,000 words according to a word counter, which obliterates the requirements for NaNoWriMo. Therefore I'm counting it

[TheDarkStar]

Spoiler: 2/52 (click to show/hide)

13 January - Firefight by Brandon Sanderson - It's the sequel to Steelheart and very well written (you should read it). The premise it that one day a random segment of the population got super powers, but they are like the One Ring from LoTR because using them makes you evil and megalomanaic.
18 January - Visitors by Orson Scott Card - It has a nice premise and has a unique (and very in-depth) way of handling time travel, but the characterization is lacking. Of course, I don't really like Card's current style of writing anyway.

[Vector]

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[notquitethere]

"Why Smart People Hurt" is a challenge because normally, I wouldn't be caught dead reading self-help books, and almost stopped in the intro because I felt talked down to. This one kind of sorted some things out for me, though. Now I'm reading a book on product design.

What was the main gist of the book? What is it about smartness that causes pain?

[Silthuri]

Spoiler: 1/52 (click to show/hide)

Resident Evil Volume II: Caliban Cove by S.D. Perry - 7/10 - It wasn't quite as good as the first book in the series. The writing style kinda reminds me of Dean Koontz's Frankenstein though, which is probably why I'm so fond of this series.

[BlitzDungeoneer]

Huh. I should probably do this, given the sheer amount of books I won that I haven't even touched.

Spoiler: 0/52 (click to show/hide)

Nothing here yet, will have to look through collection.

[sjm9876]

Should probably chip in here myself, see if I can beat the pathetic amount from last year:

Spoiler: 1/52 (click to show/hide)

Clariel - Garth Nix

[notquitethere]

How's Clariel compare to the original trilogy?

[sjm9876]

I would say not quite as good, but still an enjoyable read.

Then again, I haven't read the originals for a long long time, so my memory isn't exactly clear - and certain parts did seem like they would be more enjoyable if I clearly remembered the others.

[Vector]

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[SirQuiamus]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Why Smart People Hurt" is a challenge because normally, I wouldn't be caught dead reading self-help books, and almost stopped in the intro because I felt talked down to. This one kind of sorted some things out for me, though. Now I'm reading a book on product design.

What was the main gist of the book? What is it about smartness that causes pain?

Basically that we're smart enough to see through a lot of the world's bullshit and ask a lot of reasonable questions, but not smart enough to recognize our own limitations and react in a reasonable way--in particular, we're not good at pruning down our questioning for our own well-being (for example, asking repeated questions about the shopping mart's pastrami in infinitesimal detail when there's some other project we'd rather be using our attention on). It also talked about avoiding mania, insomnia, and racing-brain issues, which is a serious long-term problem for me and which I very much appreciated.

tl;dr: It's about the challenges of living a meaningful life as a smart person who can see through a lot of the ways in which other people create meaning for themselves, and particular aspects of self-care that smart people in particular tend to struggle with.

Hmm... Does the book give an explicit definition of "smartness?" -- i mean, metaphorically speaking, are we talking about the real-life equivalent of INT, or WIS, or perhaps a balanced combination of both? In my opinion, "intelligence" is hardly coextensive with the ability to "see through the BS," and "wisdom," on the other hand, implies precisely that kind of self-knowledge which the book assumes to be lacking in smart people (and conversely not-lacking in non-smart people?). I'm not trying to argue for any particular interpretation of the term, but simply wondering how the "smartness" discussed above applies to people like myself, the ones with slightly-above-average INT and abysmally low WIS. 

[Arx]

Spoiler: 4/52 (click to show/hide)

Towers of Midnight - Robert Jordan/Brandon Sanderson (Yay, plotlines all finishing off.)
Bloodheir - Brian Ruckley (While it's well written, I'm not actually sure how much happened in it)
Divergent - Veronica Roth (Not the best book I've ever read, and definitely a YA novel, but good concept and writing.)
The Fault in our Stars - John Green (Emotion rollercoaster. Pretty good read.)

I'd love to be pushing myself on reading, but I think I'm going to have to just kick back in a literary environment this year. I have plenty of scholarly reading to be doing to push myself.

[notquitethere]

Basically that we're smart enough to see through a lot of the world's bullshit and ask a lot of reasonable questions, but not smart enough to recognize our own limitations and react in a reasonable way--in particular, we're not good at pruning down our questioning for our own well-being (for example, asking repeated questions about the shopping mart's pastrami in infinitesimal detail when there's some other project we'd rather be using our attention on). It also talked about avoiding mania, insomnia, and racing-brain issues, which is a serious long-term problem for me and which I very much appreciated.

As far as I can tell, self-help books have two functions: to impart core insights and to share ways of coping or overcoming issues. The core-insight stuff might be completely common-sense or wholly foreign to a person's way of thinking (stuff like: there's no use dwelling on the things you can't change, happiness starts from within, it's best to own up to your own behaviour etc.); ways of coping may or may not be useful depending somewhat on the reader's dispositions. I'm glad you got something out of it.

Divergent - Veronica Roth (Not the best book I've ever read, and definitely a YA novel, but good concept and writing.)

As a writing experiment last year, I broke down the first few chapters of Divergent to see how she builds up the scenes and introduces the characters. It's cleverly done, seeding enough setting information while keeping the plot trundling on at a brisk pace. You learn about the eventual factional conflict in the book in a very early scene that served the primary purpose of introducing the family members/dynamic. So, at the same time as learning the core differences that will drive the factions apart, you also see why it's such a betrayal for the two Abnegation kids to pick a different faction from their parents. The core YA dodgy-sc-fi/love-triangle stuff I could have done without, but it was otherwise well constructed. I didn't feel any need to read the next two books.

[Arx]

It wrapped up well enough for me. I'll look at the sequels if I'm short on things to read (which I won't be).