Best and Worst Books of 2003?

Thousandstars writes "I saw the article on the best and worst movies of 2003, and, being a literature geek, I thought it would also be appropriate to ask for the best and worst books of 2003. In fiction, Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is toward the top of my best list. How about everyone else?"

My favorite:

[Guano_Jim]

I thought the Lord of the Rings series was a great set of books. I can't wait for someone to make a movie out of it.

Definitely Lord of the Rings

[AltImage]

The LOTR trilogy gets my vote. Very faithful to teh movies.

Fiction

[daeley]

I'd like to nominate the SCO court filings for best work of fiction...and worst work of fiction.

Worst Book

[canfirman]

Eleven Chapters on Chapter Eleven

I expect submissions from Daryl McBride soon. Hopefully I don't have to pay $699 for the book.

Re:Definitely Lord of the Rings

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, I didn't like that Tom Bombadil character they added in there. It was clearly just an attempt to pander to the female and homosexual audience, what with all the dancing and show tunes.

I say, if you're not going to write the book 100% faithful to the movie, don't write the book at all!

You insensitive clod

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an illiterate product of the American public school system.

Now lets return back to epic diatribes on Battlestar Galactica as quickly as possible.

New Testament

[Omega1045]

I thought the New Testament was pretty good, but it lacks a lot of the action of the Old Testament. The use of metaphor was nice. Personally, I would have like a better ending. The 4 horseman things has been way overdone...

Re:Robert "No closure" Jordan

[TrollBridge]

After a failed venture in high school, I find myself trying to plow through this series once again. Does it ever end? I mean it's a truly remarkable story, but it HAS to end somewhere, right??

Re:Quicksilver

[thatnerdguy]

I'm with you on that. It took me the better part of two months to finish that book. Near the end, I couldn't wait to finish, I was just tired of it. Also, most of the time it didn't seem like the story was going anywhere.
Of course, I am still eagerly awaiting the next novels in the Baroque series (any word on when they are expected?)

Re:"Literature Geek?"

[Neop2Lemus]

It made me wonder too as thats what I am (I think). I mean, I don't code...

The fine link between geek and non-geek becomes particularly blurred when talking about "guitar geeks". I mean are they geeks or just knobs? I've always thought the latter but who am I to say?

Should this be a poll?

Re:Best book of 2003

[Shut the fuck up!]

The Linux zealots guide to getting laid.

Here's a synopsis [adequacy.org]

Re:Crossroads of Twilight (Wheel of Time) sucked..

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

You get to the last book of a dekalogy only to realize that the author sucks.
Sturgeon's Law, dude, means that you have inverted the true number of Wheel of Time tomes that suck.
Jordan's corollary: Sturgeon was an optimist.

A friend suggested that Jordan's works were a manifestation of his subliminal hatred for trees spawned from the time he fell out of a tree as a child. Why else would so mulch wood pulp be wasted on his dreck?

Re:Quicksilver

[bentfork]

I was stuck at around the same point as you were for about a month. ( around the sand-sailing ).

I took another run at it a few days ago and was pleased to find out that the plot picked up one page later.

Stephenson books tend to reward the persistent reader. I remember having to convince friends not to burn cryptonomicon after reading the first 200 pages... Keep reading, its worth it... ;)

Same advice for the last 200 pages of this one.

Re:Robert "No closure" Jordan

[rylin]

There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time :P

Re:Some quickies

[Reality Master 101]

They are 15, not 16. And you only have to look at Slashdot to see what happens when 15 year olds get a little bit of power.

Re:All political pundit books

[Sebastopol]

Only the books by left-wingers are crap, the books by the right-wingers are all 100% accurate and truthful.

No kidding; GREAT BOOK!

[Anonymous Coward]

It took me a long time to truly understand the Lord of the Rings; here's a FAQ for those who are new to the story.

Q: Is LoTR really based on Christian Mythology?

A: Yes. Tolkien wanted to demonstrate that even the mentally and physically challenged were capable of success and that therefore we should love everyone, regardless of their defects.

Q: So who represents the mentally and physically challenged?

A: Well obviously the hobbits are the physically challenged ones here, but the central mentally challenged figure is Gandalf, responsible for the most horrible attack plan in literature.

Q: What's so horrible about a poorly armed team of two hobbits infiltrating Mordor?

A: Well, basically it ignores the fundamental strengths of the forces of light. Anyone who's played C&C or Warcraft knows that if you have an advantage in air units, you have to use it. Remember that elves can ride eagles, and that elven archers are incredibly potent - early on, Gimli dismounts a Nazgul with a single shot! With about a thousand eagles (given elven archers on each one), the forces of good would have matched up pretty well in the air against Mordor's air units: all nine of them. While the leader of the Nazgul cannot be killed by any living man, this does not prevent a team of twenty eagles from tearing him to little shreds, especially if Gandalf rode along for help. So basically an air battle would have been brief unmitigated slaughter of the Nazgul as about a thousand eagle-mounted elves blew them out of the sky in a hail of arrows.

Q: But I thought that there was some other book that said that the eagles wouldn't help?

A: We're not talking about some other stupid book here, we're talking about the Lord of the Rings. And in this book, the eagles most definitely help out, first by flying Gandalf off the tower and secondly by pitching into the Final Battle in full force, attacking ground units (stupid!) at great risk to themselves. So obviously they would have been content to take part in a brief airborne slaughter of the Nazgul.

Q: Ok so you defeat all Mordor's air units... then what?

A: Well with air superiority, you command the skies. Which means that you can fly right over Mount Doom and drop anything you want right in there... like a ring. Mordor only had nine airborne units, and with them out of the way Mordor has absolutely no way to prevent anyone from flying anywhere.

Q: But the ring would corrupt the eagles trying to drop the ring in, silly.

A: Actually, the ring can only corrupt those who touch it or those in the nearby area. This is a trivial mechanism to defeat. The first step is permanently bind the ring to a weak and helpless creature, like a rat. Second step is of course to put the rat on a long rope, so that the creature holding the rope is out of the sway of the ring. Then the eagle carrying the rope, having total air superiority, flies over Mount Doom and drops the rat in the volcano. An utterly trivial victory.

Q: Ok, so why the elaborately stupid attack plan? Why send the physical rejects as the only hope of mankind?

A: The lesson is that, though they succeed at great cost and great risk, they are still capable of success. This, of course, was the lesson of the Holocaust - that we should never feel so superior to the weak or inferior that we decide they have no place. Even idiot tacticians like Gandalf and weak, pathetic creatures like Hobbits can add some value here & there.

Q: Wait a minute. I just saw the movie, and there's this scene where they're like "this is the last stand of the Men of the West", and all the men of the west are white, and they face of in total war against Indians on Elephants and "black orcs" (er... maybe we just call them "blacks" for short) and the white Men of the West achieve a total genocidal victory. Doesn't that invalidate what you just said?

A: Well, um, no. That's all fine & good, but remember that in the Holocaust we were committing g

Re:Quicksilver?

[Russ Nelson]

Hard to get the book together when you're writing it with a fucking quill pen.
-russ

Re:Answer: The Bible

[GuntherAEPi]

Fortunately there is no correlation between popularity and quality.

Re:Quicksilver

[Anonymous Coward]

Quicksilver is at the top of my Best AND Worst list.

So you only read one book?

Re:Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

[ShortedOut]

DAMNIT!

Post Anony is too damn close to Submit! My rep is ruined!

Damn you Slashdot! Damn you!!!

Oh, this isn't the *real* ShortedOut... no, I'm his co-worker.. yeah, that's it... A co-worker that likes Harry Potter, yeah...

The real ShortedOut is way cool, he dates Carmen Electra, has a 12 inch peen, drives a Harley, and is on Linus's phone-a-friend list for Who Wants to be a Linux Programmer.

and it makes a lovely doorstop

[hurtstotouchfire]

Nothing like using Stephenson's 900 page opuses to give your place that geek chic flair.

Difference between eagles and airplanes

[astroboscope]

You started off well, but wouldn't the eagle (try to) eat the rat?

Not all that much difference...

[Rob Simpson]

Then just over their heads they saw a passing flash of color. There in the sky they saw a giant eagle, full-feathered and painted shocking pink. On its side were the words DEUS EX MACHINA AIRLINES in metallic gold.
Frito yelped as the great bird swooped low and snatched them both from death with its rubberized talons.
"Name's Gwahno," said the Eagle as they climbed sharply awy from the disintegrating land. "Find a seat."
"But how -" began Frito.
"Not now, mac," the bird snapped. "Gotta figure a flight plan outta this dump."

- _Bored of the Rings_

The worst?

[Wakko Warner]

"Treason", by Ann Coulter. That guy has issues. And breasts.

- A.P.