Top 5 books you read in 2005?
 

No particular order...

The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
Ever Since Darwin - Stephen Jay Gould
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
Sperm Wars - Robin Baker

Odd Thomas - Dean Koontz
Stack and Sway: The New Science of Jury Consulting (can't remember the authors, it was for a business law class)
Life Expectancy - Dean Koontz
Deception Point - Dan Brown
Books #1 and #2 of the Frankenstein series - Dean Koontz (can't wait until the summer for book #3)

Beyond too much reference material this has been a light year for books, but two stick with me:

The End of Faith - Sam Harris
Freakonomics - Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - mark haddon
the year of magical thinking -joan didion(depressing as hell but beautifully written)
102 minutes - jim dwyer
Trance - Christopher sorrentino
Snow - Orhan Pamuk

The only book I can remember reading this year: Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J K Rowling
Sociolinguistics - Peter Trudgill

Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Facing the Current - Gerrit Gorter

Life Is a Game, These Are the Rules: Ten Rules for Being Human
by Cherie Carter-Scott

Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Spencer Johnson

I mostly read fluffy stuff this year. The real stand out for me was "Jonathan Stange and Mr. Norrell" by Susannah Clarke. It's the most original work of fantasy I've read in a long time (not a humble "chosen one" to be found!)

Other fun books I enjoyed include:

"Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident" by Eoin Colfer
"The Adventures of Pinocchio" by Carlo Collodi
"Harry Potter" HBP
"Eat, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynne Truss

Harry Potter HBP - JK Richerthanbillgates
Deception Point - Dan Brown's pre-Robert Langdon book
re-read A Man In Full - Tom Wolfe
A Lesson Before Dying - Ernest Gaines
Oh Pure And Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet

I can't recommend Millet enough. She wrote mostly quirky small books up until "Oh Pure..", "Omnivores", "Everyone's Pretty", "My Happy Life", and my favorite title, "George Bush, Dark Prince of Love".

She mostly writes for environmental mags, but after grad school at Duke, she started out as a copy editor....



At Hustler.

I e-mailed her after reading "My Happy Life" and to my surprise, she answered and has since been very gracious in discussing her books.

Harry Potter HBP
Davinci Code

Harry Potter
"Stranger at the Gate" by Mel White
"Visible Amazement" by Gale Zoe Garnett
and a lot of fluff books.

that was an enjoyable read...

Ditto that - this series has been really entertaining...

Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince - JKR
A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin
A Knife of Dreams - Robert Jordan
Foundation - Isaac Asimov

Harry Potter (all of them - my 1st read)
City of Quartz - Mike Davis (social/cultural history of the city of Los Angeles)
Snow Crash - Neil Stephenson (15th read since 1999)
Mythologies - Roland Barthes