• 10's: Natural Selection, Barthelme; Wonder Boys, Chabon; Two Against One, Barthelme; Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami; A Wild Sheep Chase, Murakami.
• 9's: Tracer, Barthelme; Second Marriage, Barthelme; Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Klosterman; Blink, Gladwell; Bellwether, Willis.
• Average rating: 6.7

In all (reverse chronological):

• Bellwether, Connie Willis. I claim not to like science fiction anymore, but it seems like I will be going on a Connie Willis binge soon, especially since many of the books are readily available. This one is excellent, excellent. 9.
• The Chinchilla Farm, Judith Freeman. Well, I didn't really mean to read this book, but in a hilarious case of mistaken identity, did. I thought the author did a really good job of presenting characters the way the protagonist would have seen them. Everything else was pretty cookie-cutter. 6.
• The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood. This basically consists of four different stories, jumping back and forth in time and reality. I liked three of them to varying extents, but perhaps because of my youth I never got into the one told by the septuagenarian. Things picked up towards the end, but overall I found the writing of sort of inconsistent quality, some good, some not so good. 5.
• The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester. This is half history and half novel and in my opinion, it absolutely does not work stylistically. Half the time it seems like overly personalized history, and half the time it seems like a badly written novel. It's as if this guy did a bunch of research, couldn't come up with a good plot, and just wrote down whatever he'd learned with a vague attempt to make it into good reading. The subject material (the making of the OED) is interesting (to me, anyway), but I just don't think this is a very good job of telling the story. 2.
• Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami (trans. Alfred Birnbaum.) I thought this was a very mediocre book; as I was reading it, I got the sense that this was the translator's fault, that the writing was just not flowing well. The plot was fine, the characters were fine (it's a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, so read that first), but it just didn't hold together. Then the ending came. The ending is phenomenal. This is strange -- usually books have an ending that are a step down from the middle of the book. Mediocre books are not supposed to have spectacularly good endings. I don't know what to make of this; I guess this all adds up to a 6?
• A Dove in the East and other stories, Mark Helprin. Am I growing up? Do I like novels more than short stories now? Some of the stories were certainly good to excellent, but I just never got into this book. The stories were too far-flung, too seemingly arbitrary -- decent writing, but no themes in the stories for the most part, no plot. There are certainly a couple exceptions, but overall this just wasn't that gripping for me. 3.
• South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel.) Another excellent novel about a man's search for something that has been haunting him (I sense a theme) -- this one a little more real-world and less fantasy. I don't think the writing was quite as good as the other Murakami (translation issue?) -- other than that, as excellent. 8.
• The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami (short story collection; trans. Alfred Birnbaum and Jay Rubin.) For most writers, I find I like their short stories more than their novels. Basically, this is probably because I have a short attention span. But this isn't true for Murakami. I think it's because Murakami's fictiverses need some time to get the hang of; you can't just plop yourself down in one of them and understand its idiosyncratic laws of nature immediately. By the time you do this in a short story, it's over. Of course, the writing is still very good. 7.
• A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami (trans. Alfred Birnbaum.) I can't tell whether this book is better or worse than The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Murakami's worlds are so well constructed -- there's just the right amount of strangeness, so that you can still empathize with the actions and the characters, but it still has that ethereal quality of fantasy. 10.
• Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris (story collection.) I had read about half of this before, so the remaining half didn't even fill a one-hour car ride. I liked the two or three that remained, though; they get a 7.
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami (trans. Jay Rubin.) This is an utterly spectacular novel of characters and plot and writing and adventure. Utterly spectacular. 10.
• California Voter's Guide, 2005 Elections (voter's guide.) This is an incredibly entertaining document, full of funny arguments and scare propaganda, along with entirely transparent special interest sponsorship. The ending is not very good, and sometimes the all-caps and italics passages make it very hard to read, but all in all it is a quite entertaining summary of how stupid Americans are. 6.
• The Best American Non-Required Reading of 2003, ed. Dave Eggers (various.) This is a collection of various short stories, "experimental" writing, and nonfiction. Most of it is not very good. It's composed with the younger reader in mind, which is fine, but it's not that the writing is overly simplistic -- it's just not very good. I did like a few of the stories, but overall it just seemed more like an exhibit for diversity than good writing. 2.
• Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (nonfiction.) An excellent survey of examples about how our intuitive reactions are very strong -- sometimes more correct, sometimes more prejudiced, sometimes both, but in any case very intriguing. Highly recommended. 9.
• Barrel Fever, David Sedaris (story and essay collection.) About halfway through of this I got a little sick of Sedaris' schtick. His writing all basically seems the same style -- overly ironic satire, which is fine, but in large doses gets a bit monotonous. Maybe I just wasn't in the right frame of mind to appreciate it or something, since I do love me some ironic satire. He's a good writer, though, which helps. 6.
• Elroy Nights, Frederick Barthelme. This novel somehow seems a little more personal than other works of his, although the content and setting and all that are seemingly the same. It seems like there is more philosophy and less irony. It is excellent. 8.
• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman (social commentary.) This is an awesome collection of rants and riffs on the state of society. Mostly, it reads like a book written by a crazy person with millions of pet theories, who wrote the book basically because he likes arguing. The whole thing is a series of drunken arguments about metaphors and social trends and whatnot, which as a fellow pet-theorist arguer I find phenomenal. Okay, most of the stuff is bizarre subjective bullshit, but I love that stuff. 9.
• Hand to Mouth, Paul Auster. This has four parts: an autobiography, a few plays, a baseball game, and a novel. It's weird to read an autobiography before you have read anything by the author, but I simply employed my new strategy as a fiction reader of reading an autobiography as if it's fiction, and it worked well. 7 for the autobiography. The plays were okay, but hardly seemed to have much content. 4 for the plays. As the designer of a baseball game myself (!), I feel qualified to comment on the baseball game, whose flaw is that there are no personalities. Well, also, basically no skill. These are not good elements for the game. 2 for the game. The novel, "Squeeze Play," was excellent, a detective story, very well done if a little improbable in the propensity of the protagonist to survive. 9 for the novel. Which I guess gives the whole thing an average score of 5.5.
• Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, John Gray ("nonfiction".) The main things I got out of this book are: 1) I am a woman, and 2) Perhaps people have attempted to treat me like a Martian, which as it turns out is not how I want to be treated at all. On a more general note, the things that I disliked most about this book are: 1) it paints with way too broad a brush, not noting that each person is different, and 2) it seems to suggest that all problems with relationships are due to fundamental differences between men and women, and doesn't say when problems might just be due to personal incompatibility. 3.
• Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (nonfiction.) This is an amazing, amazing book. A little lower I alluded to liberal pseudoscience, something I hate, where basically people refuse to consider evidence which might run against their morals or hypotheses which if true would be alarming from a moral standpoint. (There is also conservative pseudoscience, of course, but it is rarer, [religious] conservatives not generally known for their scientific approach.) This book is the exact opposite. Levitt and Dubner simply look at whatever data is there and use statistics to find a causal link, in some cases extremely surprisingly. It's real science; sometimes the conclusions run counter to both liberal and conservative morals, but they don't care because all they want is to find the truth regardless of morality. Plus the examples are amazingly weird and cool, and make a lot of sense. I'm not going to reveal any tidbits from the book because you really should read it, but it's very, very interesting (and well-written / readable.). 10.
• Moon Deluxe, Frederick Barthelme (short story collection.) I'd read about half of these; the other half are very good. 8.
• Second Marriage, Frederick Barthelme. Aside from one short story which was awkwardly inserted (the characters don't seem consistent; the context seems wrong also), this is a phenomenal book: very realistic and empathetic characters, excellent dialogue, description, etc.. 9.
• The Law of Averages, Frederick Barthelme (short story collection.) A lot of these were incorporated into his novels, so there was a lot of basically overlap with stuff I had read (a few names changed, perhaps), but the stuff I hadn't read before was very good. 8.
• The Third Chimpanzee, Jared Diamond (nonfiction). This is an entertaining read, well-written and full of interesting cocktail party tidbits. The title refers to the fact that we're very genetically similar to chimps, but much of the book is finding analogues to supposedly unique human attributes like art and genocide among other species -- a fun tour of the animal kingdom. It's not an incredibly pointed book, but the main surprising points seem to be: 1) agriculture is responsible for both the rise and demise of civilization, and 2) we are doomed by our expunging of the world's forests. But mostly it's just fun notes and historical archaeology. 7.
• The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida (nonfiction). Florida's thesis is that a new social class has arisen in the late 20th and early 21st century, the Creative Class, spanning high-tech software developers, academics, and artists. This class is quickly growing both in numbers and influence, and it is the presence or absence of these bourgeois bohemians which codes for what we (twentysomethings) think of as "where we want to live." Or something like that. It's interesting, and it makes a lot of sense. Perhaps the most curious thing is that the presence of high-tech companies correlates very highly with the presence of a substantial gay population, because both represent out-of-the-mainstream individuals (the Creative Class), and these subcultures both want to live in places where eclecticism is valued. I have two problems with the book; first, like many academic books, the book is longer than it needs to be, as the author presents redundant examples and states his thesis like 1000 times. Secondly, it suffers from a frequent bad aspect of liberalism; the author often seems to use his data to pseudoscientifically support his moral feelings, also often trying to be gentle about his findings (i.e. refrain from saying that any one thing is better than any other thing.) But it's a good book. 7.
• One of Us, David Freeman. This is a perfectly adequate, average book. The writing is average. The characters are average. The plot is average. The setting is average. You will like this book exactly as much as you like reading. This may well be the archetypal book. 5.
• God Knows, Joseph Heller. It took me about a third of this book to get into it at all, but once I did it was reasonably good. Probably my experience would have been better if I had been more familiar with its primary source (the Old Testament), but it's pretty well-written, a cute fleshing out of an old story, a clever idea, even if it is neither exceptionally thought-provoking or exceptionally funny. 5.
• The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead. The writing is pretty good, but the plot doesn't really hang together, and the ending does a very poor job of wrapping things up in anything resembling a consistent fashion. The characters are described well but incredibly inconsistently; the plot is sort of that of a mystery, so it makes sense that there would be deceptive and contradictory description of the characters, but in this case this description doesn't make them seem mysterious so much as scattershot. 4.
• Mating, Norman Rush. Dear God, there are a lot of big words in this book, of which many are in Latin. This is an excellent serious book, with very very well-developed characters (I'm amazed at any male's success at capturing a female protagonist), and an interesting if implausible plot. On this last point, the whole thing reads like a philosophical experiment, not something that could occur in life, where things are thrown in to reveal aspects of the characters or of human nature in general or whatever. The characters are very well done, even if the big words are sometimes repetitive (I wouldn't say there are a lot of distinct ones, just that he has favorite big words which he uses over and over.) 8.
• Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, Tom Robbins. I picture Robbins as a very polarizing author; he has ridiculous word choice (and when I say that, it means a lot, because I have pretty ridiculous word choice myself), and his plots are breezy fly-by-night operations. I think this is a pretty good book in that vein, an implausible adventure. 8.
• Two Against One, Frederick Barthelme. This is the last of my Barthelme, so there'll be some yet-to-be-determined variety (recommendations?) to follow. I'm not sure if this is better than Natural Selection or not, but it's incredible. The characters are so textured, the dialogue is so perfect... and so realistic, the little things in converations, the little gestures, his description of body language is amazing. The sort of human touches which I as a writer never put in. 10.
• Tracer, Frederick Barthelme. A short novel but an excellent one. No really dull moments, evocative characters, doesn't let up. 9.
• Bob the Gambler, Frederick Barthelme. I don't know why, but I liked the second half of this a whole lot better than the first. So if you dislike the first half, maybe keep reading. 7.
• Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon. Incredible novel. The characters are humanlike but fictioned up enough to be interesting, everything ties together, the connections between things are amazingly well done. 10. 11? Nah. 10.
• Broken Vessels (autobiographical essay collection), Andre Dubus. I realized a story or two in that even though I don't generally like non-fiction, if I just read these as if they were fiction short stories, the suspension of disbelief worked fine. These are pretty good in general, but I found the narrator very self-aggrandizing, always making himself look like the good guy on high moral ground, garnering the reader's sympathies. 6.
• Chroma (short story collection), Frederick Barthelme. There are some good stories in here, a couple of clunkers, but mostly just well-written stuff. It's weird how the quality of a single piece of writing can be so consistent but the quality of a collection can be so variant. 7.
• Painted Desert, Frederick Barthelme. I was never really able to get into this. The characters didn't really pique my interest, the writing was decent but seemed arbitrary at times, the plot didn't really hang together. I felt like it read more like a well-executed writing exercise than a novel. 4.
• Werewolves in Their Youth (short story collection), Michael Chabon. Good writing, but nothing really spectacular. None of these stories were what I would consider must-reads; good characters, good plots, solid writing, but no particular sparkle. 6.
• Natural Selection, Frederick Barthelme. An excellent, excellent book. The characters are really well done, the dialogue is incredible, and he manages to work in little scenes everywhere that are really well done, great recountings of funny stuff which you can tell happened to him at some point. 10.
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon. Thumbs up for a good story -- it's not a make-you-think novel so much as an adventure novel, but it delivers pretty well on that front. 8.
• Something Happened, Joseph Heller. I didn't like this. I thought the philosophy, the humor, and the characters were all lacking, which would be fine for a plot book, but this book has no plot. 3.
• Towards the End of Time, John Updike. This just isn't very good. The writing doesn't snap, crackle, or pop, and it's not a very interesting dystopic future. 2.