Witty's Year End Book Review 2023

Time flies when you're trying to get two books put together while juggling full-time librarian work. Ahh, but here we are at the end of 2023 and it's time to promote the books I've read this year that I'd like to share with you.

As a reminder, this list is not the best books that came out this year, but the best of what I've read this year. This means the book could be published five-ten years ago and I've just gotten around to it. The book should well be available in your local library (or you can always purchase online).

Best Fiction

Gator A-Go-Go, Tim Dorsey

A sad reason for re-reading this book due to the passing of author Tim Dorsey, writer of the Serge Storms series of wacky violent Florida-themed crime thrillers.

I decided to reach back to some of the better books in that series, and this story - an unusually dark tale even for Dorsey - stood out. If you've read one Serge book, you'll notice how most of the others will go: Serge and his drug-addled Sancho Panza figure (Coleman here) will get involved in a zany scheme to revel in a particular Floridian trend, in this story the annual Spring Break craziness of college students partying at the popular beaches. There will be a parallel story involving relative innocent characters - this time a college student getting hunted by a violent drug cartel seeking retribution - that Serge will intercept and then drag along to protect those characters all the while driving across the Sunshine State and driving everybody else mad.

Gator A-Go-Go is notable for throwing in a large number of side characters that Dorsey introduced over the years, including the Davenport family and the likes of "City" and "Country" (college girls fleeing from a crime they didn't commit). Coleman - drug abuser extraordinaire - gets to shine teaching the college kids how to handle their highs, and even teams up with his mirror character Lenny to complete the circle. It's also one of the books where Serge's skill set - highly inventive ways to kill bad guys or bad tourists - goes into some of his craziest kills yet, including a painfully simple-yet-effective "death by toilet" along with the reinvention of the ballista. But where Serge's violence is wacky fun, the narrative arc for the innocent character Andy - coming to terms with what the drug cartel did to hurt his family - gets deadly serious. It makes for one of Dorsey's most complex and plot-heavy books in the series.

I may be tempted to do a review of all the Serge books next year.

Best Non-Fiction

Revolutionary Roads: Searching for the War That Made America Independent, and All the Places It Could Have Gone Terribly Wrong, Bob Thompson

One of the more interesting historical reads I've seen, where Thompson takes a literal field trip to all the important places across the United States where the foundling nation fighting the British for independence, and does it in chronological order racing from the battlefields of Massachusetts and New York down to the swamps of South Carolina leading to Yorktown. In-between, he visits the smaller yet pivotal flashpoints where bad luck or a bad military order could have ended the fight and the new nation. 

Making this a delight - for an amateur historian like meself - are the interviews Thompson makes with fellow local historians who are well-versed in both the legends and the facts of what happened on those battlefields. One of the highlights in the book is when Thompson arrives at Saratoga, the victory for the Americans that convinced France and other European nations to support the rebellion, and where controversy over Benedict Arnold's role - the hero of Saratoga who ended up as America's greatest betrayer - questioned if he was as big a hero - and as tragic a figure - as common knowledge makes him. Talking with the local historians like Jim Hughto and Eric Schnitzer, Thompson weaves together the complex events of the Battle of Saratoga to give as much insight to the reader as possible... and I'd rather let you read the conclusions on p. 176 of the hardcover for yourself so I can encourage you to check this out.

Best Graphic Novel (or On-Going Series)

Wonder Woman (Dawn of DC series), Tom King writer and Daniel Sampere artist

With all of the in-universe Crises and crossover storylines that have consumed the DC Universe the past 20 years, I tend to be wary of any new reboot of the 'verse that follows all the other confusing reboots that have gone before.

This new Dawn of DC event meant to rebirth the major characters alongside a shared narrative of an Earth - and universe - now hostile to the superheroes that had been brought back from the dead (again) has a base storyline of Amanda Waller - wary of metahumans like never before - working with her government-controlled metahumans and super-powered agencies to remove the Justice League level superheroes along with the supervillains. As part of her plot, she's gotten the United States government - with a puppet President - to outlaw the Amazonian culture and their warriors - meaning Wonder Woman herself - to the point where outright war with the Amazons will be the only result.

In the midst of that, Diana is trying to bridge the gap between the forces and maintain a positive public persona while the media and US government openly attack her and her sisters... and failing, as Wonder Woman's allies in the US find themselves ostracized and as the leaders on Themyscira prepare for a fight.

King has been one of the more reliable writers in the DC 'verse over the years, able to deliver decent plotting and dialog, and I have high hopes he'll do this series well as the Dawn plotline progresses. I'm not familiar with Sampere's work as an artist although he's done previous work on various Superman titles. His work on this series is noticeably beautiful.

As for the whole Dawn of DC narrative... we'll see.

Best Work By Someone I Email, Tweet, or Chat With On a Regular Basis

Starter Villain, John Scalzi

I should be changing this requirement from Twitter to Bluesky as Elon Musk is killing Twitter (no I will NOT call it X), but anyway Scalzi is keeping up with new twisted tales in the science fiction / fantasy genres with this latest novel. A divorced, unhappy guy stuck as a substitute teacher and stuck in a house he inherited from his recently-passed dad finds himself stuck inheriting his uncle's parking garage empire... except that the parking garage empire is a cover for a supervillain empire. The guy Charlie suddenly finds himself competing against fellow supervillains while figuring out the rules of the game: The villainy isn't for blowing up stuff for world domination, it's selling the stuff that can blow up (that's where the real money is). He has to cope with being an evildoer and also coming to terms with the possibility his pet cats might be smarter at this than he is.

Done in a breezy, almost tongue-in-cheek style, with an eye towards deconstructing the James Bond vs. Spectre / GI Joe vs. Cobra narratives that Scalzi's generation (he's a fellow Xer) grew up enjoying, Starter Villain is a good read to get into once you're tired of binge-watching the Marvel shows on Disney-Plus. Get to it, people!

Best Work Including Stuff I Wrote

Funny Locations: Collected Stories, Paul Wartenberg

Finally, I got around to putting together a flash-drive full of short stories I've written since my college years, and piling up since my last collection of stories in the now-out-of-print Last of the Grapefruit Wars from almost 20 years earlier.

Bound around a theme of stories happening in different locales, with a hopefully humorous bent, this is something I hope appeals well to others. It's got a number of stories that I know have gone over well - "Fifth Annual Office Golf Showdown" is an award winner, and "Road Trip To Vegas" made semifinalist for the Royal Palms a few years back - and I mostly hope this self-published effort has all the speeling and grammah eroors all figured oot.

(pause) Goddarnnit...

Okay, all kidding aside. PLEASE do me the honor of buying my book and leaving good reviews anywhere and everywhere, thank you!

One Week Before NaNoWriMo 2014

GET PUMPED UP, WRITERS.

You want motivation heading into next week?  Here you go:

I met Tim Dorsey at his presentation at the Bartow Public Library last week.  I mentioned to him the thing about NaNoWriMo, that it's writing a novel up to 50,000 words within 30 days.

Dorsey mentioned that his Serge A Storms book Orange Crush - his third - was 80,000 words and he finished it in 40 days.  That's roughly 2000 words a day, close to the amount needed to do NaNo (1667) in 30 days.  Heck, writing 2000 words is easy to do during a Write-In event, those events tend to last 2 hours.  That's 2 hours in a day.  And there's more than 2 hours in a day a writer can find the time to write.

Doing NaNo is an easy thing to do, as long as you prepare yourself to write.  Planning out the days you're going to be able to find the time.  Planning out the rough narrative / outline of your work.  Knowing your characters before you write them.  These are all the easy steps you can be doing right now before logging in to www.nanowrimo.org to get set... ready... WRITE!

Tim Dorsey at Bartow Public Library: The Early Warning

We're hosting Tim Dorsey - of the Serge A Storm series - this Saturday at Bartow Public Library (Bartow, FL).

We expect Mr. Dorsey will talk about his travels across the state, and how he determines the proper method of killing off rude characters in each unique touristy locale.

I'm serious.  If Tim Dorsey includes a character based on you in any of his Serge novels, you will die in a painful and creative manner...

So be very polite when he shows up, and no sudden movements, and STOP TURN OFF THAT AUTOFLASH ON YOUR SMARTPHONE NOOOOOoooo... Oh no... OH NO.  RUN...

Witty's Year End Book Review 2007

'Cause, you know, as a librarian I tend to read a few things...

This isn't so much the best of the best books that came out this year. And it's not necessarily books published this year: sometimes you just gotta reach back for a few oldies but goodies. This is the best books I've read. So if I didn't read ya this year, you ain't making the list. Siddown, Delillo.

Best Fiction book
Stingray Shuffle, by Tim Dorsey. I really discovered Dorsey last year, when my twin brother suggested his wife enjoyed reading Florida fiction including the stuff by Dorsey. The series is basically about an obsessive-compulsive Floridian psychopath, Serge A. Storms, and his eternal quest for all things relating to the Sunshine State. Along the way, if anyone comes along to disrupt his attempts at travelogue, or restoration of local historical artifacts, he ups the body count. Seriously, more people die in a Tim Dorsey book than in all WWII movies combined. If you ever show up as a character in one of those books, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE. But still, Dorsey knows his stuff, especially all the crazy stuff about Florida, which is indeed truly one of the craziest places in the world to live/visit/engage in epic battles on. One of the bits I liked about Stingray Shuffle is one of the small subplots about a long-time Floridian who's also a cult-fave pulp writer who didn't write the Great American Novel, he just wrote a series of sorta-bad mystery thrillers. I have sympathy for such characters, mostly because *I'm* trying to write pulp novels too. So during the NaNoWriMo period past November, I reached back for this book, just to thumb through and get some inspiration from a fictional bard who didn't suffer from writer's block, just lousy timing.

Best Non-Fiction book
Tragic Legacy, by Glen Greenwald. Greenwald has become over the past 4 years the preeminent critic of the Bush Administration's War against the Constitution, documenting both the blatant and subtle attempts by George W. Bush and his lackeys to shred the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Fourteenth, and lord knows how many other amendments as well as the whole concept of the Checks and Balances between the three branches of federal government. Greenwald focused this book mostly on the Bush Admin's failure to think through the War on Terror, and how the political leadership set itself up for a disastrous invasion of Iraq while at the same time violating many of the precepts and core values of American governance at home and abroad. I got this book on my own the second it was published, and when finished I donated it to my library system (budget crunch is preventing us from getting as many books as we'd like). And the good news is, people are checking it out. ;)

Best Graphic novel
New Frontier, Vol. 1, by Darwin Cooke. An interesting trend in American comic-book storytelling the last 20 years has been special offshoot storylines retelling tales and placing existing characters into historical contexts. It's a reflexive reaction to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' epic Watchmen - which might not be the first story to place heroes and supermen in a real-world setting, but it is certainly the best. It's combined also with both nostalgia for a long-lost period (the Twentieth Century) and a desire to address in hindsight many of the sins of that period. These revisionist Graphic Narratives (Golden Age, Kingdom Come, just to name two) don't mesh with the ongoing timelines of the current series, merely a "What If?" using familiar characters in new, sometimes darker ways. This one came out in 2004 originally, an alternate-universe retelling of DC Comics' during what was known as the Silver Age: the period just after the near-collapse of the comic book industry during the post-World War and early Cold War years. Cooke has the Golden Age heroes either hiding in the shadows to avoid McCarthyism, or hired on as field agents on the front lines of Vietnam by the late 1950s. Meanwhile, alien and demonic threats are lurking on the edges, as Hal Jordan (a Kennedyesque figure) gets recruited into the Space Race that is aiming in this universe for Mars and not the Moon, and as an actual Martian, J'onn J'onzz (who laughs at cheesy scifi invasion movies and thinks police tv shows are real), uncovers a mystical cabal unleashing dark forces that could consume the whole world. The book is all setup for the following volume, which I haven't read yet. The artwork makes you think bebop and early 1960s art design: the storytelling far more blunt and cynical than the tales actually written during that era. I'm getting the next volume once I'm certain I'm not getting it as a Christmas present. ;)

Best Unavoidable Book of Ultimate Destiny
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. The most anticipated novel since Dickens. The most hyped book sale of all time. Of COURSE I read the book: name me three people who didn't!

Best Book by Someone I Know and Corresponded with via Email on an Occasional Basis

There's pretty much only two contestants for this one: Stefan Petrucha and Sheryl Nantus. Here's hoping they don't find out they're the only two - last thing I want is a sword battle in an abandoned factory between them. Ahem.
Second Line, by Sheryl Nantus. Sheryl's first regular fiction novel is your standard Girl Meets Vampires, Girl Teams Up With Vampire Hunter to Save Her Neck (literally), Girl Uncovers Diabolical Vampire Plot, Girl Saves Vampire Hunter, Girl Destroys Chocolate Factory to Save the World. Wait, what? Did I read that part about the chocolate factory right? Okay, maybe it's not that standard then. The novel did have its weaknesses: the heroine Jackie St. George, transferring over from the fanfic universe, gets out of a few scrapes with the vampire horde a little too easily when you consider how ruthless and lethal the vampire boss had behaved in the backstory. What saves the novel is the banter, the ear for dialog that Nantus has. Now only if those two FBI agent friends of Jackie would show up...!