Witty's Year End Book Review 2012

To the seven people still reading this blog who aren't Chinese spammers (by the by, they kinda dropped off when I imposed the register-to-comment rule): It's BEST BOOKS TIME.

To re-state the rules: These are not books published this year that I think are AWESOME AND COOL.  Some of these books may have been published ages ago.  It's just these are the books I've read this year that I feel are deserving of the AWESOME AND COOL labels of labeling.

One thing to note: I've been reading more and more in ebook format on my Nook Color.  Yes, even graphic novels are now available in ereader format, so...

Best Fiction Book

Raylan, Elmore Leonard
Leonard is the master of simple prose crime thrillers.  He started off writing westerns but soon turned to modern noir (there is, oddly, very little difference between the outlaws of the Wild West and the outlaws of the urban streets) and hit it big writing about desperate violent criminals and cops in places like Detroit and Miami.  Raylan is a novel dedicated to one of his minor cop characters turned into prime-time television superstar: a US Marshal reassigned to his home county in Kentucky after a questionable shoot-out in Miami.  The beauty of Leonard's work is the vivid characterization for even the smallest role: his criminals (even the college-educated ones) tend towards stupid and reckless, but you can see how and why they think the way they do.  And even the most stupid of them are capable of a moment of pure clarity and profound thought... right before they do something even dumber that gets them caught or dead.  Raylan himself is not a white-hatted good guy - even though he wears an iconic beige cowboy hat - but he is at least the most sane character running around shooting up half the countryside.
I got into reading Leonard while working in Broward County libraries - during the period a lot of his books were getting turned into shows and movies - especially falling in love with his book Out of Sight (alongside watching the film of said book, it is one of my favorite non-scifi movies ever).  I watch Justified - the television show this novel is a spinoff of, expanding the fictional universe of Harlan County - enjoying the characterization and depth of narrative.  The novel is akin to reading short stories or episodes not produced for the screen, in Leonard's perfect style.

Best Non-Fiction Book

Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, Eric Foner
Once you finish reading McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, you need to read Foner's Reconstruction covering the aftermath of the Civil War and the sorrows and miscues that befell the nation.  Documenting the failures of the North to ensure the rights of freed ex-slaves right after the war ends - due to Andrew Johnson's reveal to be more interested in retaining the southern power structure (Johnson hated slave-owners more for their aristocratic airs than for their ownership of humans) - up to President US Grant's struggles to stop the Klan and cope with corrupt state-level Republican governance, Foner notes where the failures took place and why: above all a level of expediency and short-sightedness on the part of Northern politicians who quickly found the rebuilding efforts of the South too time-consuming and divisive among voters back north.  If you want to understand why we had 100 plus years after the Civil War of southern historical revisionism, Jim Crow humiliations making blacks into second-class citizens even with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in place, and why we've still got serious problems with racism in the United States to this very day... you gotta read this history.

Best Graphic Novel

I've read several but haven't really felt the need to compliment any of them by declaring them "best."  My big problem right now is that the universe I follow - DC - is undergoing yet another universal revamp called "The New 52" aka Nu52.  A lot of it has to do with what I call "Universe-Shattering Crossover Fatigue" where every year the comic book universe is rocked with earth-breaking catastrophes in which heroes die, heroes get reborn, and any recent continuity changes get rewritten just to satisfy a minor faction of head editors who want things done their way without realizing how bad their changes are gonna be.  Batman for example getting a never-before-seen secret conspiracy known as The Court of Owls even with 80/40/20 years of established history never once hinting at such a thing.  It gets tiring, all these EPIC re-inventions.  For once I want stories of honest-to-goodness one-issue-length, no more 12-issue storyarcs, no more vast ground-shaking revelations, no more what-the-hell plot twists.  Give me comfort food for a year, people, just stop with the "what a twist" stupidity.

Best Book By Someone I Know And Correspond With On a Regular Basis

Sheryl Nantus has been busy this year, I'll tell you what.  She's got Heroes Without, Monsters Within finally up for sale as her follow-up to the Blaze of Glory novel I recommended awhile back.  I haven't gotten it meself yet, but I should be getting a few BN.com gift cards for the Nook this Saturnalia...

Witty's Year End Book Review 2010

Another year of unemployment, more time to stress out and read books to calm down...

To re-state the rules: These are not books published this year that I think are AWESOME AND COOL.  Some of these books may have been published ages ago.  It's just these are the books I've read this year that I feel are deserving of the AWESOME AND COOL labels of labeling.  And for the Chinese Spammers who try to leave ....... comments in my comments field, there's a chance they might notice a title and read a book and BE CORRUPTED FOREVER BY MY WESTERN CULTURE IDEALS BWHAHAHAHA.  Okay, maybe not, but here goes.

BEST FICTION BOOK

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
This is a cyberpunk novel that's been out for less than two decades (published 1992!), but I'd heard good things about it and never got a chance to find a copy to read.  Well, with the time on my hands now...
Snow Crash involves Hiro Protagonist (yes, that's his name) living in a 21st Century Los Angeles future world where corporations (some having merged with crime families) control everything... even to where people's names are trademarked.  After losing his job delivering pizza for the Mafia (it's there in 20 minutes OR ELSE), Hiro teams up with the girl YT (Yours Truly) - who's partly to blame for that job loss - to hire themselves out as a hacker/intel to the privatized CIA.  They quickly uncover a dangerous new drug - Snow Crash - that's part computer virus and real-life virus that's infecting more and more citizenry.  It all has something to do with Sumerian religion, self-made gods, and a quest for a universal language that can enslave us all...
What makes the novel fun is how it's both standard cyberpunk - the computer universe and its anarchistic hacker culture - and post-modern thriller. Post-modern meaning self-awareness.  Hiro is fully aware of all Internet Traditions (even though this book was written before any serious traditions were forged!), and also fully hip to the tropes and memes of heroic narrative.  His description of Raven also explains the Badass so well it's what the Tvtropes.org website uses to open their Badass entry.

BEST NON-FICTION BOOK

 Battle Cry Of Freedom, James McPherson
If not the definitive work on the American Civil War, most likely it's in the Top 5.
Political blogger Ta-Nehesi Coates hosted a book reading club online for 2010 on this work, and I had chimed in with my comments, observations, and witless retorts.  Index here on all of TNC's Civil War entries, by the by.
McPherson goes into excellent detail about both the causes of the Civil War (Slavery, slavery, Southern financial and political elites eager to maintain the status quo, and oh yeah slavery) and the battlefield conflicts themselves.  Switching from one chapter that investigates and highlights the political, economic, and cultural changes that the war brought upon the nation; to the next chapter that describes the carnage, confusion, and wartime heroism of each major battle (Shiloh, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Petersburg) and the generals who mismanaged it all.
It's a must-read for all Americans.  Even the ones who don't like history.  You need to read this because, by simple comparison of the rhetoric of the Southern Slaveowner politicos to the rhetoric of today's Far Right conservatives, you'll realize we're still fighting that damn war...

BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL

JLA/Avengers, Kurt Busiek and George Perez
This had been out for a few years, and in fact had been on the drawing board for decades (back to the mid-1980s when the comic business exploded into mainstream culture), but I had finally gotten around to reading the collected series this year.
Comic book crossovers are nothing new.  In-universe, they happen all the time (especially as a guest appearance by a popular character - Batman - could boost sales for a struggling title).  Crossing universes, however, are obviously trickier: companies are wary of losing any creative control over their characters, and crossovers between universes have a habit of ignoring certain continuity in order to justify its plot.  Sometimes, a writer unfamiliar with the history or traits of a character can derail everything both within the crossover's story and back in the established continuity that could well kill off a character's popularity for good.  This is, by the way, what happened when DC and Marvel did create a crossover event called DC Vs. Marvel in the mid-1990s that created a convoluted and ridiculous Origin Myth for both universes, set up characters to fight each other for no real reason or resolution, and ended up entertaining NOBODY.
JLA/Avengers did it right.
Taking the primary superhero teams of each universe - Justice League of America (DC) and The Avengers (Marvel) - the story involves a DC galactic villain Krona who travels from universe to universe in a quest to understand how universes are created (in order to control such power for himself).  But in order to do that, he has to destroy said universes while studying them.  When he reaches the Marvel Universe, he confronts the first being of any power that can delay him - The Grandmaster, a hedonist lover of high-stakes games - and is forced to accept the Grandmaster's challenge of having universal champions fight each other to claim twelve powerful totems... and they choose the Justice League and Avengers for the game...
Busiek has a lot of fun tweaking the cultures and continuity of each comic book universe as the two teams visit the others' world and clash.  DC heroes are horrified to see how in the Marvel universe that mutants are persecuted and tyrants like Doom left unchallenged.  Marvel heroes are horrified to see that Supers in the DC universe are nearly worshiped as gods in what looks to them like a fascist society.  Marvel's resident speedster Quicksilver is envious of the fact that his competitor The Flash has his own museum.
Impressive also is Perez's artwork: Notorious for drawing elaborate battle scenes and massive gathering of characters (the cover art for one issue was so packed full of superheroes that Perez had to rest his hand for weeks after completing it), this series was quite possibly his best effort since Crisis on Infinite Earths.
The clincher for the series is when the two teams, realizing the Grandmaster's plot had forced their two Earths together to trap Krona - and that the trap is falling apart - find out from the cosmic being the price each hero will pay even if they stop Krona.  As the heroes had reverted to their Silver (Heroic) Age personas of the 1980s, all of them are shocked by the de-railings (and deaths) each character suffered during the Dark (Antihero) Age of the 1990s.  Disgusted by their futures, they nonetheless agree that stopping Krona - who would destroy both universes anyway - has to happen... and they proceed to launch a massive assault on Krona's citadel just as he's carving into the two beings (Infinity and Kismet) that personify each universe...
As a comic book fan, this was a decent read.

BEST BOOK BY SOMEONE I KNOW AND CORRESPONDED WITH VIA EMAIL ON AN OCCASIONAL BASIS 

I'm gonna need to get back to you all on this one, I haven't made up my mind between Sheryl Nantus or TNC or...

Update on NaNoWriMo 2008

One word.

AUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHH (as of Nov. 21st, only 9,000 words done)

Compare to a good colleague of mine, Sheryl Nantus, who's got 38,000 words by Nov. 21st. Sigh.

This Saturday. I'm going to try to find an Internet Cafe place in Tampa, see if I can get a few other local writers to join in, and GET SOME DAMN WRITING DONE!

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...!