Witty's Year End Book Review 2014

It's December 24, last year I did this on that day and today seems like as good a day to do it as well.

The rules are simple: these are from the books I've read - sometimes re-read - during this year.  While I kept it last year to current books - in honor of having a job again in a library filled with books - this year I feel I can go back to the books I've re-read as part of the review.  Hope you don't mind.

Best Fiction

Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie

I've made a decision to try and get into new science fiction authors, as waiting on anything new by Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury, Iain M. Banks or Arthur C. Clarke is going to be a bit of a problem.  I saw this title as a Nebula award winner and so made the jump.
Breq is the only survivor of a missing, possibly destroyed sentient spaceship of which she - and gender pronouns get to be an issue as the story progresses - was mentally part of, meaning half her memories and identities are a mess.  She becomes embroiled in a bizarre galactic civil war within Breq's empire that leads to sequel hooks aplenty.  Leckie's work is very similar to Banks' Culture series, with a well-designed 'verse that plays with the conventional tropes of space opera (which means it delves into a mess of human identity issues in-between all the laser fights).  It is one of those books that requires re-reading to make certain you didn't miss a plot point.

Best Non-Fiction

What If? Randall Munroe

The creator of xkcd, a webcomic of absurdist thought, puns, and scientific accuracy, kept getting all of these weird science questions to answer and so started a secondary blog that would answer "What If We Did This?"  Ranging from such crazy ideas as "what would happen if we drained out the oceans" or "what would happen if a pitcher threw a baseball near the speed of light", Munroe applies actual (and sometimes theoretical) physics and engineering to the question to bring up some of the more bizarre - and world-threatening - consequences of such events.
For example, pitching a baseball at the speed of light would cause a nuclear reaction of such intensity that it would wipe out the baseball stadium and the city it was in... and when you throw in the rules of baseball, it means the batter was hit by the ball and advances to first base.
If you want your mind blown, you gotta read this book.

Best Non-Fiction I Praised On My Political Blog

The Selling of the President, Joe McGinniss

As I noted on my Notice a Trend blog: this book was the first one from college I kept, rather than trade back in after my classes were done.  It's short but exposes so much of the sins of our current political culture.  I still feel this is one of those books everyone needs to read once in their lives, if only to realize how corrupt our election/campaigning system has become.  I wrote about the book due to McGinniss passing away this year, and I feel it deserves special mention here.

Best Graphic Novel Series

Sandman: Overture, Neil Gaiman with JH Williams

Gaiman returns to his breakout graphic series Sandman with a prequel tale about how the human personification of Dream, Morpheus, was captured and broken by a dark magus in the early years of World War I (from the first volume Preludes and Nocturnes).  Like all Gaiman works, it hits the tropes early and hard, and can get confusing for anyone who hasn't read the original series back in the 1990s.  But the series promises to answer several of the mysteries and secrets from Gaiman's back-history of his magnum opus, including the reasons why Dream must destroy any dream vortexes that arise among us dreamers...

Best Mystery Anthology That Includes a Short Story I Wrote

Mardi Gras Murder, Sarah E. Glenn (editor)

Another anthology, this time more of a straight up mystery/thriller type tale called "Why The Mask."  It's less "Whodunnit" and more "Howdunnit", about a woman seeking revenge in 1930s New Orleans, but I hope it appeals to the mystery/thriller crowds.

Witty's Year End Book Review 2013

With almost a full year clocking as a full-time librarian again surrounded by books, books, dvds and more books, it's about time I finished up for this calendar year and promote another year end book review!

To be fair, the rules have changed: during a period when I was out of libraries and relying on my own time and pace for books worth reading/promoting, I pretty much covered any title I'd read over the years to fulfill the Best Fiction, Best Non-Fiction, Best Graphic Novel et al.  This time, I had a whole library to work with (insert grin here), so this time I will focus on the books released this 2013 for once.

Best Fiction

The Ocean At the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman.
Ever since the Black Orchid 3-parter really, I've been into Gaiman's literary style: knowing the fantasy tropes of superheroes as well as magic, playing and deconstructing stories and then putting them all back together again for the sake of the story itself.  Although Mike Bruscell had to remind me when Sandman came out it was the same author and worth pursuing.
Ocean was the first book in a few years that was geared more for adults - Gaiman's last few were juvenile/young adult - and it's a flashback-based tale of a mid-40s man returning to the place of his youth drawn by a re-emerging memory of what happened when he was seven.  A lonely young boy who gets befriended by a girl living on a farmhouse with her mother and grandmother who talk nonsensical (anyone familiar with Gaiman knows the trope he's playing with here) but who are at least the only other ones aware that an inter-dimensional monster has arrived in their corner of the world.  While this monster is disruptive, it's easy to deal with... problem is that monster causes a mess that brings nastier monsters into the world to clean up...
All of Gaiman's favorite tropes are on display here - the love of cats, the vastness of the universe, the magic of perception, the monsters that try not to be monsters but just can't help themselves - as well as a sense of this being a personal tale, related very much to the author's own childhood and to a sense of loss when that childhood ended.  It's a very good book to read.
Also, when I named my new cat Ocean... well when you read the book you'll understand why.
Runner-Up (I think I do this once in awhile): The Human Division, John Scalzi

Best Non-Fiction

The United States of Paranoia, Jesse Walker
I get into conspiracies, but for all the right reasons...  Growing up I read books about UFOs and ghosts and the Bermuda Triangle and Loch Ness Monster, the strange and unusual, upon which I noticed the bits of conspiracy and cover-ups surrounding some of the events.  By my middle-school years I had "graduated" to more serious stuff like JFK's assassination and the Church Committee findings.  While reading these conspiracy theories I quickly grew to recognize the folly behind a lot of them: some of the conspiracies get so convoluted in their setup and explanations, and relied on thin wisps that half the time weren't even real, that they made little or no sense (sometimes the simplest explanation is the correct one).
This year Walker came out with a book reviewing the prolonged, twisted history of conspiracy thought in the United States itself: the fact that even since our colonial days, our society has been fearful of "the outside threat", the shadow figures below or above us, the belief that someone or some group had it in for our own, for our nation and communities.  Walker does his best to explain the mindset of how perfectly rational people would believe irrational conspiracies: the make-up of the American mindset that allows us to handle the real world while believing that alien shapeshifters from the moon Europa are harvesting our ova.  At least, Walker tries to explain: I think it's all a plot... yes a plot...

Best Graphic Novel

Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh

It's not the most beautifully drawn work in the universe, but Brosh writes in a clear, refreshing, horrifying fashion.
Taken from her ongoing blog, each chapter delves into a particularly unusual moment during her life or delves into particularly painful observations.  Above all, for me, are the moving two-parter chapters she writes about her chronic depression: arguably the most insightful, illuminating description of what depression is really like and why it is so hard for those of us enduring it to ever explain it to people who never experience it.  Where the character representing Brosh describes the emotional void/distance that overwhelms you... the flatness of your emotional state itself... Look, these words I'm using barely even describe it right.  Brosh's words do.

Saddest Thought That is Going To Bother Me Forever

Elmore Leonard is dead and I'll never find out if Foley and Sisco ever get back together.

Best Humor-Horror Anthology That Includes A Short Story I Wrote

Strangely Funny, Sarah E. Glenn (editor and submitter)
Okay, so I'm shilling my stuff!  Glenn and co-editor Gwen Mayo were kind enough to add "I Must Be Your First" into the first anthology printing from their Horror & Mystery LLC publisher.  Some of the stories I found very good - "Best of Taste" by Edward Ahern, "One Scareful Owner" by Catriona McPherson, "Criticus Ex Machina," by Glenn - and some of the others very dark and unsettling.  Some of the online reviews on Goodreads have been okay... but I'd... we'd like to get a few more... especially with 4 or 5 stars attached!

I Got Q and A'd for Strangely Funny

Sarah Glenn, the editor to Strangely Funny, spent time to ask me a few questions about me, my writing process, favorite authors, etc.

She asked me the peanut butter question, which I warned her NOT to do...

Anywho, check out her blog: she's interviewing all the other authors who committed a story to the humor horror anthology NOW ON SALE!