Favourite books of the year
My real favourite book of the year was George R. Stewart’s great East Bay novel Earth Abides: it’s the end of civilisation and he feels, well, not fine, but he could be worse. As for books published in the last few years:
1. Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps: She was ahead ahead of all the other rock critics through the early Seventies. Then she moved on.
2. Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake: A girl who can taste emotions learns to stomach unprocessed food and book-length metaphors.
3. Ozamu Tezuka, Black Jack v. 1-3: The world’s greatest doctor is OK with the Japan’s capitalism but has trouble with its collectivism.
4. Chris Ware, ACME Novelty Library #20: Is it enough that he’s the greatest graphic designer around? Since when was enough enough?
5. Lisa Robertson, R’s Boat: The first-person pronoun as a way of driving down to one’s precise thoughts.
6. Tove Jansson, The True Deceiver (tr. Thomas Teal): Fictional children’s book author wants less than the truth; factual children’s book author gives you all of it.
7. Los Bros Hernandez, Love and Rockets: New Stories #1-3: The best installments of the continuing stooories of quacks who’ve gone to the dogs since, what, the early ’90s?
8. Feminaissance (Christine Wertheim, ed.): Good use of poetry statistics. Also: good hip hop criticism, and Fuck Yeah Eileen Myles.
9. Error and Inference (Mayo & Spanos, eds): Some foundational issues in the philosophy of science are worth yelling at each other about.
10. R. Crumb, The Book of Genesis: Crumb’s Rubenesques are closer to the spirit of the text than the Lego version.
Ten more recommendations:
John Quiggin, Zombie Economics
Grant Morrison et al., Batman R.I.P./Final Crisis
Daniel Suarez, Freedom (TM)
Will Alexander, The Sri Lankan Loxodrome
Naoki Urasawa et al., Pluto v. 1
China Mieville, The City and the City
Brandon Downing, Lake Antiquity
China Mieville, Kraken
Robert Kirkman, Ryan Ottley et al., Invincible #1-75
James Wolcott, Lucking Out
BONUS LIST! My favourite 19th century novels:
1. War and Peace
2. The Brothers Karamazov
3. David Copperfield
4. Crime and Punishment
5. *Les Miserables
6. *Pere Goriot
7. Middlemarch
8. **The Mill on the Floss
9. Pride and Prejudice
10. **Bleak House
*Read as part of 19th century month
**Read since 19th century month
