Tuesday, January 01, 2019

Book-A-Day 2018: Post-Mortem

Introductory

First of all: yes, I know. It does seem odd to have a post-mortem for something not yet dead. But, trust me, Book-A-Day 2018 is dead: everything is read and all of the posts written and scheduled. [1] It's just going to twitch a bit for the next two weeks while the dying makes it out to all of the extremities.

2018 was my fourth run of Book-A-Day here on Antick Musings -- before that, it was something I did myself in a desultory way for a few weeks or months, to kick myself out of a reading doldrum. Those prior runs are the year of 2014, a year-long stretch covering 2010-2011, and a 200-day stretch in 2006-2007.

Book-A-Day can be either of two things: either I'm reading a book every day, or I'm writing a post about a book every day. Over the course of a year, the latter turns into the former, obviously. And every time I do this, I try to do both, and I think it's been more successful each time. (Of course, I would think that.)

This is probably the last time I do a Book-A-Day year. I have two reasons for that, one serious-logistical and one silly.

The silly reason first: I just realized that I was laid off soon after finishing every other Book-A-Day run: first in April of 2006 (after ending in February) and then in January of 2015 (after the 2014 run). I should be safe this time, but I'm not planning to tempt fate.

The more serious reason is that I just don't have the vast masses of quick-to-read books coming into my house that I did back in the SFBC days, and I've now worked down all of the remnants of both those days and what I've bought since then. (Well, the quick-to-read portions of both: I still have far more unread books than I can get to in the next five years.)

So even if I wanted to do Book-A-Day again, in 2021 or so, and tempt the Job Gods, I probably wouldn't have the books to do it with. I relied heavily on the library this time out, and the only way to do that again would be to read a lot of junk that I don't care much about just to pad out the totals. (Which, come to think of it, I did quite a bit in the 2014 and 2010-2011 runs.)

Given that, let me take a look at what I did read in 2018, in the manner of the previous Post-Mortems for 2006-2007 and 2014. There will be only one graph, I think, and this is it.

In 2018, I read 433 books in 365 days and wrote 379 blog posts covering 437 books and 6 individual comics issues. Careful readers will note that I wrote about more books in 2018 than I read; I started the year with a small cushion of stuff read in December 2017. I also read more books than I wrote posts, because I wrote about longer series (all comics) more and more as the year went on. The numbers and percentages in the chart and below are based on number of books rather than number of posts.

I don't know if everyone likes placing books into tidy little categories as much as I do, though the wars over the SF/Fantasy border seem to prove they do. But it's how I organize these Post-Mortem posts, so here's what I read, as I categorize it:

Fiction: SF and Fantasy (18, 4.2%)

This is what I used to do for a living: I know, I'm surprised it's this small a portion of my reading these days, too. I keep saying that I'd be happy to go back to SFF publishing if they wanted me, but I have no idea how my current expertise would align with that world.

In 2014, this was 4.4%, with 16 books.

Fiction: Mystery and Thriller (5, 1.2%)

The larger genre right next door to SFF, in which I also used to read a lot more. Several of my would-be reading projects are in this area; maybe one or more will happen in 2019.

In 2014, this was 0.5%, with 2 books.

Fiction: Mainstream (10, 2.3%)

I'm reading fewer long books of prose in the first place these days, but it seems like about the same percentage of it is not obviously genre. But I tend to think of this category as defined negatively: it's what doesn't fit into clear genres.

In 2014, this was 2.7%, with 10 books.

Non-Fiction: Narrative (15, 3.5%)

This is the category for relatively serious non-fiction -- histories, travelogues, memoirs, stuff like that. It's really miscellaneous, obviously.

In 2014, this was 6%, with 22 books.

Non-Fiction: Lists and Frivolities (17, 3.9%)

And this is the non-fiction category for things that aren't serious at all -- a lot of these were bathroom books, and this category has often been the place for things I read quickly in an evening when I realized I hadn't read a book yet that day. But my sense is that the cute little gift-y thing that sits by the cast register isn't really a big book category anymore.

In 2014, this was 2.7%, with 10 books.

Comics: Strip and Panel Collections (27, 6.2%)

I divide the world of comics into possibly idiosyncratic categories, based on how they first appeared. I think it makes sense; you may disagree. First up are books of comics that originally appeared as individual strips somewhere -- online or in print. This used to be mostly collections of newspaper comics, then mostly collections of webcomics, and now it's pretty miscellaneous.

In 2014, this was 10.4%, with 38 books.

Comics: Floppy Collections (194, 44.8%)

The second category of comics includes things that were mostly reprinted from periodical comic books. Most of this stuff reprints series (ongoing or mini-) in an obvious way, but there are a few oddballs like the Best American Comics series, which I put here to put them somewhere. But, generally, things in this category appeared as a publication under the same overall name as the eventual collection. Since the American comics market is what it is, and I was reading a lot of comics this year, it's the largest category -- almost half of all books.

In 2014, this was 19.5%, with 71 books.

Comics: Originals in Book Form (66, 15.2%)

This category should be pretty self-explanatory: comics, by people working in the English language, that first appeared as a book, without any previous serial publication.

In 2014, this was 29%, with 106 books.

Comics: Translated from Japanese (and other Asian languages) (17, 3.9%)

Comics, mostly manga, translated for an American audience.

In 2014, this was 12.9%, with 47 books. I used to read a lot more in this area, but that was mostly stuff that came in as publicity packages and that I didn't necessarily like all that much. Once the flow of free product stopped, there were only a few things from that flood I wanted to keep up with on my own.

Comics: Translated from French (and other European languages) (42, 9.7%)

In 2014, this was 7.7%, with 28 books. This one swapped size with the translated-from-Asia category since 2014, interestingly. I think part of that is just that there's more "art comics" coming over, accessibly, from France than from Japan, and part is that I did a big re-read of the whole Dungeon series, which contributed 17 books all on its own.

Art Books (9, 2.1%)

Back in my SFBC days, this was a huge staple of my book-a-day runs, and often the trigger for them: when I had too many art books stacked up, it was time to run through them comprehensively. But I think there are fewer books like that being published at all, in this Internet age, and I haven't had a way to get them free for a decade now.

In 2014, this was 2.2%, with 8 books.

Books for Children of Various Ages (12, 2.8%)

This is one of my fuzziest categories, since nearly everything here could be counted as something else -- a novel, an original GN, or whatever. But this is where I put things that are very specifically for younger readers, and not just accessible to younger readers. I try to put "YA" books -- which regularly bleed into adult readership -- in the general categories, and books aimed at middle-grade or younger readers here. But I don't promise absolute consistency.

In 2014, this was 1.6%, with 6 books.

Poetry (1, 0.2%)

I read a book of poetry this year! And I have a bookmark in another one, so I may actually finish a similar book next year. I used to read more poetry, ten to fifteen years back -- the book I had going in the bathroom was generally poetry, until some particularly horrible British historical survey anthology knocked me out of the habit.

I have not read any poetry, as far as I can tell, in any prior book-a-day run.

Playscripts (1, 0.2%)

I did read one playscript in 2014, for 0.3% of the total. So that number holds absolutely steady.


That's what I read in 2018. I should come back in about two weeks and add in the last links, once all of the posts have gone live. If you're reading this later than January 16, 2019, you can judge whether I did that or not.

If you've read this far, let me leave you with one last thought. There's probably some similarly crazy project in the back of your head -- maybe for your work, maybe gardening, maybe exercise- or diet-related, maybe housecleaning, maybe running for Congress!

Do it. Do it this year. Start in on it as soon as you can. Jump onto your crazy hard-work ideas and make them real. There's nothing like finishing up something you really wanted to do and looking back on it. I want all of you to have that feeling. So do it. Start the planning today.


[1] With one tiny asterisk: the post for the book I finished today isn't quite done yet. I wrote the post for book #380 today (which I read yesterday) and started #381, but it's not final. So, tomorrow morning I will finalize and set to post the very last Book-A-Day 2018 post. 
Your Hornswoggler is Andrew Wheeler Released into the wild 1/01/2019 02:00:00 PM 0 comments
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Book-A-Day 2018 #366: Giant Days: Not on the Test Edition, Vol. III by Allison, Sarin & Fleming

Yes, this is day #366 of last year's Book-A-Day. I've run over; so sue me. As of today, it looks like Book-A-Day 2018 will extend to number 379 on the 14th.

 You really don't need to know anything about creator John Allison's extended Tackleford universe to read and love Giant Days -- the connection is very loose and tenuous, and I don't think Giant Days has ever actually shown us Tackleford. But I still ran through the whole world-building story when I wrote about the first two hardcover omnibus collections this May, so people might think that Giant Days is hard to get into.

It isn't. There are these three friends at a fictional college somewhere in England: Esther, Daisy, and Susan. They are written with style and verbal flair, and drawn with panache and energy. Their adventures are just that little bit bigger and more exciting than actual life. They are quirky, distinctive people who are fun to read about. You are missing out on something wonderful if you don't read about them.

Which brings me to Giant Days: Not on the Test Edition, Vol. 3, which collects issues 17-24 of the comics series. The stories here take place at the end of their first year of college, over the summer, and the beginning of the fall term.

(This is a British school, so they seem to be on a trimester system and on track to graduate after only three years. There may be Americans who will be completely thrown by this, but I expect they're already cowering in a cool dark room right now, utterly terrified by the oddities of life.)

As usual with Giant Days, it's character-based humor with everything turned up just a couple of notches from real life -- and you can get to know the characters through any of the stories, so you don't actually need to start at the beginning. (That's obviously the best place to start, but it's not required.) So the three women have further love complications, and house complications when their second-year house rental turns out less nice than they'd expected. There's a plagiarism scandal, that music festival, a horrible housemate for McGraw and Ed (their male friends), new unpleasant neighbors, a brush with the criminal underworld, and an extended visit from Susan's father.

The big draws are Allison's sprightly, crackling dialogue and the energetic art from Max Sarin (pencils), Liz Fleming (inks), and Whitney Cogar (colors), all of which add up to a thoroughly entertaining, wonderful set of stories about a group of quirky, believable people.

Also included is the third (of three) self-published all-Allison Giant Days stories in the back of this book, which Allison made a couple of years before starting the min series with collaborators. [1] So, to my mind, not only is Giant Days one of the very best comics series out there, but the Not on the Test Editions are the best way to read that series. Period.


[1] Some might say they are prequels; those people are wrong. Prequels are works made later but set in an earlier time period. Works made earlier are just works made earlier.
Your Hornswoggler is Andrew Wheeler Released into the wild 1/01/2019 12:00:00 PM 0 comments
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Another Year Hornswoggled: 2018 in the Rear-View

In the annals of pointless rituals, this is certainly one of them.

Once, far too long ago, there was a dumb meme to make an end-of-year blog post out of the first and last sentences from each month of the year on that blog. I liked the way it randomly summed up a year, so I've been doing it ever since. And now I'm doing it again.

January

The whole point about teens is that they're not done yet. 

And Frakes makes that real; reading this book is a lot like listening to a good storyteller talk about her life and adventures.

February

I know cliches only get to be that way because they're durable and common, but, boy howdy! does this book rely heavily on a very cliched cliche for its premise.

Writing this post, I realize I consistently dropped one of those pesky "e"s in my post about Let Me Be Perfectly Clear, and that no one noticed for several years. It's correct now. I think.
Your Hornswoggler is Andrew Wheeler Released into the wild 1/01/2019 10:00:00 AM 0 comments
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Favorite Books of 2018

If you review stuff at all, you have to do an end-of-year list to sum it all up -- I'm pretty sure that's a law somewhere. Since Antick Musings has turned into a book blog (despite my half-assed efforts over the years to do other things), that means it features a list of my favorite books at the end of each year. Because I'm grumpy and opinionated, they will be odd choices. Because I'm puckish and contrary, I insist on doing my list at the very end of the year, and counting only things I actually read that year, not some arbitrary publishing calendar.

(I've been doing this since this blog started; see previous entries for the years 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.)

My rules have gotten codified in relatively simple terms, so here they are again:

The Rules:

  • My list is finalized on the last day of the year, so it includes all my reading for the year.
  • This is a list of "favorites," not "bests."
  • I try to favor recent/current books -- but this rule has been bent in years when I read fewer books.
  • My reading includes many genres and formats, and the list mixes that all together.
  • I pick a favorite for each month, to make a top twelve.
  • And each month gets a narrative including other notable books I read then.

The Field:

Since I was doing Book-A-Day this year, I read more books in 2018 than any year since I started keeping track (1990, when i graduated college), a total of 433. That's way up from 2017's 139, 2016's 161, 2015's 175 and 2014's 383. (2014 was also a Book-A-Day year -- 2011-2013 averaged a bit over 150).

Still, that's not a lot of books compared to what gets published, and I did a lot of re-reading this year. More seriously for some possible readers, the vast bulk of that was comics (graphic novels, BD, whatever you call it), and some of you, I know, can't stand some or all of that stuff.

But a book can only be someone's favorite if that person reads it, so it's what I had to work from. And here's what was worth remembering and celebrating in a year of Book-A-Day reading:

January

I read a lot of worthwhile books to start off the year, across several different genres. In non-fiction, there was the smart and puckish The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance by Kevin Underhill (an exploration of "crazy laws" actually researched and written by a working attorney) and the data-soaked Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve by Ben Blatt (a textual examination of a whole bunch of famous and/or major writers). I re-read Teri S. Wood's big SF comic Wandering Star in the gigantic newish Dover edition, and found it just as true and humanist as it ever was.

Welcome returns included Mimi Pond, with her second volume of comics memoir The Customer Is Always Wrong, and Tom Gauld, with the collection of mostly-book-related cartoons mostly from The Guardian, Baking With Kakfa. Satania, a big, stunningly drawn graphic story from Vehlman and Kerascoet, had a lot of meaty moments but didn't quite have the punch of their earlier Beautiful Darkness. Steven Brust had a new Vlad Taltos fantasy novel, Valista, with his usual sly wit and a unique take on the locked-room mystery.

I only read J.M. Coetzee's 1980 novel Waiting for the Barbarians -- which is not genre, but not a thousand miles from genre, either -- this year. I often say a good book is one that's still good no matter how late you read it: that's definitely the case there.

But it came down to a three-way contest for my favorite, among three modern comics creators -- two telling fictional stories and one reporting from a foreign country, but all striving to show real life with real people. Sarah Glidden's Rolling Blackouts was an honest, multi-faceted look at the thorny, maybe unsolvable Israeli-Palestinian situation. Jeff Lemire's Royal City, Vol. 1 began a strong family story in a decaying city. And, in the end, I had to give the nod to Cyril Pedrosa's Equinoxes, another family story with amazing ambition and reach.

February

I don't like to make old books favorites of a new year, since that feels like cheating. So I'll just mention re-reading the big fat hardcover collection of the beginning of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg!, a great action-dystopian comic from the '80s, fizzy with its own energy and ideas. Similarly, Another worthwhile collection of older work: Julia Wertz's Museum of Mistakes, which pulls together just about all of the comics from the early "Fart Party" era of her career.

In newer books, Jeff Lemire's standalone graphic novel Roughneck was another strong story of hard-hit people in a punishing Canadian landscape of small towns and few opportunities. Louis Undercover is a similarly emotionally powerful story, by Fanny Britt and Isabelle Arsenault, about one boy and his father. And my favorite of the month was the magnificent Spinning by Tillie Walden: a memoir of her childhood and teen years spent competitive figure skating and how those experiences have colored and pervaded her whole (still short) life to date.

March

I'll start off this month with the old book, which I disqualify for consideration in 2018 because it's from 2003. The Night Country is a great borderline-horror novel by Stewart O'Nan, who I'm coming to believe can write absolutely anything he puts his mind to. In some of the same territory is Nothing Left to Lose, Dan Wells's last book about teenage psychopath and monster-hunter John Wayne Cleaver.

Another novel slightly too old for consideration was Nicholson Baker's 2009 book The Anthologist, which had a slightly wider field of view than his other books I've read but the same intensity of focus.

The rest of my candidates are all graphic novels. Particularly timely is The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, an intensely personal memoir about her immigrant family and life -- I wish I could make a million "build the wall" assholes read this, or live through something similar. You & A Bike & A Road is lighter on the surface, the story of a trip across the Southern US, but cartoonist Eleanor Davis finds deepness in all of the moments of that trip.

And the book I keep thinking about is Charles Forsman's powerful I Am Not Okay With This, which takes the themes of a thousand lesser comics -- teen angst, mysterious power, restless youth -- and transmutes it into something unique and special.

April


Once again, I'll start writing about May with the book that can't be my favorite because it's too old: P.G. Wodehouse's 1932 collection of magazine writings, Louder and Funnier. It is just as loud and as funny as it should be, and still a joy to read three generations later. Similarly, I re-read Dave McKean's great graphic novel, Cages, in its semi-new edition -- but, again, that book is about twenty years old now, depending on how you date it. Another old book: Bruce Chatwin's unique travelogue, In Patagonia, as much the story of his family -- which may be fictional, or at least apocryphal -- as it is the story of his trip. And I re-read Tom Stoppard's famous first play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which you don't need me to tell you about.

I was very impressed by The Vision, a story about Marvel Comics's favorite android, by Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta: it's pretty rare that I consider a superhero story for this year-end roundup. Also really strong was Joe Ollman's comics biography of a quirky, little-remembered writer, The Abominable Mr. Seabrook.

Top of the month was the chilling, powerful graphic novel Voices in the Dark, adapted by Ulli Lust from the original novel by Marcel Beyer, with an English translation adapted by Nika Knight from John Brownjohn's translation of the novel.

May

I found fewer books from this month to call out: maybe I was working through the obvious good stuff by this point in the year, maybe I was just getting tired. This is also the month where I dove into the reading-project side of Book-A-Day, which I'll get to in a moment.

I liked the prose and the point of Eating Aliens by Jackson Landers, both a book about going out to hunt, cook and eat invasive species in the USA and a passionate call to do more of that. And I enjoyed I.N.J. Culbard's comics adaptation of the classic Lovecraft novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; all of Culbard's Lovecraft adaptations have been gems.

Nearly taking the crown this month was a great memoir, My Father, The Pornographer by Chris Offutt, about his farther (the fantasy and SF writer Andy Offutt), about family, and about two tons of porn.

But the best book of the month came out of the reading-project side. I ran through the entire Dungeon series, written by French creators Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim with various artists (including both of them, for various books), and a number of those books could be called out here: The Night Shirt and Soldiers of Honor in particular. And the most powerful book of the month was from that series as well: The Depths by Sfar, Trondheim and artist Patrice Killoffer (in French, Les Profondeurs), the back half of the book Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 3: Heartbreaker.

June

This was the month where the re-reads really kicked in, with an every-Monday series of posts on the Hernandez Brothers' Love and Rockets, which ran through the end of the year. Keeping to my general rule, none of those books can be favorites for 2018 -- but they're great books by great cartoonists.

Similarly, this month and later I re-read major works by Alan Moore and various artists (six volumes of Swamp Thing), Grant Morrison mostly with artist Richard Case (three or six volumes of Doom Patrol), Mike Baron and Steve Rude with occasional fill-in artists (nine volumes of Nexus), art spiegelman (The Compleat Maus), Matt Wagner and a lot of different collaborators (four volumes of Grendel Omnibus), Tim Truman (four volumes of Scout and Scout: War Shaman), and Eddie Campell with occasional assistance (two volumes of Bacchus). All of that is ineligible for the 2018 list; all of it is great comics that is worth your time and attention.

In newer comics that I read in June, there was the crazy Demon saga by Jason Shiga, in four volumes. Nagata Kabi's My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness was a tough memoir to read, but deeply worthwhile. From France, there was the amazingly nutty Mickey's Craziest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicholas Keramidis, the often nerve-wracking true story of Guy Delisle's Hostage, and the quietly serious On the Camino by Jason.

But my favorite of the month, for once, wasn't in comics form: I got to Charles Stross's Laundry Files novel The Delirium Brief slightly late, but it was worth it.

July

Again, there were a lot of great book-format comics: the translated short stories in Manuele Fior's Blackbird Days, the memoir of Kristen Radtke's Imagine Wanting Only This, the quirky appeal of Eleanor Davis's Why Art?, the YA graphic-novel equivalent of power pop in Hope Larson's All Summer Long.

I almost picked Brazen, a collection of short comics biographies by Penelope Bagieu of interesting and ground-breaking women, as my favorite, but it will have to settle for being runner-up.

Because one of my favorite writers was back after a long hiatus: James Alan Gardner launched a new series of fantasy novels about superheroes in contemporary Waterloo (Canada) with All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault.

August

In the doldrums of summer, I read a lot of things that were either too old to qualify (Steve Erickson's great first novel Days Between Stations, the front half of Baron and Rude's Nexus, Dave Sim's first phonebook collection Cerebus, more Love and Rockets) or that just didn't thrill me enough (no names here).

I'm not going to make Martha Wells's great second "Murderbot" novella Artificial Condition the favorite of this month mostly because I think I may need to hold a slot for a later volume at the end of the year. But it's definitely up there.

Which leaves me with Tom Perrotta's most recent novel Mrs. Fletcher for August: it's a sharp book about today's sexual mores by the current master of stories about suburbanites. (That may sound dismissive, but a huge number of Americans are suburbanites, and we need muses, too.)

September

The token old book that doesn't qualify for this month is P.G. Wodehouse's great 1936 story collection Young Men in Spats.

Some excellent comics-format stuff that also passed under my eyeballs this month -- Come Again by Nate Powell, another atmospheric, creepy story from a master; My Boyfriend Is a Bear, a cute, wonderful maybe-metaphorical romance by Pamela Ribon and Cat Farris; and All the Answers by Michael Kupperman, a deep dive into family history and repression.

But my favorite of the month was Kristen Gudsnuk's Henchgirl, which revitalized the "tell the story from the villain's point of view" idea and delivered several metric tons of fun storytelling.

October

This one was a tough choice, with four strong possibilities. I reluctantly counted Carla Speed McNeil's The Finder Library, Vol. 1 out of contention due to my long-standing "no old stuff" rule; it's several years old itself and collects the beginning of her great SF comics series starting from the mid-90s.

Jen Wang's The Prince and the Dressmaker was a lovely, almost fabulistic story about being yourself and finding your authentic life, and I'm sure it will be beloved by an entire generation of readers who need that message.

I'm holding another slot at the end of the year for Martha Wells's "Murderbot" series, so I'll just point out that it is totally awesome through the third book, Rogue Protocol, which I read in October.

So the favorite for this month is the devastating, DeLillo-esque Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, which I fully expect will be a lot of people's top graphic novel for the year. It is that powerful.

November

Starting again with the old ineligible stuff: I finally read Larry Marder's work in the big wonderful Beanworld Omnibus, Vol. 1, but that's all work from the '80s and '90s. Slightly newer, but still all reprint, is the great single-volume collection of Evan Dorkin's occasional comic Dork.

From the present day: Pam Smy's Thornhill was a creepy, excellent story in a hybrid comics/prose format that I've been seeing popping up a little bit more and more -- it may turn into a genre with a name one of these days. And Zander Cannon's third collection of his current comic, Kaijumax: King of the Monstas, was another amazing melange of prison-story, monster-movie, crime-fiction, and just plain drama.

Top of the month, though, was the second collection of a webcomic: Strong Female Protagonist, Book Two by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag. It's got a smart, often-political edge and a definite point of view, wrapped up in a distinctive version of the superheroes-in-the-real-world plot.

December

Everything that I want to mention for the last month of the year was actually recent: does that mean I finally caught up on my re-reading and older books? (No: not at all. But maybe I momentarily paused. There are always more old good books than any of us can read.)

In comics, I loved the third big collection of the comic about British women at university, Giant Days: Not On the Test Edition, Vol. 3, written by John Allison and drawn by Max Sarin and Liz Fleming. And the front half of Matt Wagner's big trilogy-ending superhero semi-autobiography was also impressive in Mage: The Hero Denied, Vol. 1.

I finally caught up with the first book of Jeff VanderMeer's "Southern Reach" trilogy, Annihilation, which is one of the best creepy books I've ever read and which makes me want to get the two follow-ups immediately.

But best for the month, and summing up the whole year, is the fourth book in Martha Wells's "Murderbot Diaries," Exit Strategies. She's maintained a magnificently balanced, snarky tone through the whole series (three of which I read this year) and created one of the great robot characters in all of SF. (And maybe strike the word "robot" from that last sentence, too.)

And so I end up with...

2018's Top Twelve

  • All Those Explosions Were Someone Else's Fault by James Alan Gardner
  • The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross
  • The Depths (in Dungeon Monstres, Vol. 3: Heartbreaker) by Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Patrice Killoffer
  • Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa
  • Henchgirl by Kristen Gudsnuk
  • I Am Not Okay With This by Charles Forsman
  • Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perrotta
  • Sabrina by Nick Drnaso
  • Spinning by Tillie Walden
  • Strong Female Protagonist, Book Two by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag
  • Voices in the Dark by Marcel Beyer and Ulli Lust
Those are the most memorable books I read this year. I recommend all of them to all of you, whoever you are.

You might hate them, of course: that's how taste works. But I think they're all worth reading even if you hate them; I've had a lot of books like that in my life, goodness knows.
Your Hornswoggler is Andrew Wheeler Released into the wild 1/01/2019 08:00:00 AM 0 comments
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Read in December 2018

This is how my latest run of Book-A-Day ended. As I type this, I have posts written and scheduled through the 21st and have read books for posts through the 30th. So even if I utterly fail on the reading-a-book-a-day part of this project from this moment, I should still be able to have a post about a book every day through the end of the year.

But, of course, I intend to keep reading, so Book-A-Day is currently (tentatively) scheduled to run through about January 14. And here are the books that will end that run:

Jay McInerney, Story of My Life (12/1)

Gilbert Hernandez, Birdland (12/1, digital)

Herge, The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 3 (12/2)

Michael Kupperman, Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 1 (12/3, digital)

Claudio Persanti and Lorenzo Mattotti, Stigmata (12/4, digital)

Al Columbia, Pim and Francie: "The Golden Bear Days" (12/5, digital)

Joyce Farmer, Special Exits (12/6, digital)

Charles Forsman, The End of the Fucking World (12/7)

Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (12/7)

John Allison, Max Sarin, and Liz Fleming, Giant Days: Not on the Test Edition, Vol. 3 (12/8)

Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, and Erin Humiston, Calla Cthulhu, Vol. 1 (12/9)

Chris Roberson, Francesco Biagini, and Stephen Downer, Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Balance Lost, Vol. 1 (12/10)

Matt Wagner, Mage: The Hero Denied, Vol. 1 (12/11)

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls, Vol. 5 (12/12)

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, Saga, Vol. 9 (12/13)

Nicholson Baker, House of Holes (12/14)

Larry Marder, Tales of the Beanworld (12/14)

C. Tyler, You'll Never Know, Vol. 2: Collateral Damage (12/15, digital)

C. Tyler, You'll Never Know, Vol. 3: Soldier's Heart (12/16)

Tim Truman, Scout, Vol. 1: The Four Monsters (12/17, digital)

Tim Truman, Scout, Vol. 2: Mount Fire (12/18, digital)

Tim Truman, Scout, Vol. 3 (12/19, digital)

John Boswell and Dan Starer, Five Rings, Six Crises, Seven Dwarfs, and 38 Ways to Win an Argument (12/20)

Jim Woodring, Poochytown (12/21)

Tim Truman, Scout: War Shaman (12/22, digital)

Eddie Campbell, Bacchus Omnibus, Vol. 1 (12/23)

Eddie Campbell, Bacchus Omnibus, Vol. 2 (12/24)

Kaoru Mori, Emma, Vol. 1 (12/25)

Kaoru Mori, Emma, Vol. 2 (12/26)

Kaoru Mori, Emma, Vol. 3 (12/27)

Kaoru Mori, Emma, Vol. 4 (12/28)

Kaoru Mori, Emma, Vol. 5 (12/29)

Brandon Graham, Royalboiler (12/30)

Martha Wells, Exit Strategy (12/31)


And that was that. I don't expect to keep up this reading pace in 2019, particularly given some changes in my work situation. But it was fun while it lasted. Let's see what I do manage to read next year: I'll list it here, whatever it is.
Your Hornswoggler is Andrew Wheeler Released into the wild 1/01/2019 12:01:00 AM 0 comments
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