Well, well, well... another year gone by, another few dozen books consumed. This was both a really good and really bad year for me and books. I read quite a few -- 96 books, by my count -- but didn't come anywhere close to my totals for previous years.
Of course, there were a few reasons for that. Most importantly, my new job launching and editing The Revelator dominated my time this year. This required me to read a ton of material -- mostly articles -- which didn't leave much time for reading. I'm quite happy with that trade-off.
We also moved again this year, something I would have been happy to skip. Our landlord wanted to move his family back into the house we were renting, so the first half of the year was dominated by searching for a new place to live, packing and moving (and, to a lesser degree, unpacking). Oh well.
All of this meant some of my reading time found itself devoted to shorter material -- graphic novels, comics and short stories. Honestly, sometimes that's all the energy that I had. (But it added up. Last month, in a rare period of binging, I read something close to 250 Spider-Man comics written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by a variety of artists. If I had counted those as their trade paperback collections, my total number of books read for the year would have been much, much higher.)
So anyway, how did the books that I actually got to read pan out? The best -- by far -- was Borne, the excellent post-apocalyptic novel by Jeff VanderMeer. That's an incredible book -- so good I may just re-read it in 2018.
The worst book? Again, by far, it was Frank Miller's latest Dark Knight opus, The Master Race. Holy abomination, Batman, that was truly awful on just about every level.
Other highlights: Critical Critters by Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy; the Rachel Rising series by Terry Moore (which I finally got to finish this past year); and the most recent Walking Dead volume (book 28), which I thought was the best of the series so far.
So that's my brief look at my book list for this year. Check out past entries in this rarely updated blog for my lists from previous years. There's some good stuff.
What will this coming year hold? Well, The Revelator is going to dominate my year again -- as well it should, because I'm enjoying the hell out of this job (the hardest and best I've ever had) -- but I'll make sure to carve out some time for a few good books along the way.
