2018: My Year in Books

It's time for my annual look back at the words that paraded in front of my eyes over the previous 12 months.

It was a good year for books, although as always I wish I could have spent a lot more time reading -- and especially more time reading in-depth novels and nonfiction books. Still, I did read 111 books last year, slightly higher 2017's total of 96.

I'm not going to try to pick my absolute favorite, but I will note some exceptional reads.

First was the excellent graphic novel UPGRADE SOUL by Ezra Clayton Daniels. It's a marvelous science fiction story about race and identify. Powerful doesn't even begin to describe it.

I loved the three-book graphic novel series ROYAL CITY, an inter-generational tragedy written and painted by Jeff Lemire. I have so much to say about this series, but adding anything more here would give too much away.

Lemire is also writing a new horror series called GIDEON FALLS, illustrated by Andrea Sorrentino. The first volume came out this year; it starts off slow but ultimately blew my mind.

EXIT STAGE LEFT: THE SNAGGLEPUSS CHRONICLES was the weirdest and most perfect book of the year. Writer Mark Russell and artist Mike Feehan turn the old Hanna-Barbera cartoon to an examination of the politics and culture of the 1950s -- and today. Highly, highly recommended.

I rounded out the year by reading a few nonfiction books about environmental issues. The one that resonated the most with me was ECODHARMA, David Loy's new look at how Buddhism can save the planet. This was an early review copy, and I think the book is officially released this coming week. I say it's worth your time.

On top of the "new books," five of 2018's books were re-reads as I returned to series that weren't fresh in my brain -- the excellent, paranoid, horrific INJECTION series by Warren Ellis, Declan Shalvey and Joride Bellaire; and the quite wonderful RESIDENT ALIEN cozy mystery series by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse. Those series both get high recommendations.

There were plenty of other good books (and one or two stinkers) in 2019. You can see my full list here.

What's up for my reading in 2019? Well, I have a massive stack of environmental books to be read and reviewed, so that's a start. I'll also be trying to read more books by women and people of color through the year. And I'll probably read a graphic novel or two (or 20, or 50).

So what are you reading? I'd love to hear your recommendations at any time.

2018 in articles

I wrote about 80 articles for The Revelator in 2018 (the first year that all of my articles appeared in one place, the site I also happen to edit). Here are a few that I think summed up the year:

For Florida Panthers, Extinction Comes on Four Wheels -- a new way for me to look at the annual mortality stats. (I dread looking at 2018's final numbers.)

 

Ghost Cat Gone: Eastern Cougar Officially Declared Extinct -- this came as no surprise (the cougar was last seen 80-odd years ago), but the official announcement still resonated with people.

Is This the Year the Florida Grasshopper Sparrow Goes Extinct? -- not quite, but it's still a bad situation. (A good entry from my series on captive breeding, too.)

Extinction Ink -- a look at a tattoo artist who memorializes endangered and extinct species (I like using the arts as a lens to look at important issues).

Drill, Baby, Drill: The U.S. Added 38 Percent More Oil and Gas Rigs Last Year -- an exclusive detail that no one else seemed to have noticed.

Can Throwing a Tantrum Help Save Us From Climate Change? -- a fun book and a fun interview.

RIP Sudan, the Last Male Northern White Rhino -- I've been writing obituaries for almost every member of this species as it dies out. Painful.

America’s Freshwater Mussels Are Going Extinct — Here’s Why That Sucks -- important stuff (and again, a fresh way to look at it by focusing on captive breeding).

Trump Budget Cuts Could Cause Hundreds of Plant Extinctions in Hawaii -- again, a story just about everyone else missed (plus not enough people write about plant extinction).

Eight Years Until Red Wolf Extinction? -- that timeline still scares me.

How the Golden Lion Tamarin Is Helping to Heal Brazil’s Rainforest -- a nice success story in the making.

It’s No Mystery Why These Crime Novels Are Set in National Parks -- a fun interview about serious subjects.

Inhumanity at the Border — and Beyond -- one of the all-too-few editorials I wrote in 2018. This really resonated with people.

Sorry AC/DC, Rock and Roll Is Noise Pollution -- just a fun way to look at a serious issue.

Murder and Intimidation of Environmental Activists Hits Record Levels -- I tried to focus on both the treats and the people trying to help.

When This Rat Went Extinct, So Did a Flea -- who else but me would write about parasite extinction?

The Trump Administration’s ‘Dishonest’ Attack on Fuel-economy Standards -- a tough one to write, but important. (Great interviews really helped.)

How the Environment Fared in the Midterm Elections -- a great collaboration with my deputy editor, Tara Lohan. (I look forward to following these new officials as they take office next month.)

 

Swampy Thing: The Giant New Salamander Species Discovered in Florida and Alabama -- too cool (and one my most popular articles of the year).

 

2018: The Year Things Fell Apart — or the Year the Tide Turned? -- another editorial. I'm happy with how this one came out. Expect more in 2019. 

 

For all of my 2018 articles -- including a lot of other good ones -- go here. 

And check out the archive on this now-rarely updated blog for similar posts from previous years -- except for last year, which I missed.

2017: My Year in Books

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.

216: My Year in Books

My name is John and I like to read.

A lot.

As in, I really like to read and I really read a lot. Last year, according to my tally, I read a surprising 132 books. That's up from 123 in 2015 and the highest number I have read in a given year, at least as an adult. And that doesn't even count the thousands of articles, comic books, comic strips, short stories and related ephemera that I consumed over the year.

How the hell do I read so much? Easy -- I have a tendency to pick very short books, like graphic novels, which comprised the bulk of my reading once again this year. I would love to take more deep dives into novels or whatever, but I don't always have time for that. That means that I have (no exaggeration) hundreds and hundreds of novels on my bookshelves and in my Kindle waiting to be read.

I'll get to them all one of these days.

(Cue me in another decade or two, looking like Burgess Meredith in "The Twilight Zone"...)

Anyway, here a a few recommendations (and one non-recommendation) from this year's list.

Best novels: NOS4A2 by Joe Hill and JOYLAND by Joe Hill's dad, Stephen King. That's one talented family.

Best nonfiction book: THE MADHOUSE EFFECT by Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles. An essential examination of the science of climate change and the industry devoted to denying it.

Best graphic novel: MURDER BY REMOTE CONTROL by Janwillem van de Wetering & Paul Kirchner. Boy, that's a truly weird book, luckily rescued from obscurity and brought back into print this year.

Best art book: EYE TO EYE,  collection of photographs by the mysterious Vivian Maier (subject of the great documentary, "Finding Vivian Maier"). I think this is already out of print due to fights over Maier's copyrights and estate, but it's worth trying to track down a copy.

Worst book of the year: Amazing Fantastic Incredible: A Marvelous Memoir by Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran. I'll admit that I love Stan Lee, but this was biography by way of publicist. Sublimely awful.

It's January 1 as I post this blog, so if you'll excuse me, I think I'll stop writing and start making some headway on this year's list of books.

2016 in Articles

Okay, as 2016 turns into 2017 I find myself struck with two powerful revelations.

A) I am really, really bad at updating this blog.

and

B) I am really, really happy about the writing that I did during this past year.

I wrote and published 236 articles in 2016 -- that's down from 248 in 2015 -- covering as endangered species, climate change, new technologies, science careers, comic books and other topics. Most of those articles were written for Scientific American, TakePart and various IEEE publications, which kept me pretty busy, but I also wrote for PBS's Nature, Audubon, Sierra, Hakai, Slate, Vice/Motherboard and several trade publications. I'm happy to say that I didn't take a single assignment just for the money. I enjoyed working on everything and feel that the work I did this past year not only mattered but helped to add to the conversation on many important topics.

As I usually do at this point, here's a list of 20 of my favorite articles from the past year, in the order that they were published:

1. The Surprising (and Mostly Legal) Trade in "Mermaid Ivory"
2. How Do You Save an Elephant’s Tusk? Ask a Materials Engineer
3. Endangered Hawaiian Bird Immortalized In Space
4. What Happened When I Pushed Myself to Interview More Women
5. Drones' New Mission: Save the Forests
6. Preaching Against Extinction
7. Turtle Voyeurs
8. Wildlife Tourism Faces Dark Days—but Revenue Soars
9. Why People Keep Taking Deadly Selfies With Animals
10. Firefly Populations Are Blinking Out
11. Scientists’ New Research Tool: Pokémon Go  
12. Is It Ethical to Kill Poachers?
13. Snails Are Going Extinct: Here's Why That Matters
14. The Amazing Biodiversity within an Elephant's Footprint
15. A New Weapon in the War Against Climate Change Denial: Laughter
16. How to Craft a Winning Elevator Speech
17. Snow Leopard Conservation Gets Boost from New Tech
18. How Do You Stop a Marauding Bull Elephant Named Trump? Send in the Drones
19. Vote for Biodiversity
20. How High Schoolers’ Hacks Fixed a Whale Snot-Collecting Drone

(That's a pretty good list, but there were a lot of other gems in the mix. You can find links to everything that I published last year here.)

In addition to all of the above I also appeared on several radio shows and podcasts, had my work translated into Spanish, did some blogging here and there, tweeted a lot, and wrote dozens of ideas for gag cartoons that I will get around to drawing one of these days.

One more note about this year's articles: you may recall my discussion earlier this year about trying to achieve gender parity in my sources. Here's how it all broke down. I interviewed a total of 331 people in 2016. 197 of them were men (59.5%), 134 were women (40.5%). That's not quite the 50-50 I had hoped for, but it's still pretty good (and much better than most journalists, especially in the sciences).

Well, that's the year that was. 2017 is bound to hold all kinds of exciting challenges and opportunities, so I (for one) look forward to what comes out of my keyboard in the months ahead.

For now, though, thank you for reading. As always, I couldn't do any of this without my friends and readers who make all of this possible.

Latest sketchbook

I finished another sketchbook this morning! I keep these nice little pocket-sized sketchbooks on my desk and devote a couple of minutes to it each day. I allow just a minute or two per page, which is a nice, freeing exercise.

Someday soon I'll get back to finished drawings, but in the meantime here are a few favorite pages from this most recent sketchbook:

The Funny-Book Maker (a poem from the archives)

BAD ENDING # 10: THE FUNNY-BOOK MAKER

By John R. Platt

The comic-book artist

Got lost in his work

Black lines

Inked on white paper

Over and over and over

Two pages of art a day

Then three

Then five

Then ten

He no longer slept

He called his editor:

"Send more scripts!"

He neglected his health

His friends stopped calling

His wife left him

He didn't care

Only the stories mattered

Then, one day,

He ran out of ink

"No time to get supplies,"

He thought,

And reached for his Xacto knife

The found him two weeks later

Drained and dry

Sad and alone

But surrounded

By the best work of his career

It never saw print.

(One of a series of "Bad Endings" poems I have written over the years. This was originally published in January 2006 in BARE BONE 8, Raw Dog Screaming Press. Copyright 2006, 2016 John R. Platt)