Favorite Reads of 2009

Since the annual BSC Book Tournament is currently going on, I figured I’d share my 10 favorite reads from last year. No differentiating categories, and everything is equal no matter what format or medium it was published. Also, not limiting myself to 2009 publications, just to what I read last year. I know there is usually a lot of preamble that comes with these lists concerning standard formulas, and since I usually view them as a combo of guilty conscious and covering your virtual ass at work, the only thing you need to know is that the way I gauge merit is simply by how much something kicked ass. Not kissed it. You may recall that BSC had a Summer Six Pack feature where a whole bunch of people more talented than me visited BSC and shared their mid-year thoughts on the best reads of the year. Some of my choices from then survived the second half releases and are noted here.

Let’s get to it, and in no order that matters to anyone who doesn’t have the potential lifespan of an ascendant to decipher its true meaning (and answers).

From the artist/writer who brought us one of the best comics of the last decade in Skyscrapers of the Midwest, Joshua Cotter’s Driven By Lemons allows me to take umbrage with Warren Ellis for jumping the gun. THIS is “one odd fucking book”.

Stuff of Legend (written by Mike Raicht & Brian Smith with pencils by Charles Paul Wilson III) is the hotness. I will get deeper into this over at BSC throne world when the Random House version is released. I talked a bit about it at Vogue Immunity and aside from being perhaps the most visually pleasing comic that I saw last year (I’m on Wilson’s waiting list for a commission,that’s how much I dig it–me volunteering to wait for shit don’t happen often), it also has a very nice story that admittedly at this point scores more for having the element of being intriguing than being a blow-your-mind concept or due to uncommon execution. I find you want to know what happens next more than you appreciate what just happened, which makes this a rare comic that actually might be more successful as a monthly read not (thus far) a one sit down read. It’s still early, but that’s both the promise and cause for hesitation for me about this book. Since I always look to the future, this doesn’t bother me but I’ll be interested to see if an internal mythology develops. As an aside, I want to slap the shit out of the next person who calls this a “Dark Toy Story”. Google it. Some of you should be a little better than that. Proper justice will occur when I drop mine.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of G.I. Joe and this is the first of two Joe related entries that cracks my Top Ten. My twitter boy and fellow mentat Jason Wood just brought this up recently, but Mark Bellomo’s The Ultimate Guide to G.I. Joe: 1982-1994 (v2) is the best G.I. Joe resource ever put to print. Sure, you can go to Yojoe.com (the definitive online resource for everything G.I. Joe) but there’s something about having this resource in-hand and physically turning the pages memories. This bad boy is not just a nostalgia trip, it’s the tool for actively collecting the best years of the greatest toy line ever. There are some oversights and errors, but they are of the type only a handful of people on the planet would recognize and are synonymous with minor continuity errors found in 12-book novel cycles. There is no other guide. Tanks for the memories.

I bought my copy of Dust of Dreams because for some reason I can only get 4 copies of every Tor book published except the ones I specifically make a point to ask for. Then, I get it after 30 sites that if you add up their traffic might do what we do at BSCkids before noon (forget about BSCreview). I’m not mad at all though, because at the end of day, Erikson is perhaps the only writer that I can honestly say is consistently worth retail. Erikson is the only author that will have hundreds of pages dedicated to multiple threads that I absolutely couldn’t give a shit about, but still causes me to come out loving the novel and wanting to be his herald. All of those disastrous threads (an example in Toll the Hounds was that entire Dying God rubbish) are points that I go back to during my several rereads of each book in the series. I want more books, the board game, the MMORPG, I want it all. I want plushie Kruppes. Historically, people have taken shots at epic fantasy, but in many cases those were shadowboxers, as Erikson hadn’t yet created the work that the term was meant to recognize.

The most kickass novel for me was Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey. I liked it so much I asked Kadrey to drop a guest spot over at BSC (which is still my favorite guest post yet). I rather enjoyed a previous novel by Kadrey that I reviewed at BSC called Butcher Bird, and this was more of the same high adrenaline – yet clear – fun ride. Much like a Charlie Huston or a Richard Morgan, I admire Kadrey’s ability to write compelling fiction that doesn’t rely on chiefly on being vague. There is no hiding, and it’s bold rather than simple. Sometimes we just need our fix, not broken shit we have to put together that in the end not only never has all the pieces, but also sucks. I hate that.

Charlie Huston not only wrote a post-Matheson vampire series that has a right to exist, but he also brought it to a conclusion at a high level (which is uncommon for series of any kind). Five books with only one brief hiccup, which wasn’t the final book, My Dead Body. I think No Dominion is as solid a piece of speculative fiction that you fill find in the last several years. There is this reverence to irreverence in Huston’s almost freestyle and wheelin’ like manner that threatens to identify itself as modern pulp.

Brush with Passion made me cry. Yeah, I said it, and hat’s all that really needs to be said. RIP Dave Stevens (go check out some thoughts I had in a Jan-Ken-pon piece last year).

I said this on twitter recently, but my writer of the year wrote G.I. Joe, and his name is Mike Costa. That Twins issue he did (Cobra) was the single best comic of the year and he’s made Chuckles the illist Joe ever. This listing is for all IDW G.I. Joe titles within their comic continuity (the movie stuff is meh though I didn’t hate Helix). I’m not so sure that a Joe relaunch could have been done better. Hell, I’m not sure if a launch of any kind could have been done this well. Chris Ryall and team are kicking ass in general, as Transformers and G.I. Joe at IDW kicks as much ass now as they did in the ’80s (with relative awesome-ratio adjustment due to time). If I could only by one line of books, it would be G.I. Joe, and that’s a damn sweet world to live in.

One of the few projects of any kind that I continued to cover last year, Marvel’s re-presentation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz with the perfect creative team of Eric Shanower & Skottie Young should have won ever award the industry has to offer. Through these pages we saw that a title directed at a young all-ages market, with a top shelf creative team can do well a notion that seems to be dead in the main-line. I read this (or something like it) line from a poster over at the CGC boards the other day:

“Comics used to be read by smart kids, now it’s read by dumb adults”

With this retelling of Baum’s classic, Shanower and Young show us a future in taking it back. You can check out my reviews of the issues and my interview with Shanower over at the Death Star. I also briefly touched on it more recently at VI. Let’s try to grow, and cater less.

I don’t even know what this means, but Carroll is among the greatest living American novelists. Even more, it had to battle a god-awful cover (Carroll’s books usually have great covers IMHO). Carroll’s ability to strike the relatable with absurdist darts and then switch it up and touch magic with bare hands, makes him among the few writers in the world not named Saramago that can make me buy a book make me buy a novel titled The Ghost in Love with no shame in my game when I reach the cashier. As an aside, Chris Barzak is reaching that level fo me as well.

Wednesday Comics was so good that it can’t be contained by irrational constructs like Top Ten lists. Everybody should be reading DC Comics newspaper style, and I dare say if DC would have called on all legions and corps to hijack all copies of USA Today and replace them with copies of Wednesday Comics, the world – once committed – would admit to itself that as readers we are still a planet of the world’s finest.

Props to:

Paul Malmont for Jack London in Paradise, Haruki Murkami for 1Q84 , Jeff Parker for Agent of Atlas, Daniel Way for Deadpool, Jonathan Lethem for Chronic City, Matt Wagner and Amy Reeder Hadley for Madame Xanadu, Jeff VanderMeer for Finch, China Mieville for The City and the City, Bryan Talbot for Grandville, Matthew Sturges and Luca Rossi for House of Mystery, and Bill Willingham for Fables, Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray for Jonah Hex, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning for Guardians of the Galaxy, Paul Cornell and Leonard Kirk for Captain Britain and MI: 13, Julian Lytle for Ants, and Hi-Fructose.