Unqualified Offerings

[NOTE: I really did start on this post in December. Don't think of it as late, think of it as a year-in-review post that really reviews the whole 365 days.]

This year sucked, politically and personally. But when the world is running down, there’s still stuff we like. Hence this post. Ground rules: this is not necessarily stuff that got released in 2011 or was new in 2011. It’s stuff that was new – or re-newed – to me this year. By category, go!

Books:

Mike Carey, The Naming of the Beasts (at al.). The fifth and apparently final (for now?) novel about the ghostbreaker Felix Castor is hard-boiled urban fantasy done right. Carey writes tight prose, creates interesting characters and follows his ideas in fruitful social and philosophical directions. Naming is a fitting wrapup, if wrapup it be, and the whole series is worth reading. (The third book is the only one that rates as sub-par, and it’s merely a little dull.)

Harry Connolly, the Wooden Man novels. Despite including these on the list with the Carey novel, I’m not a huge urban-fantasy fan. But Connolly also does hard-boiled fantasy right. The whole series was new-to-me in 2011, with two bona fide new releases: Circle of Enemies and Twenty Palaces: A Prequel. I reviewed the latter earlier this month. How these differ from other urban fantasy novels: Imagine if HP Lovecraft could write dialog and wasn’t a huge honking racist. Best recommendation I can give: Ever been on a cruise ship? Ever used – and paid for – the internet on a cruise ship? I finished the second novel in the series, A Game of Cages, while on a cruise in September, and immediately downloaded the third to my iPad while aboard, and was glad to do so.

Jenna Moran, Invasion and An Unclean Legacy. For too long, Jenna Moran’s talent has been confined within the niche world of tabletop RPGs. Hey, it’s my niche world, so I mean no disrespect. But Jenna’s been honing her prose-storytelling chops for a decade at her macrofiction blog, Hitherby Dragons, and has finally started publishing stories for money. I like these two books a great deal, and I love some of the stuff in the ebook pipeline.

George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons. Honestly, this book was a mess. Book Five in a putative seven-book series that has been in progress forever is not the time to toss a few more plates into the air when you already have too many spinning. And we’ve had enough fake deaths now that readers might expect Eddard Stark to stick his head back on his neck and begin to walk around sometime during The Winds of Winter. But it’s my mess, in that I’m fully invested. And sentence by sentence and even chapter by chapter, it’s still pretty good.

Blogs:

Periscope Depth. Became my favorite politics/culture blog this year. Lately author John Perich has spent a lot of time covering his enjoyable first novel, Too Close to Miss, but this too is relevant to my interests, so I don’t mind.

Alyssa Rosenberg. Became my favorite culture/politics blog this year. The place to go for the Higher Nerdery. (Points off for lack of attention to tabletop RPGs.)

The Iron Samurai. My late-year discovery: weightlifting, Zen, and personal development. You gotta love a blog with a three-part series on what Olympic lifters can learn from Oscar Wilde.