2010: Read

I used to do a top comics bit as well, but I somehow stopped buying comics over a year ago. Still, here are the books I liked the most this year. It's very difficult for me to compile the books list because, for the most part, I love most everything I read. I read everything from popular books (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO was kinds of awesome, UNDER THE DOME was no), nerd books (I really wanted to put NEUROMANCER here but I bumped it for NEVER LET ME GO), and plain old literary books (THE GRAVEYARD BOOK and POINT OMEGA were astounding!). So, here it is. Honest: I think after watching the film, NEVER LET ME GO earned a rather unfair advantage, and YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? is here not just because of its content but also because of Ms. Breslin's spate of writing over at her various blog posts and her THE WAR PROJECT and THEY SHOOT PORNSTARS, DON'T THEY? Anyway:

COMING & CRYING, edited by Meaghan O'Donnell and Melissa Gira - When these ladies do a second edition of this book, I encourage you to purchase it. Keep an eye here.


SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR by Bryan Lee O'Malley - Can a comic book series be more perfect that SCOTT PILGRIM...? (well. actually, Y THE LAST MAN was pretty perfect too!) Not going to lie, by the time the book ended, I was teary! O'Malley does in a few pages what others at all comics companies can't do in thousands of decades-worth of pages: give us the most romantic, exciting, hilarious, heartbreaking, and relevant (to a certain generation) story. Steeped in musical and pop culture, SCOTT PILGRIM's characters meander through their lives in the same way you did in your early twenties, but in SCOTT PILGRIM'S FINEST HOUR, the titular hero learns a few things about himself, what he needs to do in order to not just rescue the woman he loves from her ex but also from herself. And along the way, basically, Scott Pilgrim discovers how flawed a man he is, he steps up his game, not only for his love, but for himself. By the end he isn't perfect, no. But him and his girl, have a chance to continue growing, together.

YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? by Susannah Breslin - I first discovered writer Susannah Breslin through a post Warren Ellis made years ago, when she ran her THE REVERSE COWGIRL blog, and I've been a fan since. This year I sound this small collection of her short fiction and it cemented why I became a fan of hers: her language. YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? is the various ways in which men are, well, bad. Whether it is the mand who ushers a midget into porn superstardom, the man who really just hates everyone and everything (the title story), the man who wonders about eating a woman, or the man prone to fornophilia. Breslin's words cut right to it, no time for niceties, and it is evident not just in her journalism nor blog writing, it's more than clear here. And that's what draws me the most to her writing, to her bits of fiction in YOU'RE A BAD MAN, AREN'T YOU? she doesn't fuck around, plain and simple. Reminds me of my initial reads of Chuck Palahniuk. And, all through this, because of her stories, I don't get the idea that Breslin doesn't like men, quite the opposite: I think she loves them, but is not naive to the social failures most of us are. If you're a man, or know a man, read this book and it'll show you maybe ought to know less men.

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro - Ishiguro writes about becoming an adult with pretty sharp ear for the things adults do not tell children. Everything is ambiguous or flat-out false. Adults leave out a lot of the terrible things we all have to live through, the honestly brutal bits. NEVER LET ME GO, for me, explores these ideas but expands upon them by giving us Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth to view the world through. A sci-fi story that does more than linger on what possible future may lie ahead of us. Thematically dense, Ishiguro reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's most recent novel THE ROAD: where McCarthy dealt with a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, Ishiguro shows us archetypes of boys and girls, and eventually men and women, who're raised mainly via their pop-culture (which could seem prescient always), which, at first may seem a bit of a reach, but if you remember finding things out your father, your teachers, your first girlfriend, your mother said were true but really were not, these stories will speak to you. NEVER LET ME GO seems to go far deeper than McCarthy, however, by exploring what the meaning of the soul is, and how it may be proven or not, along with showing the sheer naivetee with which we tend to approach the honest world, even when it's staring us dead in the heart. I want to point out plot bits but feel I would be ruining how much the story builds upon itself. Mark Romanek's film was also great.

GENERATION A by Douglas Coupland.