2012 in books: yeah, yeah, 2013 is almost a month old; deal with it.

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For various and sundry reasons (one of which happens to be a still-ongoing series of trials and tribulations with my spouse's and my vehicles, plus [PERSONAL CRAP], still more [PERSONAL CRAP], a bout of some non-specific gastrointestinal complaint, and a comedy of errors of an audit at work that dragged on two weeks longer than it should have), I've not been able to slap up my annual "books read" post until now. This failing has doubtlessly irritated me more than any of my putative readers, but let it pass: this blog is principally for my benefit.

• BEST WORK OF FICTION READ IN 2012: As might be expected, I'm having a little trouble selecting only one title for this honor. I suppose it would be George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings (1999; and yes, it was really that good)....although four of the five novellas collected in Robert Silverberg's Sailing to Byzantium (2000) omnibus are also strong contenders (particularly the titular novella and "The Secret Sharer" -- oh, hell, and "We Are For the Dark" too), and can easily stand as literary fiction, full stop, no qualifiers. Then again, I suppose I am biased. (OTOH, I've always thought that "literary fiction" was the biggest genre ghetto of all, albeit one with an outsize footprint due to the amount of snobs writing about it in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Times of London, The Paris Review, etc., etc.)


• BEST WORK OF NON-FICTION READ IN 2012: For all of my qualms with it, that would be Frances Yates' overview-to-date of her work, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979). For anyone interested in learning how certain Renaissance mystics and philosophers adapted the Kabbalah to "prove" the "truth" of Christianity, jump-start the scientific method, or how this and other philosophic strains such as Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism influenced and were reflected in the work of such people as Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney and John Milton (or even anyone interested in a little more detail behind some of the characters and thoughts presented in Alan Moore's comic book series Promethea and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), this book is a fair place to start.


• MOST ENJOYABLE WORK OF GENRE FICTION READ IN 2012: Hmm, tough one. Let's call it a three-way tie between Stephen King's The Dark Half (1989); Robert Silverberg's Sailing to Byzantium; and George R.R. Martin's A Clash of Kings, the second book in the Song of Ice and Fire cycle (five books and counting), and leave it at that. I'll also give an honorable mention to Poul Anderson's Satan's World. I may not have read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy in 2012, but what I did read tended to be of higher than usual quality.



• BEST BOOK READ IN 2012 THAT I DIDN'T POST A REVIEW OF: Either Fred Stenson's novel of the Hudson's Bay Company in the 19th century, The Trade (a runner-up for the 2000 Giller Prize, renamed in 2005 the Scotiabank Giller Prize), or the first book in David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999). While I also quite liked the second book in the Red Riding Quartet, Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000), set during Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee, I didn't like it as well as I did the first book, partly because the narrative focus was divided between two main characters who were both deeply disturbed, as opposed to only a single such character in Nineteen Seventy-Four. Still, fans of James Ellroy's neo-noir books, especially his L.A. Quartet novels, should find much to like about Peace's examination of Leeds in the 1970s and early 1980s, which parallels Ellroy's look at Los Angeles of the 1940s and 1950s.



• BOOKS WHOSE MINDSET I WAS MOST HAPPY TO ESCAPE in 2012: The first two books in David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, Nineteen Seventy-Four (1999) and Nineteen Seventy-Seven (2000). While I applaud Peace's bravura writing and skill at inserting the reader into the psyches of some very troubled characters, for me, at least, the disorientation and tenuous grasp on reality that this fostered, especially in Nineteen Seventy-Seven, became too exhausting, disturbing and dispiriting for me to say that I actually enjoyed reading them without numerous caveats. I do plan to read the other two books in the quartet (Nineteen Eighty [2001] and Nineteen Eighty-Three [2002]), but, as with the first two books, I will not be reading them back-to-back.



• BOOK READ IN 2012 WHOSE PREFACE WAS BETTER THAN ITS ACTUAL TEXT: That would be Stephen King's sort-of zombie novel Cell (2006), which has an agreeably shudder-inducing premise (some unknown parties created a signal broadcast through worldwide cellular phone networks that effectively wipes the brains of the people who are on their cell phones when the signal is broadcast and writes a new set of operating instructions that causes them to be at first murderously or suicidally violent and then to function as a flock organism with limited individual intelligence but with greater, even paranormal, capabilities the larger the group that they congregate in) that is never quite handled with the finesse that one could hope for (by, say, a John Wyndham); a better treatment of a kissing cousin of Cell's premise (even if it has a much happier ending than Cell does) can be found in issue #3 of Warren Ellis' 12-issue limited comic book series Global Frequency.



• MOST UNDERWHELMING LITERARY CLASSIC READ IN 2012: Without a doubt, Evelyn Waugh's Catholic conversion narrative Brideshead Revisited (1945). Hopefully any novels by him that I read in the future will have more of his celebrated snark and bile and less of Brideshead's unbelievable "come-to-Jesus" uplift. (I am looking forward to reading his World War II-set Sword of Honour trilogy.)



• LEAST EDIFYING SOCIAL SCREED IN FICTIONAL FORM READ IN 2012: They don't get much more embittered and reactionary (well, this side of The Turner Diaries, at any rate....) than James Barlow's The Burden of Proof (1968), the basis of the 1971 movie Villain, which almost sank Richard Burton's career as a movie actor. This was the last novel that Barlow published before he emigrated from England to Tasmania; he died less than five years after settling in his new home.



• BEST BOOK READ IN 2012 THAT SUFFERED FROM THE OVERALL EXCELLENCE OF THE AUTHOR'S WORK: What can I say? Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin Series is so damned good, an installment has to be stupendously great for it to rise above the high standard that O'Brian set. The seventh book (of 20 complete books; the 21st book, unfinished at the time of the author's death, was published as 21 in the U.S., and as The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey in the UK), The Surgeon's Mate (1980), while quite good, didn't do that, which is one of the reasons why I nearly forgot that I read it (aside from the fact that I read it last January). The Surgeon's Mate didn't have the pleasures of the new of the first book, Master and Commander (1970); the wonderful capers and by-play of the titular heroes of the second book, Post Captain (1972); the gripping plot twist involving the physician, surgeon, naturalist, Catalan patriot and spy, Stephen Maturin, of the third book, HMS Surprise (1973); the interest of seeing Captain "Lucky" Jack Aubrey work with a contingent of Royal Marines to capture a French fortification on an island in the Indian Ocean in the fourth book, The Mauritius Command (1977); the knuckle-whitening tension of the chase near the bottom of the world and the hard-won escape from being marooned on the titular island in the fifth book, Desolation Island (1978); or Aubrey and Maturin's escape from captivity in a Boston madhouse and the pitched naval battle between the Americans and British in the sixth book, The Fortune of War (1979) -- ah, hell: just say that the whole series is fan-freakin'-tastic, that each event, incident, interior monologue and dialogue all wonderfully mesh together to create the best -- the most amusing, engaging, poignant, suspenseful and informative -- three-or-four-thousand-paged novel you've ever read, and let it go at that. One need not be a fan of the "heart of oak" genre to fall in love with the Aubrey-Maturin Series; in fact, I daresay that readers looking exclusively for nautical action set in the Napoleonic Wars are going to be disappointed, given that O'Brian was at least as concerned with writing a comedy of manners and an examination of the revolutions of ideas and morals in the early 19th century (indeed, he has acknowledged Jane Austen as a major literary influence) as he was in writing gripping naval (and sometimes land) battle scenes. You don't have to refer to the numerous annotation sites, web rings, or mapping projects (or to the various print companion books, which at this point include a cookbook) to enjoy the Aubrey-Maturin Series -- but they do help.



• BEST BOOK READ IN 2012 BY A SWEDISH AUTHOR WHO ISN'T STIEG LARSSON: The second book in the ten-volume Martin Beck series Story of a Crime, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö's The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966; English translation 1969). The first book, Roseanna (1965; English translation 1967) wasn't bad either, but I was less impressed with the first Wallander book, Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell (1991; English translation 1997). No, I still haven't started Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Sorry, Mom.



• WORST BOOK READ IN 2012: Hands down, Michael Ankerich's Dangerous Curves Atop Hollywood Heels: The Lives, Careers, and Misfortunes of 14 Hard-Luck Girls of the Silent Screen (2011), an amateurishly-written, amateurishly-edited tome whose defects outweighed the welter of information on some relatively obscure silent movie actresses. This could be used as a textbook for budding writers (and editors) on how a published book should not look. A vexing, joyless, and enervating slog.



• BOOK STARTED IN 2012 AND CARRIED OVER INTO 2013 THAT I STILL HAVEN'T FINISHED READING: Mainly because the copy that I started reading soon began falling apart, Vardis Fisher's novelization of the so-called "Pemmican War" between the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company prior to their forced merger, Pemmican (1956). It's already got enough racism, misogyny, and gore to send most advocates of "political correctness" fleeing into the night, and I'm not quite halfway through it yet. Then again, I've also taken a time-out to read, via inter-library loan, Joseph M. Flora's Vardis Fisher, #76 in the Twayne's United States Authors Series, or TUSAS (NY: Twayne Publishers, Incorporated; 1965; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 65-12996; 158 pps.; Sylvia E. Bowman, Editor, Indiana University), and pick my way through some of the essays collected in Rediscovering Vardis Fisher: Centennial Essays, ed. by Joseph M. Flora (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press; 2000; ISBN: 0-89301-223-8; 262 pps.), to try to contextualize Pemmican better. I'm thinking of starting Fisher's whopping 12-book didactic fiction series Testament of Man in 2013, even though I'm missing three of the books and have pretty crummy copies of a couple of them. We'll see; I'm always full of good intentions as regards my reading list, but my follow-through sometimes leaves a lot to be desired.


• BEST COLLECTED COMIC BOOKS READ IN 2012: Much to my surprise, I have to give the nod to two Warren Ellis-scripted series, Planetary and Global Frequency (with an honorable mention to his run on The Authority, with awesome artwork by Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary). The series most likely to be enjoyed by someone who doesn't normally read comics is Global Frequency, particularly given its relatively short run (12 issues or two thin trade paperback collections) and the lack of backstory, continuity, or other niggling, pedantic and boring details that fanboys and nerds the world over love to parse and obsess over. That said, if you happened to have read Marvel Comics to any great extent over the last thirty or forty years, the one-shot Fall of the Hulks: M.O.D.O.K. #1, collected in Incredible Hulks: Fall of the Hulks, is almost guaranteed to tickle your funnybone. Hillbilly Egghead ("Shu-ZAHM!" ) for Governor of Michigan! Hey, he can't be any worse than John Engler....



• COMIC BOOK COLLECTION READ IN 2012 LEAST LIKELY TO APPEAL TO THE NON-COMIC BOOK NERD: Tough call: there's the multi-issue Spider-Man crossover storyline from 1993, the waaaay over-hyped and bafflingly celebrated Maximum Carnage; there's the first two volumes of the DC Archives series reprinting the only somewhat more understandably celebrated New Teen Titans from the early 1980s, written by Marv Wolfman and penciled and inked by George Pérez and Romeo Tanghal, respectively (think of the New Teen Titans as DC's equivalent of Marvel Comics' X-Men, only without the bewildering plethora of ongoing titles, one-shots, mini-series and limited series); there are the multiple reboots of Wonder Woman by the likes of Jodi Piccoult (no, really) and Gail Simone, the least edifying (and most recent, as well as most recently read by me) of which was the one written by J. Michael Straczynski and Phil Hester; there's the ultra-violent, frequently near-explicitly sexual superhero satire The Boys by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson; but the one that I actually bothered to review in detail was Essential Marvel Horror, Vol. 1, which reprinted (most of) the early adventures, from the early 1970s to early 1980s, of two of Marvel Comics' third-string characters and horror-based anti-heroes, the Son of Satan (a.k.a. Daimon Hellstrom, although sometimes he was called "Hellstorm" in recent years) and his younger sister, Satana (now working on her third -- or is it her fourth? -- life). Seriously, even I have some difficulty in explaining my fascination for unevenly executed, poorly thought-out time wasters like these; guess it must be love, or at least an addiction. Or could it be that I empathize with such characters because my own life is so unevenly executed and poorly thought-out..?