2013 in books: welcome to the wonderful world of e-reading.

[uvula_fr_b4]

In 2013 I added another platform to the tried-and-true (and, if truth be told, still preferred by me), 650-year-old printed and bound book platform: the missus sold me her Kindle Fire 7" last February, after she'd bought a Kindle Fire HD. I had a brief scare with it in April, when it mysteriously quit working, but the missus was able to dope-slap it back to life.

Since my previous favorite bookstore chain, Borders, bit the dust in September 2011, my acquisition of a Kindle has gradually meant that my new favorite (and I say that guardedly...) "bookstore" is Amazon.com; the other thing that has been driving my eyeballs and wallet (or, to be more precise, electronic access to my bank account) towards Amazon's door is the missus's growing impatience, disgust, and, some days, fury, at my book hoarding library: never much of a reader to begin with, she sees no need in keeping books around after they've been read once (EXCEPTION: those books that she wants to keep around for a possible re-read, such as certain works by Catherine Ryan Hyde, Diane Chamberlain, Jennifer Weiner, Jodi Picoult, Lisa See, or Lilian Jackson Braun); however, now that I have a Kindle, she doesn't have to be troubled by the sight of what is to her merely unsightly, ungodly clutter, or at the thought of the time and effort it will take to pack and move a bunch of what is to her utterly unnecessary dead weight when next we change residences.

In addition to purchasing books for my Kindle (and downloading a few free books that Amazon offered; usually not ones in the public domain, oddly enough), I've been working the crap out of Project Gutenberg's main (U.S.) site to download works that I'm interested in reading that have lapsed into the public domain (including some pulp sci-fi and fantasy from the 1920s - 1950s) under U.S. copyright law. (Project Gutenberg's Australia site has even more works available, owing to Oz's less generous copyright laws; however, I seem to be unable to actually download any of the titles on its site, most likely due to my having an American IP address: if I wish to read something on PG-Oz's site that isn't on their main site, I'll be obliged to read it in HTML, directly on their site, which will mean that my bookmarks may be lost, and I won't be able to highlight or annotate it, at least if I read it on the Kindle.) While I've flirted with reading a Project Gutenberg text on my PC or laptop various times over the years -- in particular, I've made two or three false starts of Edwin Arnold's Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation -- acquiring a Kindle actually spurred me to read a few of their books (as well as a couple of short stories). I've previously blogged about my trial-and-error explorations of exactly how I was finally able to read a Project Gutenberg text on my Kindle, so I won't reiterate them here; suffice to say, neither Amazon nor Project Gutenberg make it blindingly obvious how, or if, this may be done.

I've also borrowed some books from the library for my Kindle, only one of which I didn't finish; as the rental period for e-books in my library network is a mere two weeks (as opposed to the three week period accorded to physical books, with the option to renew the rental up to three times, provided that no other library user has placed a hold on it), I've been obliged to drop any other book I was actively reading at the time in order to get through my e-(book) loan. This has directly resulted in my stalling out in a physical book (along with my growing ambivalence about it), but I've resumed picking my way through it as of 31 December 2013.

Alright, enough preamble; on to the rundown.

• BEST BOOK READ IN 2013 THAT I'VE YET TO POST A REVIEW OF*: Anyone who's read these recaps of mine won't be surprised that this is a toss-up: either Gregor von Rezzori's Memoirs of an Anti-Semite: A Novel in Five Stories (partly translated by Joachim Neugroschel; otherwise translated or originally composed in English by the author) or (yes; deal) George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords, the third book in his ongoing (five books thus far; supposedly it will run to seven books) epic fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire, currently partly adapted as a popular (especially among pirates...) HBO television series, Game of Thrones.
  
  The former is a beguiling, satiric, semi-autobiographical novel (or collection of five novellas; this book defies easy categorization) of a cosmopolitan and callow upper-crust snob in the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire between the world wars (and, in the last story/novella/chapter, after the second one), which ultimately shows, via inference, how the Nazis rose to power and how the Holocaust occurred: through the political indifference and casual prejudice of the majority of Central and Eastern Europe's citizenry (it's a mark of Rezzori's skill -- and his translator's -- that he's able to make such an unlikable, callow, snobbish cad so interesting); the latter is yet another door-stopper-sized installment in a wildly popular re-imagining of our world's medieval history and mythology, as well as our ongoing psychology, political and personal, that is easily overlooked by readers caught up in the inexorable whirligig of Martin's plots within plots. A Song of Ice and Fire promises to be a series that will reward those who reread it with deeper layers of meaning and musings on the human condition (for one thing, it's all too easy to conclude that Martin's main theme is "God hates us all!", given how it doesn't seem to matter what a character does, morally speaking: everyone is equally liable to sudden death, maiming, disfigurement, defilement, and debasement, no matter how good, bad, or indifferent their actions); it also promises to be as rich a fodder for the cosplayers, gamers, and fan-fic writers as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
  
  *EDITED TO ADD: I've since posted a review of A Storm of Swords; you can read it here.
  
  
• HONORABLE MENTION: That would be Guy Gavriel Kay's pseudo-historical fantasy (a better term might be "semi-historical magic realism") Under Heaven; I was directed to it by Bill Sheehan's glowing review of the novel's sequel, River of Stars, in the 1 April 2013 Washington Post. Under Heaven is essentially a tale of the An Lushan Rebellion on an alternate Earth's version of Tang China (called Kitai, a variation of Catay or Cathay, a name for China from the Khitan, the language of a Mongol people who established the state of Kara Khitai; not to be confused with the Hyborian Age's China analogue Khitai, in the shared universe stories of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian), as refracted primarily through the POV of a second son of a renowned Khitan general, who is simultaneously honored and cursed by a gift of 250 Sardian horses for his work in burying both Khitan and Taguran (read: Indian) dead, in order to lay the dead soldiers' ghosts to rest.
  
  Despite what you might think from this synopsis, Under Heaven's fantastic elements are even more spare than those in George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, which is why I semi-facetiously proposed a variation of the "magic realism" tag for it. Kay's prose was supple and elegant until a slight drop-off in quality in the final fifty-odd pages; I will very likely read River of Stars, which is set 400 years after the events in Under Heaven. This was an e-book that I read on my Kindle. Oh, and Under Heaven is also BEST BOOK BY A CANADIAN AUTHOR READ IN 2013.
  
  
• OH YEAH: I read another installment in Patrick O'Brian's 20.5-book (he died before completing the 21st book) Aubrey- Maturin series (a historical fiction series set during and just after the Napoleonic Wars, they are as much, if not more, comedies of manners as they are mere historical or nautical fiction; the fact that O'Brian cited Jane Austen as one of his favorite authors should hearten prospective readers who don't live, breathe and eat Napoleonic military history), The Ionian Mission (this is the 8th book in the series); while still exemplary, it wasn't as enjoyable as most of the other books I've read, probably because the physician-cum-spy (and Irish and Catalan nationalist; never let it be said that Maturin is too timid to support a losing cause) Stephen Maturin wasn't featured as heavily as in the previous books. I really need to step up my reading in this series, though; at only one book a year (and, for several years, no books a year....), I'll be getting a "senior coffee" at McDonald's by the time I finish. Two Aubrey-Maturin books a year shouldn't be an imposition, since they're so good.
  
  
• WORST BOOK READ IN 2013: Ooh, tough call: either Hanns Heinz Ewers's Alraune (with what one hopes is a particularly infelicitous translation by Joe E. Bandel), or Peter Stephan Jungk's The Perfect American (rendered into English by the award-winning translator Michael Hofmann ). Alraune is an unhorrifying horror story / Decadent satire about a supernaturally-begotten femme fatale in Wilhelmine Germany's Rhineland that has been adapted into at least three movies; The Perfect American is a satiric look at the final year in the life of "Uncle" Walt Disney that has been adapted into an opera by Philip Glass. Only readers scrupulously interested in these books' authors, genres (in the case of Alraune) or subject matter (in the case of The Perfect American) -- or the figuratively self-flagellant -- need bother.
  
  
• DISHONORABLE MENTION: The first book in the sidebar trilogy featuring Olivia Atta Clemens -- former paramour and long-time friend of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain -- A Flame in Byzantium was dull, dull, dull, and easily the worst thing that I've read by this author since another book only marginally related to her long-running Saint-Germain series, Out of the House of Life. Olivia, a vampire turned during the reign of Nero, comes to Constantinople during the early part of Justinian I's reign, and finds it not at all to her liking. Dreary, uninteresting complications ensue; even the (ahistorical?) burning of the Library of Alexandria, roughly halfway through the book, couldn't rouse this reader's interest for more than a dozen pages.
  
  
• BEST NEW-TO-ME AUTHOR READ IN 2013: That would be Guy Gavriel Kay; the only trouble I'm anticipating with reading more of his books is deciding what one to read (Tigana? The Lions of al-Rassan? The Last Light of the Sun? The Sarantine Mosaic duology, consisting of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors?) after I read River of Stars. He's also the BEST 'WHAT TOOK ME SO LONG TO READ THIS GUY?!' OF 2013.
  
  
• BEST SELF-PUBLISHED BOOK READ IN 2013: The perpetual e-book freebie (a more accurate term is "loss-leader") The Emperor's Edge by Lindsay Buroker was a pleasant surprise: a fun book that didn't require me to shut off too many of my brain cells or feel guilty for enjoying it. Unfortunately, it's the first book in a seven-book (so far...) series, of the same title. There was a noticeable drop in quality in the second book, Dark Currents; it read more like an RPG (role-playing game) adventure than a fully fleshed-out novel. The series is a mash-up of heroic fantasy and steampunk (more of the former than of the latter, it must be said), with generous helpings of humor; the main character is a female guardsman (read: police officer) named Amaranthe: she has a tendency to overthink things, but is otherwise competent, fit, and capable, and she has a crush on a taciturn, dour, and intimidating assassin named Sicarius (whose name is taken from the Roman term for "assassin"; it literally means "dagger-man").
  
  To make comparisons to the writing styles of various writers of superhero comics of my experience, The Emperor's Edge was reminiscent of David Michelinie's first run on Iron Man (Vol. 1, #116 - #157), while the second book, Dark Currents, was reminiscent of Mike W. Barr's writing on Batman and The Outsiders, or perhaps of mid- to poor-quality Len Wein (or, conversely, mid- to high-quality Marv Wolfman). And as long as I'm comparing the style of the first two books to that of certain writers of superhero comics, let me note that the character of Amaranthe reminded me a fair bit of Janet Van Dyne, The Wasp, as written by Roger Stern during his run on The Avengers (Vol. 1, #227 - #279; #281 - #285), with the difference that Amaranthe was less worldly (because she was less experienced) than Janet was.
  
  I picked up the first three books in an electronic omnibus edition (The Emperor's Edge Collection; I haven't read the third book, Deadly Games, yet). I also picked up a free prequel short story featuring Sicarius, called "Shadows Over Innocence", which I enjoyed more than Dark Currents, but perhaps not quite as much as The Emperor's Edge. OTOH, Buroker posted a very interesting blog entry on 1 January reflecting on her three years as a self-published author and two years as a self-supporting, self-published author; while I was a bit taken aback by her candid admission of how she allocates her time spent writing based on sales figures (this is a simplified summary), I was also struck at how she's essentially an Anthony Trollope for the digital age: Trollope scandalized his contemporaries with his unapologetic accounts of what he was paid for each of his works, and how he tried to devise stories that would give him the greatest income possible. If an author is able to think this way and still produce interesting work, more power to him (or her); OTOH, it seems to me that this approach can also lead to a glut of, say, self-published zombie or paranormal romance novels, at least based on the evidence of Amazon's Kindle Daily Deals section.
  
  
• WORST SELF-PUBLISHED BOOK READ IN 2013: Sorry, Joe E. Bandel: I applaud your goals with translating a public domain work of Hanns Heinz Ewers, Alraune, in an effort to increase Ewers's profile among young(-ish) readers of English; but the results, as distributed through Lulu, left a lot to be desired.
  
  
• BEST GENRE BOOK READ IN 2013: If I can't just say George R.R.Martin's A Storm of Swords again, I'd have to say the unabridged version of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. Far more than just another sci-fi allegory of the Vietnam War (see also: Ursula K. Le Guin's The Word For World is Forest), The Forever War is a great, satiric thought-piece on the corporatization of war -- war as the main item in numerous companies' mission statements and as an irreplaceable part of Earth's economic program -- that has become even more relevant now than it was in its original, expurgated form in the 1970s. What with the still-ongoing, if rebranded, "war on terror," The Forever War could've easily been written during the administration of "Bush 43." Add in the future shock elements as human society on Earth undergoes changes over the millennium that the United Nations Expeditionary Forces are using "collapsars" (black holes) to jump light years away from Earth to fight the extraterrestrial Taurans -- to the point that the answer to the question "What is human?" becomes very, very different than what it was when the war started -- and you've got a nice, solid science fiction novel that works on more than one level.
  
  
• HONORABLE MENTION: Guess I'd pick a western: Matt Braun's Bloody Hand, to be precise. It's highly reminiscent of a blaxploitation movie, given that the titular character is a mulatto fur trapper for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company who infiltrates a band of Crow under orders from one of the company's founders, and finds a better place among the Crow than he ever did among whites, blacks, or the idiosyncratic trappers. Bloody Hand is a cut above a "mere" adventure tale, but there's action and thrills a'plenty for all of that.
  
  
• WORST GENRE BOOK READ IN 2013: Tie: either Hanns Heinz Ewers's Alraune (translated by Joe E. Bandel) or Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's A Flame in Byzantium.
  
  
• BEST PROJECT GUTENBERG BOOK READ IN 2013: Despite the stodginess of the English translation (translator unknown; although this edition does contain a foreword by Charlotte Mary Yonge, arguably most famous for the 1853 romantic YA novel The Heir of Redclyffe, which was more popular in its day than the works of Dickens or Thackeray), Friedrich Heinrich Karl Freiherr de La Motte-Fouqué's Undine (German publication: 1811; Undine's Wikipedia page says that an unabridged English translation by William Leonard Courtney, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, was published in 1909), was a bit of all right, as the Brits say. Essentially a Christianized fairy tale of the doomed love of a Rhinemaiden (read: Teutonic siren; Melusine) for a knight, Undine's tragic love story managed to retain a surprising amount of poignancy despite telegraphing its denouement, taking its own sweet time getting there, and slinging about Christian moralizing like the proverbial sailor on shore leave flinging cash around. I first came across a reference to Undine while reading Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (which was itself referenced in Ian Fleming's From Russia, With Love). It was much in favor among European readers in the 19th century, and apparently Little Jo in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women swooned over it.
  
  
• WORST PROJECT GUTENBERG TEXT READ IN 2013: This would be a short story: John William Polidori's much-vaunted "The Vampyre" -- vaunted because it's credited with being the first vampire story (as opposed to poem) written in the English language (written in 1816; published in 1819; erroneously credited to Lord Byron, who served as the model for the titular character). To quote my post on it: "I first seriously intended to read "The Vampyre" when I read Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, and was amused by Edmond Dantès being mistaken for Polidori's Lord Ruthven, although in the book Byron is credited as Ruthven's creator. (IIRC, "Ruthven" is pronounced "riven," giving Polidori's character an added -- bite.)
  
  "The name Lord Ruthven was first given to the avatar of Byron in the fictionalization of an ill-starred affair with a married aristocratic lady that he'd had, 1816's Glenarvon by Lady Caroline Lamb (the aristocratic lady in question). It sounds as though she drank and doped (the latter via laudanum) herself into an early grave at the age of 42; she died four years after Byron did."
  
  
• MOST UNDERWHELMING PROJECT GUTENBERG TEXT READ IN 2013: While I loved F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (it was also one of William S. Burroughs's top ten favorite novels, believe it or nuts...), and have affection for This Side of Paradise, I have to say that the short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- which was adapted into a movie in 2008 that I've yet to see -- was pretty blah. (The story is in Fitzgerald's 1922 collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, which also contains "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," which was parodied by Will Self in his short story "The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz," collected in Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys.) The only thing that kept me from considering it a total waste of time was the fact that it's likely at least the partial inspiration for a one-off villain created by Gerry Conway for Marvel Team-Up Vol. 1, #31, Drom the Backwards Man, to fight Spider-Man and Iron Fist. Comic book nerds; what can you say?
  
  
• MOST AMBIVALENT PROJECT GUTENBERG BOOK READ IN 2013: I followed through on a longstanding intention to read "Rain" (the novella originally titled "Miss Sadie Thompson") by W. Somerset Maugham, then said "WTF?" and read the entire omnibus it was collected in (though not, obviously, in the order in which the stories, fragments and novellas / novelettes were collected in), 1921's The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands. "Rain" was the basis of four movies (three officially -- one starring Gloria Swanson, one starring Joan Crawford, and one starring Rita Hayworth -- and one unofficially); to be more precise, the 1923 play based on "Rain," by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, was the basis of these movies. What nudged me into finally reading "Rain" was my purchase of Alan Brennert's (a very occasional scripter for Marvel Comics who did more work for DC Comics; he's even more celebrated for his work as a screenwriter and producer for television, particularly L.A. Law) historical novel Honolulu (an offshoot of his earlier novel Moloka'i), and reading, in his author's note, of the conflicting accounts of the person whom Maugham based Sadie Thompson on; Brennert wrote that he included what he hoped was a more accurate depiction of this person than Maugham's in Honolulu.
  
  While "Rain" was enjoyable enough (despite Sadie Thompson's hair described as being tied in "a sluttish knot"; how can a knot be "sluttish"?), "Mackintosh" is arguably better than "Rain"; the ending was more profound and poignant, at any rate. "Honolulu" might be the second or third best story in the collection (it's also replete with racism, native magic, and the coveting of another man's woman, with a twist in the tale at the end; it also contains some head-scratching examples of Maugham's queer turns of phrase: "..violent deeds diapered the monotony of life"; uh, is there an editor in the house..?). "The Pool" was notable for its sexism, racism, and Nietzschean advice for the lovelorn in Samoa, with a soupçon of Undine; the mixture didn't quite gell. "Red" is essentially a drawn-out reworking of Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", only clumsier and less effective (Maugham writes in "Red": "'The tragedy of love is not death or separation....The tragedy of love is indifference.'"); as is Maugham's wont, there's a twist at the end that a reasonably awake reader can spot coming quite early in the story. "The Fall of Edward Barnard" was terrible: so very amateurish, tin-eared and under-baked, and as genuine as a three dollar bill. Of the sketches or fragments that open and close The Trembling of a Leaf -- "The Pacific" and "Envoi" -- "Envoi" is more effective; these sketches are only a page in length, if that.
  
  While I'm not sorry that I read The Trembling of a Leaf, and I still intend to read more Maugham, I'm not in any tearing hurry to do so. The Maugham works that I'm most likely to read next are: Ashenden: Or the British Agent (two of the stories collected in it -- "The Traitor" and "The Hairless Mexican" -- were the basis of the 1936 Alfred Hitchcock movie, Secret Agent; Hitchcock's adaptation of the eponymous 1907 Joseph Conrad novel was another 1936 movie called Sabotage); The Magician (whose villain, Oliver Haddo, was based on self-described "Great Beast" Aleister Crowley; it was adapted for film in 1926, with Paul Wegener -- co-director and star of 1920's The Golem: How He Came Into the World -- playing Haddo); and Cakes and Ale; or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, a satire of the literary world of England in the early 20th century, featuring a character based on Thomas Hardy (Ashenden, who was Maugham's avatar, is the narrator; the character serves the same function in several of Maugham's books).
  
  
• MOST ENTERTAINING AUTHOR REDISCOVERED IN 2013: Michigan's second most preeminent crime (and western!) writer, Loren D. Estleman; I read the first five books of his Amos Walker (a Detroit-based PI) series (the first book, Motor City Blue, was a re-read) as library loans on my Kindle; despite some quibbles, they were more entertaining than your average episode of Castle or any of the Law & Order franchise.
  
  
• BEST NON-FICTION BOOK READ IN 2013: One of the two non-fiction books that I actually finished in 2013 was Alexander William Kinglake's Eothen: or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (first published in 1844, but this this was the 1898 George Newnes edition, with endnotes by Newnes and an appendix taken from Elliot Warburton's The Crescent and the Cross [1844; 267 pps.], regarding Warburton's visit to the tomb of the adventurer, socialite, and proto-archaeologist Lady Hester Stanhope, whom Kinglake actually spoke to in her last years; she was apparently regarded as something as a queen -- although one wonders just how much of this was the guileless accounts of her contemporaries -- by a Bedouin tribe), which concerns a trip that he made through Syria, Palestine and Egypt (then territories of the Ottoman Empire) ten years prior. Eothen was a pleasant, interesting read, if you've any interest in the types of tours that people (read: male Englishmen) in the upper half of the social strata in the 19th century went on; it's as much of a (light) humor book as it is a travel narrative. (Kinglake also tossed off some relatively mild anti-Irish slurs in an episode of him and his companions haggling over the price of a saddle in Chapter II ["Turkish Traveling"]; anti-Irish humor was quite popular in English books of the 19th century. I should also register that the comic dialogue at the end of the first chapter is pretty strained; even Anthony Trollope was better able to pull off humor than Kinglake.) This was another Project Gutenberg book. I first encountered a reference to Eothen (which means "from the East" or "from the early dawn") in the first volume of Capt. Sir Richard Francis Burton's Wanderings in West Africa (never did read Vol. II); IIRC, Burton referred to it with approval, and without too much condescension (which constitutes truly rafter-shaking praise from RFB).
  
  Oh, the other non-fiction book that I read in 2013 (well, finished in 2013, given that I started it on Wed., 26 Dec. 2012)? Joseph M. Flora's lit-crit / mini-biography, 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; Flora was an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at the time), which I finished on Thur., 10 Jan. 2013; it was published before Fisher's 1967 novel Mountain Man, a partial basis for the 1972 movie Jeremiah Johnson (not a bad movie, BTW). I also read most of a subsequent collection that Flora edited called Rediscovering Vardis Fisher: Centennial Essays (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press; 2000; 254 pps.; ISBN: 0893012238); the most interesting essays were Mick McAllister's "Father to the Man: An Apology for Fisher's Indians," John D.W. Guice's "Fisher and Meriwether Lewis," and Marilyn Trent Grunkemeyer's "An Anthropological View of the Testament of Man" (although the photographic / biographical essay on Fisher and his wives was pretty interesting as well).
  
  Yes, I got all lit-crit on Vardis Fisher in an attempt to better understand his portrayal of Indians and fur trappers in his sensationalist novel Pemmican; no, I still haven't finished it yet.
  
  
• BOOK(s) BEGUN IN 2013 THAT I'M ACTIVELY READING IN 2014: While the review of Robert Hughes's last-published work, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History, that appeared in the 22 December 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books had me champing at the bit to read it, I wasn't quite as smitten with it as the reviewer, Ingrid D. Rowland, was. Rome is basically a patchwork of essays more or less stitched together into a putatively unified book: quite engaging in spots, but I'm not exactly convinced, thus far, that Hughes was able to craft a truly unified text out of the idea that a publisher ("Lord Weidenfeld, the formidable publisher of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London," to quote Hughes's acknowledgments [p. ix]) handed him. While I'm more or less enjoying it, I'm frustrated with the gaps in the index (which seems to be the norm, I'm afraid; yes, I'm one of those nerds who highlights, annotates and updates the indexes of the books he reads), and I'm increasingly annoyed w/ Hughes's propensity to quote passages without attribution.
  
  That said, he's an engaging enough of a guide, though Rome isn't a patch on his masterpiece, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding. At minimum, there is some interesting trivia to be had in Rome. (Another bit: "Bramante's inspiration for [Saint Peter's] was essentially Roman, not Florentine. That is to say, it was modeled on the gigantic bath complexes of ancient Rome..." [p. 218] Given the 20th century's gay bathhouse culture, this casts an interesting light on "Mother Church.")
  
  However, I've caught Hughes (or, more likely, his editors) in a major error: he reports, in Chapter 3 ("Later Empire"), in a discussion of the emperor Caligula's impact on the city of Rome, that "Jugurtha, once king of of Numidia, died of starvation in 104 C.E.," when Jugurtha in fact expired in 104 B.C.; on the same page, Hughes writes: "..the Gallic warrior Vercingetorix, Caesar's chief enemy in Gaul, was beheaded in 46 C.E." (p. 99 for both), when of course Vercingetorix lived and died before the Christian Era (or "C.E."; also styled "Common Era" and "Current Era"). As always, when I discover an error of this magnitude, I'm left to uneasily wonder how many other errors are lurking in the text, unnoticed by me. (Aside from these caveats, I should also mention that any prospective readers who will be offended by Hughes's occasional swipes at the Catholic Church may want to seriously consider giving this rather disorganized book a pass.)
  
  I also hope to finish Matthew Rossi's collection of speculative non-fiction essays, Bottled Demon (the titular essay scared the bejeesus outta me...), since I liked his first collection, Things That Never Were: Fantasies, Lunacies and Entertaining Lies, so much. Rossi self-published Bottled Demon and its sequel, At Last, Atlantis, which I've also purchased. Unfortunately, my Kindle had a hiccup that resulted in all of my highlighting and annotations up to that point (23% read) vanishing into the ether; I'm now at 38% read, but I haven't yet tried to re-do the highlighting and annotation that I previously did on the first quarter of the book.
  
  Rossi used to post these essays on LiveJournal as ezrael (and on a no longer extant blog, "Once I Noticed I Was on Fire, I Decided to Relax and Enjoy the Fall"; be advised that the link to his then-current blog, "ezrael.org," is no longer active, but he is active on Twitter), but he's wisely decided to start charging (a pittance for the self-published electronic books: $2.99 each) for the privilege of reading them.
  
  
• LIBRARY E-BOOK ABANDONED IN 2013: A work by the world-renowned author Anonymous (but actually, according to the book's Wikipedia entry, "a London lawyer of the time named Stanislas de Rhodes"), The Autobiography of a Flea (originally published in 1887, but reissued in several editions over the years; a glance at the first chapters of the versions available at Horntip and Wikisource show that they begin rather differently); it was originally published by the pornographer Edward Avery (ironically -- especially given the role of a Catholic priest in The Autobiography of a Flea -- there is a contemporary, defrocked Catholic priest in Philadelphia of the same name who plead guilty to "involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and conspiracy to endanger the welfare of a child" in March 2012), who was finally done by the Bill in 1900 and driven out of business, owing to his stock being destroyed. My Kindle told me that I was a little over 40% of the way through before my rental expired and the book was ganked from my Kindle. I was mildly curious to read some Victorian erotica -- not sure precisely what the dividing line between "erotica" and "pornography" is, but The Autobiography of a Flea qualifies, in my mind, more as the latter rather than the former -- but, based on this example, I probably won't fall over myself in a mad dash to read more.
  
  
• DO YOU FEEL GUILTY ABOUT IT?: Naah. The plot was non-existent, the dialogue flat, and the character development nil; it just didn't turn my crank.
  
  
• BEST KINDLE SINGLE READ IN 2013: One of Electric Literature's offerings -- Maggie Shipstead's "Angel Lust" (yes, the titular phenomenon was referenced in the HBO series Six Feet Under; why no one's called it "corpse boner" yet is beyond me...) was decent enough to have me thinking about possibly reading her first novel, Seating Arrangements, even if the ending was a bit...off. To quote the description of "Angel Lust" on Amazon: "Simon Orff, a thrice-married movie producer, departs for his deceased father’s house, daughters selfishly in tow," to sift through his father's belongings; he of course ends up musing on his own and his father's life. Three guesses who manifests the "angel lust."
  
  
• HONORABLE MENTION(s): I have to admit that the father-son collaboration between Stephen King and Joe Hill on "Throttle" (an homage to Richard Matheson's classic short story "Duel," which Steven Spielberg adapted for his first movie; the story was originally collected in an anthology paying homage to Richard Matheson published in 2009, titled He Is Legend, and published as a Kindle Single in 2012), was pretty nifty in a big action movie way; however, "Duel" was more unsettling because the violence had no explanation, no back-story, no purpose (as I'm sure that King and Hill would be the first to agree), unlike the violence in "Throttle." And while they weren't officially labeled "Kindle Singles," Christa Faust's short stories "Cutman" and "Footjob" provided tense, gritty, perverse (more in the case of the latter than the former) neo-noir thrills in fifteen pages or less; if anything, I think I liked them better than Money Shot, Choke Hold, or, yes, even Butch Fatale, Dyke Dick -- Double D Double Cross (love that title....).
  
  
• MOST UNDERWHELMING KINDLE SINGLE READ IN 2013: Probably James Wolcott's historical essay "Wild in the Seats", which was another look at the premiere of the Stravinsky and Nijinsky ballet The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du printemps) in May 1913, which sparked a near-riot among the audience; as I enjoy Wolcott's cultural criticism and personal essays, and since I devoured and relished Modris Eksteins's Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age over twenty years ago, I was looking forward to his take on it. "Wild in the Seats" wasn't exactly bad; it just felt unnecessary and mediocre, and really only made me want to unearth my copy of Rites of Spring from storage and re-read it.
  
  The Kindle Single that I read that was authored solely by Joe Hill, "Thumbprint", was pretty meh; it made me suspect that the parts that I really liked about "Throttle" were written by Stephen King. Oh, well.
  
  
• BEST COMIC BOOKS and/or GRAPHIC NOVELS READ IN 2013: Oh, the 32-issue run, in DC's Vertigo imprint, of The Losers -- story by Andy Diggle, art mostly by Jock -- was pretty great, if you're into covert paramilitary caper thrillers with strong political overtones. (I've no intention of seeing the 2010 movie loosely based on the first arc of the limited series.) The Dynamite mini-series Battlefields: Dear Billy -- story by Garth Ennis, art by Peter Snejbjerg -- about an English nurse who survives being raped and machine gunned by Japanese troops after the fall of Singapore to go on to serve in a British military hospital in Calcutta and have an affair with a dashing bomber pilot named (what else?) Billy is a powerful, poignant look at how war can prompt or strengthen prejudice and genocidal urges. (The previous mini-series, Battlefields: The Night Witches, about female Russian fighter pilots in World War II, was also pretty good, but I read that one in 2012.) Last December, I started reading the 60-issue Vertigo crime series Scalped, written by Jason Aaron (currently one of Marvel's "architects") and drawn (mostly) by R.M. Guéra, which is about crime and curdled Indian rights activism on a fictional South Dakota Lakota reservation, Prairie Rose; in addition to being far and away the best neo-noir crime series I've read since Brian Azzarello's and Eduardo Risso's 100 Bullets, also from DC's Vertigo, Scalped is an intense, at times mordantly funny, at times infuriating look at the (hard) life and (hard) times of the average American Indian. It might well make you rethink that weekend getaway at the Indian casino resort that lies a two- or three-hour drive away.
  

Aaaaand that's a wrap, people. Let's do this again next year.