Ahhh, I love year-end reviews.

2014 was an excellent year for reading. I try to keep my average rating around 3 stars, but this year a bunch of books pushed me periodically into 4-star and 5-star territories. Here are some of the bests.

Best graphic novel: Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli

While Saga, Lumberjanes and Will Eisner continued to be go-to graphic novel series for me, the really break-out, knock-out, transcendentally-sublime comix for this year was Asterios Polyp.

Briefly, the story follows a Christopher Plummer-lookalike architect named Asterios Polyp who smokes cigarettes, looks very 1960s mod dashing, and meditates on the nature of aesthetics and life. This comix held a very special place for me, since I used to gobble up philosophy of aesthetics, and so many of the concepts (the sublime, Apollonian vs. Dionysian art, death of the author) were like old friends. This comix handles those concepts with deft, intelligence and humor. Really blew my mind and made me happy.

Best fem(inism) book: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Ahhhh. They're coming for us. THEY'RE COMING FOR US!

So I was supposed to read this in high school and I never did. I'm glad I read it now, as I'm a bit more - ahem - conscious? Anyway, this is a brilliant, BRILLIANT speculative fiction/feminist book. The basic premise is: patriarchal dystopia. But, like Orwell, most of its aspects are true in some corner of the world. Indeed, since reading this, it's hard not to see Handmaid's Tale stuff all over the news.

Best title: TEOFTW (The End of the Fucking World), by Charles Forsman

Honestly, kind of a bummer.

Basic premise: Sociopath teen killers on the run.


Other best title/Best sci-fi discovery #1: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, by Jack Womack

This title makes me smile every time I see it. And I'm so happy to have discovered this book, about a little 1990s tween princess (hollaaa) who gets slowly corrupted by a Frank Miller-esque, pre-Giuliani dystopian NYC. Brilliant, brilliant. And I Twitteracted with Jack Womack this year - eeeeeeee.

Best sci-fi discovery #2: Floating Worlds, by Cecilia Holland

Discovering dusty, forgotten sci-fi classics is the shit. This was one such classic. Finding it made me feel like a million bucks. I had never, ever heard of this, or Cecilia Holland (who I guess writes more historical fiction?), but this book - wow. Jeez. The voice, the vision, the everything! If you like Ursula Le Guin or Kim Stanley Robinson, you will loooaaff this.

Best poetry: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, by Patricia Lockwood

Finding a poetry book that I like is hard because, as I think a lot of people feel, I have this insecurity that I Don't Get Poetry. Of course, once I found poetry that was just fun to read (like Christopher Logue, or John Milton), I could at least enjoy it and stop Trying To Interpret/Analyze.

This book is incredibly fun to read. The imagery is koan-like: it shocks you into higher states of awareness. She makes links you wouldn't even think of. The most obvious and general being the link between patriotism/naturalism and sexuality/sensuousness. It's sort of fun, weird, vulgar, eye-opening and completely original. I loved it.

Best pulp: Blood Music, by Greg Bear

Ahahaha, WHAT IS HAPPENING. If you love the films of David Cronenberg (as you should) or appreciate the special harmony of horror-comedy in Slither, then you will love this book. A basically ridiculous, bio-horror book about a crazy biologist creating wetware gray goo (accidentally, of course) that eats up the world. Wonderful! Totally stupid at times, very sexist, plot lines just meander away, never to return, but, oh my God, it's fun.

Best biz/econ book: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone

American consumerism 2.0! Oh God. The shape of things to come, people. Jeff Bezos is an interesting dude, sure, but what's more interesting (scary!) is what Amazon means for the future of our society. No joke!


And now... drumroll...

Worst book of 2014: (TIE) The Big Time, by Fritz Lieber, and The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe

Oh man. What's annoying is that books like Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds get lost in the mists of time, but this nonsensical, self-important pap and its legacy just go on and on and on.

In both cases, the author seems to think he's the bees' knees, so smart. In both cases, I found the ultimate story insipid and the way it was told eyeball-gouging awful. For Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe seems to think that using archaic, esoteric vocabulary is - I dunno - impressive? Instead of some sort of proto-hipster, exclusionary elitism. For The Big Time, Lieber's half-baked sci-fi idea gets all dressed up in awful sexist tropes. How is this book still even in print!?

BEST BOOK OF 2014: (TIE) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, and Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, by Finn Brunton

Both of these books were soooo deeply pleasurable to read. So smart, so informed and informative, and so fun. And so different! Jonathan Strange is a 1,000-page fantasy about English magic in the Georgian period. It's, to me, a way more impressive fantasy world than Tolkien or Herbert, since Clarke manages to marry it completely to the realities of 19th century England.

Finn Brunton's Spam is likewise incredibly rich and well-researched: it's a non-fiction account of the past, present and future of spam. It also, like Clarke's book, filled me with delight - but of a very different sort. While Jonathan Strange was a costume drama with magic and wit, Spam was basically A Story of My Life, as I've lived much of my life online and know its cultures and tribes well. Learning about the inner workings of spam opened my eyes to, again, how late capitalism/consumerism influences our culture (now digitally!). Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.