20081016.YearOfBooks
Since Paul and Wendy didn't like my desert-island author question, Paul suggests something more realistic: What do you plan to read over the next twelve months? Okay, easy enough, I guess. Here's a rough sketch of the texts I plan to consume over the next four seasons, ranked into four categories, the first being the one's I will pretty much absolutely read and the last being books that I will read unless other additions to the list along the way push these out.
Snuff (Chuck Palahniuk)
Baudolino (Umberto Eco)
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami) REREAD
The Love of a Good Woman (Alice Munroe)
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (Umberto Eco)
The Last Cavalier (Alexandre Dumas)
The Children of Húrin (J.R.R. Tolkien)
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami)
Wild Sheep Chase (Haruki Murakami)
The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
Nine Stories (J.D. Salinger)
Silverfish (Dave Lapham)
The Absolute Sandman, v. 1 (Neil Gaiman) REREAD
The Absolute Sandman, v. 2 (Neil Gaiman) REREAD
The Absolute Sandman, v. 3 (Neil Gaiman)
The Absolute Sandman, v. 4 (Neil Gaiman)
Fables, v. 11 (Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham)
Mary Jane Loves Spider-Man, v. 2 (Sean McKeever, Takeshi Miyazawa)
The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) REREAD
The Elephant Vanishes (Haruki Murakami)
After Dark (Haruki Murakami)
Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
An Artist of the Floating World (Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Cheese Monkeys (Chip Kidd)
No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy)
Patriot Acts (Greg Rucka)
Heart, You Bully, You Punk (Leah Hager Cohen)
The Man Within (Graham Greene)
King of Odessa: A Novel of Isaac Babel (Robert A Rosenstone)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) REREAD
Thunderstruck (Erik Larson)
Lady Chatterley's Lover (D.H. Lawrence)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Five Festal Garments (Barry G. Webb)
Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories - A Love and Rockets Collection (Jaime Hernandez)
Emma, v. 2-7 (Kaoru Mori)
Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) REREAD
The Shack (William P. Young)
Twilight (Stephanie Meyer)
Great Neck (Jay Cantor)
Leepike Ridge (N. D. Wilson)
Oscar Wilde Discovers America (Louis Edwards)
Cyndere's Midnight (Jeffrey Overstreet)
Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen)
Oh yeah, and there's whatever six books get included into our bi-monthly bookclub.
As you can see, I lean heavily toward fiction. I think there are two non-fiction books in that pile and one fiction that's written as if non-fiction and one piece of historical fiction based around events recorded in journals and newspapers et cetera. I'm obviously favouring a couple authors (primarily Murakami, Ishiguro, and Gaiman - my rereads are almost wholly from two members of this group).
Some of the books from the last group are ones I don't have much particular interest in, but sort of feel a duty toward. Neither Twilight nor The Shack interest me, but they're so very popular that I may just check them out (plus The Shack sounds like the kind of thing that someone from the book club may pick anyway). Water for Elephants has an interesting cover, but that's about all I know. Leepike Ridge is one I'll have to give an honest shot to. I had read the first chapter and put it down under the shame of reading something that was overwrought and just trying too hard (not unlike the recently Auralia's Colors)—one of the things about my personality that makes like a little tricky to negotiate is that I become unbearably uncomfortable when I see someone embarrassing themselves. For this reason, I don't usually watch Ben Stiller movies (Meet the Parents was torturous) and have a hard time with Michael's scenes from The Office when he's interacting with anyone outside the office. And, it turns out, I get a sick-ish feeling in my stomach's pit when I read someone and it's clear they're trying super hard and not making it but maybe they don't realize it and they're just so earnest and, yeah. Basically, watch Swingers and you'll know what I'm talking about.
Labels: lists, literature
I really need to do a full review of this sometime. Settlers of Catan is an awesomely fun game and pretty much perfectly paced (those with xBox 360s should check it out on that platform), but the Cities and Knights expansion set turns an awesome game into an incredible game. There is so much to do and so many strategies to do it with. Most of our games end up pretty close and so we never quite know who's in the lead. My one piece of advice: endeavor to complete your turn quickly, as those who make lingering moves can drag the game out for quite longer than needed (the game should finish in one-and-a-half to two hours, but there are certain friends of ours who can stretch a game to nearbout four hours... ugh). My other one piece of advice is that if you have the five to six player expansions to the game as well, play even your three to four player games on the larger map. It gives everyone more room for growth and contributes to what may be a funner gaming atmosphere. My last only piece of advice is that you start with regular Settlers of Catan before graduating to Hot City Knights.
Players each act as the governor of colonial Puerto Rico, competing to see who would make the best governor. Managing the arrival of new colonists, the growth of new plantations and maintenance of old ones, the building of essential building, the trading of crops for money to build with, and the shipping of crops back to the Old World, Puerto Rico is a thinking game that keeps everyone active throughout the whole game. Even more so than Settlers, this one keeps the leader shrouded in ambiguity even up 'til the very last move. Great stuff!
As you may have gathered from above, I think pretty highly of Settlers of Catan. It's broadly considered a gateway game - a means of introducing people to the recent European style of gaming, of drawing out those who "don't like games" because they're only familiar with boring, tedious crap like Monopoly and other Chutes and Ladders-style fare. Unlike those games of your youth, Settlers is honestly fun and combines strategy and fortune in a fun, easy-to-learn way. In the game, you play on a island (different every time you play) covered with a variety of resources. Your goal is to settle the island, building settlements and cities, connected by roads. You accomplish this through harvesting the land of its natural resources (and making trades as necessary). It's an awesome game and there are numerous sets with which you can expand the game (Cities and Knights, Seafarers of Catan, etc.), even expanding the game to fit up to six players from its original four (by adding more pieces and enlarging the island). Get it, play it, love it.
I will admit that the placement of Tigris & Euphrates on the list here may be a little premature. I've only played the game once. And it was a test game with The Monk. The game supports 3 to 4 players so we each played as two players to make four - and I'll freely point out that this is not the ideal way to experience a game. That said, it was a lot of fun and you can expect a full review after we get some real play time on the board. It's a pretty high strategy game somewhere between Settlers and chess. Which is fine, 'cause I love Settlers and hate chess. I'd say it feels pretty similar to Puerto Rico so far as the chance/strategy ratio goes.
This one's rad. It's the only game I played as a ten-year-old that is still on my list of Fun Games to Play. One player is Mister X and the others attempt to uncover his secret movements through simple deduction to corner the poor chaps and clap him in irons. While playing, Mister X should probably wear sunglasses and a ballcap to hide his eyes.
Power companies competing for control over the nation's power grid doesn't sound like fun. But... Surprise! It is. Budding capitalist pigs should soundly enjoy themselves. Read 
A fun game. And I don't ever really like cards. But this is so much more than cards. It's like Fistful of Dollars in your fist. You can read 
I'm not very good at all at speed games. I played Pit about a year ago and kinda just stood there with trades in my hand wondering how everyone was going so fast. Even so, Dutch Blitz, as advertised, is a vonderful goot game. It's like playing multiplayer solitaire very quickly (we like to play with eight players for the pure ferocity of it). I tend to place moderately, but if you're a fan of speed games, I haven't played a better one.
As related in my NAQ review, I'm not a big fan of party games, but as far as they go, Wise and Otherwise is far and away my favourite. I think it might be due to its catering to my taste for the absurd. For those familiar with the Balderdash series of games, the mechanic is the same. The difference is that rather than everyone crafting phony definitions for words and guessing which is the real definition, players craft phony proverbs and guess the real one. The player who's turn it is provides the first part of the proverb, such as "There is an old Nepalese proverb: A cooked dog..." and everyone writes down inventive endings to the proverb such as, "is better than eight" or "won't complain of the cold" or "is a happy dog." These are shuffled in with the real one and everybody guesses what is the truth. A fun game and the real proverbs are generally as loony as anything you'd make up yourself.
A tile-laying game of strategy, Carcasonne is pretty easy to pick up. And fun. Though not as fun as the games I mention above, so I probably won't play it much until I get tired of the above games.
I am famously bad at games like chess, checkers, Connect Four, Othello, Stratego, etc. So I don't play them often. The Monk got me a cool laser-based game called Khet last Xmas and promptly beat me five games straight. Within minutes. It's a fun game. You should try it. Go is another game I will occasionally play. I like it for a couple reasons. For one, it makes even people who are good at chess sweat. It's too much for their computation skills. For another, it's pretty elegant. I might not be that good at it, but I still like it!
I find word games to be moderately fun. The inherent problem with most of these games is that they cater to a particular kind of person - a person with a problematic affinity for vocabulary. Simply stated: the dorkiest of the dorks in your group will win every time. Scattergories largely defeats this by allowing the use of words and terms that wouldn't be allowed in typical word games and further complicates the issue for word dorks by basing your entries not so much on letters but on categories. Boggle is fun because the rounds are short and egalitarian. Everyone's working with the same letters and the spatial element of the game may just be enough to adequately handicap a dork in order that someone less dorky might win. Still jocks will always lose, so Boggle could never make a Top 10 list.
I love Trivial Pursuit, but playing the game as intended is rather boring. People land on subjects and only one person gets a chance to answer a question and half the time, when people do get a question right its something aberrational and dumb like "Literature: Was Frodo Baggins the hero of The Chronicles of Narnia?" That's why I vastly prefer to do away with the board and just sit around with a roomful of people and ask whatever looks interesting on a card. That way everyone's involved and there's nothing so distracting as a bored to compel boredom to creep in. And the game ends when people get tired of not knowing what movie Paul Perkins produced for $17,000 in 1923.
The set-up time is two or three times what it is for Settlers (and Settlers isn't brief on set-up time) and explaining the rules to a newcomer would probably take an hour (the instruction booklet is forty-some pages long). And then the game itself, if expedience is not demanded, can last for hours and hours. And hours. And, well, hours. I've played eight hour games in my more youthful days that were only about a third of the way done. That said, it's one of the coolest war strategy games I've ever played. A good can be one of the best games ever. You just need ridiculously patient friends with a lot of time to kill (and as I get old, time is becoming more and more difficult to find).
Jonathan Coulton was born to a pack of roaming gypsies in the arid wastelands of Coulchester, Connecticut back in the '40s. As a young man in his mid-to-ambiguous-twenties, he developed a taste for application programming using VB .NET. Sensibly, he found such tastes to be soul-sucking and through pale, hollowed eyes, he glimpsed a dream. A dream that included occasionally playing soul-crushing (in an inspiring way) music at venues that prohibit my attendance via difficulties with time and space. It should also be noted that as yet, he has no entry on the 
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Bigby is great. Let me get that out of the way from the outset. He's got this deep sense of purpose. He's patient and cunning. He's brave and strong. He's high adventure, secret intrigue, and noir potboiler in a single, perfect package. He's a lover and a fighter. And he doesn't beat around the bush. He's invincible and vulnerable all at once. He's the king of wolves and he believes in marriage. And that is just rad.
Yotsuba is that pure kind of childhood that all of us wish we remembered and none of us ever really had. She's undiluted by the world around her. Pure. She takes the goofiness of this world and, by her other-ness, shows it for what it truly is: goofy.
When Barbara and Karl Kesel were writing Hawk and Dove, they brought to life a Dove who I could immediately respect. Dawn Granger was smart, sharp-witted, and actually had a personality. It would have been too easy for her to be just a girl in a painted-on costume who behaved as an automatic writing for the Lords of Order. But she was too good for that.
What strikes me first about Usagi Miyamoto is that he is humble. Honestly humble. Not that fake sort of humility you get with Superman where he pretends to be weak to fit in. Usagi is one of the better swordsman wandering the countryside of a feudal Japan peopled by anthropomorphic animals; and yet he willingly subverts his skills until needed not because he wants so desperately to fit in, but because his humility is hard earned. Once proud, he learned to respect the value of life. He learned that his talents were not enough to make him the best. He learned that he had ever so much more to learn. He learned that he is no better than those among whom he sojourns. And that is something special.
Hellboy is the kinda guy whom we would describe as a galoot. Or if not "we" then certainly someone from a bygone era of American history would have. He's enormous and has a fitting weight upon his shoulders - the weight of knowing he shall bring the world to an end - and he approaches this with a certain devil-may-care attitude. He reminds me of what the Thing would be if he were less a caricature than he is. Oh, and if he was a demon, of course.
Jack Knight is exactly the kinda guy I can relate to. Relentlessly hip in an entirely trivial way. Dearly attached to cultures that don't exist. And he appreciates a good Hawaiian shirt. Of all my favourites, he was always the most reluctant hero. It was a joy to watch his story unfold over the course of eighty or so chapters.
Poor little Virginia Applejack. She carries about her the scent of doom, of a life that's fated for catastrophe. Still, she's scrappy and she's tough and she's too big for her britches and really, in the end, she'll kick your butt. It may take a while for her to get around to it but sooner or later, she'll take a swing at your head with a baseball bat. Unless she's protecting you, that is. Respect.
Bartleby, in a classic struggle between nature vs. nurture, overcomes his carnivorous tendencies to become the Bone cousins' most stalwart ally. Really, besides being a foil for Smiley Bone (and cute as a button), he just wants to help. And he probably wouldn't ever touch a quiche.
The blind lawyer/vigilante may be Marvel's greatest creation. Spider-Man's is a good character and fun to read and identify with, but Daredevil is just plain intriguing. He believes deeply in the American judicial process and the Rule of Law; but simultaneously, he circumvents the law daily in his vigilante activities, and in so doing, admits that the Rule of Law is flawed. Plus he's blind. Like justice. Get it? Really, it kind of depends on who's writing him, but in the hands of Bendis or Nocenti, he is an awesome read.
I know it's cheating but the Osaka from the comic and the Osaka from the tv adaptation of the comic blend into one for me and I hear the English voice actress for Osaka every time I read her lines in the books (like how I now hear Johnny Depp every time I read something by Hunter S. Thompson). And that = rad. It's funny too, because I read the books before I ever saw the show. I think the show just jived so well with what was in my head that it immediately became Right. In any case, I think I have a thing for seemingly dumb-but-funny characters, who then turn out to be not so dumb but only different (I also adore Roger from BPRD and Smiley Bone from Bone). In any case, Osaka is the reason to read/watch Azumanga Daioh.
Liz carries just the right mix of melancholy and humour to be truly horrified by herself but still find genuinely rich friendship in the company of Hellboy and Abe Sapien. She's somber and morose and with good reason. But there's still something in there that wants to escape the horror and the moping. And it's that spark in her that I love.
I'm so stoked beyond belief that someone would name their daughter Knives that it hardly even matters what her character is. Fortunately, she's nice and sweet and I just feel bad for her and want to root for her. I'm conflicted because I'm mad at Scott for dumping a girl named Knives, but I understand why he did it. *shrug* Poor little Knives Chau.
Really, it's pretty hard not to like Spider-Man. He's one of the best characters ever created. He's iconic without really having much of an icon. It's really hard to get around his origin theme: With great power comes great responsibility. When I got to the end of Jack Knight's story, I couldn't help comparing him to Spider-Man and asking, How will he sleep, knowing that he had the power to help and gave it up? Spider-Man's power is both oppressive and fun for him. It's the bane and boon of his existence. He should be in therapy, but he's too busy saving your life.
Sam Smith is exactly who I'd want to be if they made a comic of my life. He's unassuming and average. Yet, when things crank up and the world around him falls apart, he's right there, poking life and fate in the eye with a sharp stick. He gots moxie, this guy. And he gots it in spades.
Really, the only reason anything in Bone turns out alright in the end is because of this guy. When Gran'ma Ben and Thorn are acting like ninnies, playing the melodramatic card, this little guy plods forth with a resolve unmatched. He's kinda like Sam Smith in that way. Both Thorn and her grandmother, Rose, have powers and abilities - and the still mess things up. Fone Bone's got none of that, but what he does have is determination founded in love. This guy is the real deal.
