Sunday, January 20, 2013

Books of 2012 (the Final Edition)

Hello,

As it is well past the end of the year 2012, it is the end of the year with my first real new year's resolution: to read a book a week. If you follow this blog with any regularity (and by that I mean you've gone back and read through old posts because I'm pretty sure nobody knew this existed before I actually posted the first list), you know that I completed that feat back in September . Upon completing that goal so very early in the year, I decided to keep going instead of quitting, so I forged ahead.

With about 3 weeks left in the year and 69 books read, I decided I'd go for broke and attempt to reach 75. Well, friends, I reached that number on new year's eve with several hours to spare! I was pretty excited to actually be able to accomplish that feat.

Before giving the final list, I wanted to go through and give a few “awards” from the list of books I read this year. I haven’t really thought this through, so I’m just going to wing it and come up with some “awards” as I think them up.

Best Book
The first award I can think of is the obvious "book of the year". This one is pretty tough for two reasons.

  • 75 is a lot of books to keep track of.
  • Many of the books that I read were in a series, and I read them back-to-back (to-back-to-back-to-back, etc.). This makes it difficult for me to differentiate between specific books in a series, especially those I read early on in the year.
However, I think I may just be able to come up with something. Judges, please tally the votes. And the winner for the best book Phillip read in the year 2012 goes to:
  1. Cold Days by Jim butcher!
Cold Days continues where Harry left off in the exciting conclusion to Ghost Story . Some pretty awesome stuff happens to Harry that will have exciting consequences in future books. We're just over half way in the series at 13, and I am definitely looking forward to where Mr. Butcher takes Harry in the remaining books. If you haven't read any of the Dresden files, I highly recommend them, especially if you like stories about sarcastic wizards living in a modern day setting. I belive it is urban fantasy at its finest.
Honorable mentions:
  1. Paper Towns by John Green
  2. Redshirts by John Scalzi

Best New Author
The second obvious choice for an award is best author. However, since the list contains the author I regularly use as the answer to the question "Who is your favorite author" (Neil Gaiman, if you don't know me very well), I'm going to go a different route: Best NEW author, i.e., the best author by whom, until this year, I had not read anything, which actually is most everyone on the list; it only excludes Butcher, Gaiman, and Paolini. And the winner is:

  1. John Green!
This really was a pretty tough decision. I found a few really good authors this past year, but the fact that I read every book Mr. Green has written to date, and the fact that each of the books are stand alone stories (not part of a series), pushes him above the others about whom I was thinking. You may have heard of Mr. Green from his role in one half of the internet video duo The VlogBrothers or more recently the Youtube internet learning sensation that is Crash Course . Mr. Green is a young adult writer, true, but his stories are excellent. Don't believe me? Just ask Time Magazine . Maybe you've heard of it. That's best fiction book. Not young adult fiction. Not children's fiction. Best Fiction. There are other places too. The Kansas City Star , Amazon.com , Oprah Magazine , etc. You get the point (that at least that one book is good; however, since that is not my favorite book by him, you'll just have to take my word for it).
Honorable mentions:
  1. Veronica Roth
  2. Brent Weeks
  3. John Scalzi
  4. Kevin Hearne

Best New Series
The next award I'm going to be giving out is the best series; however, like the award for best author, I'm going to restrict it to series I began in 2012. Otherwise, it'd be hard not to choose The Dresden Files . Also, I had to have read at least two books in the series in order to determine if the series is going to be good rather than just the first book in the series. So, the award for best series of books Phillip read in 2012 goes to:

  1. Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks
I picked up the Night Angel Trilogy randomly from Amazon because a roomate was playing Assassin's Creed , and a story about an assissin seemed to be dripping with potential for awesome. The Night Angel Trilogy follows a man called Azoth as he ventures from a young boy in the slums to become the Night Angel, the perfect assassin. As the best epic fantasy [*] I read in 2012, it was very enjoyable, and I highly reommend it to anyone who likes epic fantasies.
Honorable mentions:
  1. Iron Druid Chronicles by Kevin Hearne
  2. Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth
  3. The Hallows by Kim Harrison

Most Looking Forward to the Movie
Number four! We're really moving right along here, huh. For number four, I'm going to do something that may or may not really make sense. Movies! Some of the books I read in 2012 are going to be turned into movies: some already have release dates, some have only had the rights sold for a movie and are more up in the air. Some I knew were going to be a movie before I read them, some I found out after I fninished reading the book. So, the fourth award is for the book I'm most looking forward to see the movie or think it would be a great movie and should be turned into one. And the award goes to:

  1. The Host by Stephanie Meyer
I know, Stephanie Meyer?! What am I thinking? Truth is, I really liked this book. The premise is that sometime in the future (there may be a date given, but I don't remember it if there is) an alien race has come to Earth and completely taken control. They do so by physically taking control of human bodies: attach themselves to the spinal column and hook into the brain, and the only way to know if someone has been "possessed" (for the lack of a better word) is to look at their eyes: the aliens leave a silver ring around the eyes of those they have possessed. And of course there is a resistance of humans. Warning: it is still a Stephanie Meyer novel, so there is a lot of romance involved. If that's not your thing, or you think you can't get over it, do as the Hunter would say and skip it! However, I'm looking forward to the movie, and I really hope they don't screw with it too much.
Honorable mentions:
  1. Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth
  2. Caster Chronicles (Beautiful Creatures) by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
  3. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Character I'd Most Like to Meet/Hang out With
This supurlative (when did I change it from "awards" to supurlatives? Oh well) is difficult to determine. I mean, there are a lot of really cool characters in 75 different books. And just as many different reasons to meet or spend time with a person. There are just too many variables. However, with all that said, there is a character that stuck out to me as one who would be absolutely swell to spend time with:

  1. Oberon O'Sullivan from The Iron Druid Chronicles .
Okay, so I made up that last name to make it sound more plausible. Oberon is an Irish Wolfhound belonging to Atticus O'Sullivan. The cool thing about Oberon, though, is he can communicate telepathically with Atticus and a few select others. So, I'd have to be able to hear Oberon's thoughts for this to really live up to expectations. Atticus can take care of that, though (if he's there, that is. I guess he'd have to come along. I didn't really specify rules to this little adventure). Anyway, Oberon is incredibly funny and smart. In the books, he's constantly having verbal (mental?) sparring matches of wit with Atticus (and constantly coming out ahead of the 2000 year old druid). He's still a dog, though, so he bargins to get things like time with a French poodle (or two) or a particularly delicious brand of sausage (any type of meat, really). His humor consists mostly of the types of things I like (geeky television shows or movies, puns or other lexical humor, etc.). On top of all that, he's a dog, so I'd get to play with a dog, something I haven't been really able to do since before I graduated from high school.
Honorable Mentions:
  1. A from Every Day by David Levithan
  2. Margo Roth Spiegelman from Paper Towns by John Green

World in which I'd Most Like to Live
Nearly all of the books I read in 2012 were fiction (only one was non-fiction, though several were realistic fiction). With fiction, usually comes a different world, either a completely new world (epic fantasy) or a change to the world in which we live (many different things: urban fantasy, dystopian, sci-fi, etc.). Most of what I read was either urban fantasy or dystopian fiction.So, which world would I most like to live? The answer is:

  1. Scott Westerfeld's world in Uglies .
(Caveat to award: Uglies world before Tally goes and messes everything up.) Uglies is set in the distant future after we (as the human population) killed most of the population when a bioweapon was created that made oil unstable, thus causing cars, along with oil fields, to explode. The really important part, though, is upon turning 16, everyone is turned "pretty" through government funded cosmetic surgery. When you're pretty, lots of cool things happen: you get sent to a special part of town where everything is provided for you (just ask the wall, and you get what you want!), you go through everyday going to party after party, you have no responsibilities or obligations, etc. Then at some point (I don't know the specific age), you go through another round of surgery to get turned into a "middle-pretty", which is less "OMG! She's so hott!" and more "I can really trust what you have to say, sir!". "Middle-pretties" are just adults with jobs and kids.

The world just seems like a pretty awesome world in which to live. Yes, there are problems (it wouldn't be a good story if there weren't), but people living there don't know about them (and I can't really tell you without giving spoilers).
Honorable Mentions:
  1. Kevin Hearne's world in Iron Druid Chronicles .
  2. John Scalzi's world in Redshirts

Best Looking Cover
This one's actually really hard to decide. The old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" doesn't apply to the way I look at books. I will look at a book and decide whether I just straight don't want to read it or if I'll give it a chance to sell me with its synopsis on the back. In other words, I'll determine that I don't want to read a book based on the cover, but I don't believe I've ever decided to read a book soley based on the cover.

With that said, I'm just going to go with the book that I actually did not know anything about when I bought it, so therefore, you could make an argument that I judged the book and bought it because of its cover (maybe...). Let's not be completely crazy here; the book does have a good looking cover too, but I just don't have any idea how to judge which of the 75 books I read has the best looking cover. So, with that, the book that Phillip read in 2012 with the best looking cover is:

  1. Divergent by Veronica Roth
I mean, it has a fireball on the cover! That's cool, right? That's plenty enough reason right there for it to have the best looking cover of the books I read in 2012. Then you add the other stuff and BOOM! great stuff happens. There's a gold circle around the fireball that is also on fire! And the city skyline in the background (Chicago, if you can't just recognize it) on the bottom of the book. You know how I like Chicago (maybe you know that. I do. Believe me).
Honorable mentions:
  1. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David Levithan
  2. Beautiful Redemption by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl

Finally, without further ado, here's the list:

The list is sorted alphabetically by the author's last name, so it’s not in the order I read them. Also, the links are to the form in which I read them, i.e., if I read the paperback edition, I put a link to the paperback, if I read the hardback, I put a link to the hardback, if I read it on my Kindle, I put a link to the Kindle edition, etc., though sometimes the hardback is not available on Amazon, and I don't understand why. I don't get anything from you purchasing books from these links; I used Amazon because that's where I bought most of them. Feel free to purchase from anywhere else if you so desire.

[Insert catchy sign off here]

[*] I'm defining "epic fantasy" here as a novel that creates an entirely new world (different from the world in which we live).There are similarities and differences to our world, but the majority of the world must be created by the author: countries, cities, system of governemnt, money, etc. Epic fantasies usually involve magic, but I'm not sure if my definition requires magic.

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Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Book Tree Fini

Hello,

I realized I didn’t ever put up a picture of the Book Christmas Tree with lights on it like I said I would. So, before I take it down, I’ll provide what I promised.

Tree with Christmas lights without lights on in the room. Tree with Christmas lights with lights on in the room.


There that is! Let me know what you think in the down stairs window (aka, the comment box).

[Insert catchy sign off here]

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