rushthatspeaks | Strange Horizons End of Year Summary

I probably should have mentioned by now that I have a paragraph in the Strange Horizons 2011-in-review post. In that paragraph, I restricted myself to 2011 as a calendar year, but even if I'd been including my entire year of daily reviews Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes would have come out as the best. As for the rest of it, I probably ought to write more about Locke and Key at some point, as it is at the moment the only originally-English-language comic I follow. And film-wise, I can't recommend Sergei Parajanov's The Color of Pomegranates highly enough, especially if you don't need your brain this week.

I've been meaning to do a 365-Books-In-Summary post, too.

Top Ten Books I Read For This (except for the de Waal, these are in no particular order; links are to my reviews):

1) Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes. I wish I could write about this brilliant book in the way it deserves.

2) Stella Benson, Living Alone. This is my vote for Book That Needs Rediscovery By The F/SF Community Stat. If you like Naomi Mitchison, Sylvia Townsend Warner, or Georgette Heyer, this is for you, and it's up on Project Gutenberg.

3) M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart. My favorite work by a writer who has become one of my great sources of the sheer joy of reading. I really need to write that essay on Why M. John Harrison Is Comfort Reading No I Actually Mean It.

4) Tove Jansson, The Summer Book. I have been reading this to my wife intermittently and somehow it is even better read aloud.

5) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough.

6) Pingali Suranna, The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India. NINJA GOOSE.

7) Naomi Mitchison, The Delicate Fire. This is one of those books that grows on you-- I knew it was good at the time, but months later I discover it has taken up an amazing amount of space in my head, and that's a good thing.

8) Derek Jarman, Modern Nature. The most painful book of probably my last several years. Worth it.

9) Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down.

10) Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita.

And two works I am so unable to be objective about, both because they hit very, very deep things in my brain and because the authors are dear friends, that I cannot possibly say anything about their quality but only hope that other people love them as much as I do: Jo Walton, Among Others, and Gemma Files, the Hexslinger series (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns).

I'll do a worst of the year post later on, probably with a list of the reviews I enjoyed writing most, as being enjoyable to write about is orthogonal to a book's quality.