books

2009: My year in media

These are the books I read in 2009 — just shy of my hoped-for 50-book minimum. Reading the twelve books of Gene Wolfe’s so-called Solar Cycle slowed me down a little. Beyond the Wolfe (which I think I’m going to have to read again at some point), some of my favorite reads this year were Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert’s Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?, Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon, Audrey Niffenegger The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Scott Westerfeld’s Midnighter trilogy. I don’t know what, if anything, that says about my reading habits and preferences. There were a couple of small disappointments in the list, but I don’t think I read a single bad book this year.

These are the movies I saw this year. Some of the highlights, in the order I saw them, were:

Honorable mentions include Doubt, Speed Racer (yes, really), Away We Go, The Man From Earth, and George Romero’s zombie ouevre, which I finally got around to watching all of this year. (I think it’s a toss-up between Dawn and Day of the Dead as my favorite.)

Surrogates and Lady in the Water were easily the worst movies I saw this year. (Excluding The Room, but I had Rifftrax to get me through that painful experience.) And at least Surrogates is tied up in fond memories of the Vegas Capfest.

I listened to a whole lot of music in 2009. You can see the evidence of that in my monthly mix CDs. That’s 223 songs altogether. Is it any wonder I had trouble putting together a “best of the year” mix?

I’m not even going to talk about the television I watched in 2009. Well, not yet anyway.

The masks we wear

From Love Sick: A Smoldering Look at Love, Lust, and Marriage, text by Michael J. Nelson:

As we go through life, at work and in relationships, with both friends, strangers, and loved ones, we all wear masks. Some of us wear plastic dime-store Sandy Duncan masks, while others prefer the less expensive Burt Reynolds model. The downside to wearing them is that people don’t get to see our true selves, plus they’re itchy, and cut down on peripheral vision.

Tuesday various

The science fiction of cancer itself

I’m currently reading Lorrie Moore’s stunning short story collection, Birds of America. This morning on the train, I read “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” which I’d actually read once before, I think in my freshman fiction writing workshop. It can be a tough story to get through because of its subject matter, pediatric cancer, but it’s a masterful work. (It won the O. Henry Award for Moore in 1998.) Here’s a small bit:

Sifting through the videocassettes, the Mother wonders what science fiction could begin to compete with the science fiction of cancer itself — a tumor with its differentiated muscle and bone cells, a clump of wild nothing and its mad, ambitious desire to be something: something inside you, instead of you, another organism, but with a monster’s architecture, a demon’s sabotage and chaos. Think of leukemia, a tumor diabolically taking liquid form, better to swim about incognito in the blood. George Lucas, direct that!

Thursday various