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It was a slow reading year for me. I guess getting married and moving left little time for getting involved in a book. Anyway, here's the books (including complete story graphic novels) I read this year, compiled for my own need of keeping track of these things, and listed in order of best to least-best.

1. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Probably on my list of all time favorite books. A lost at sea adventure about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger. It explores a number of themes like the nature of survival, religion and storytelling.
The kind of book you can't put down.

2. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
I actually put this book down early on but I'm glad I went back to it. Once I got the hang of the characters and the way scenes would quickly segue to the next, I understood why this is a classic. It's an unusual mix of silly humor with gut wrenching tragedy. There's a few scenes that still haunt me.

3. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
Told from the point of view of a boy with autism, and believably written by an author who has worked with autistic children. It starts as the mystery of a murdered dog but is about much more.

4. Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenides
A beautifully written story of a hermaphrodite and his/her family history. It's a very human story that deals with immigration, incest, and weird sexual self-discovery. There were a few instances where some of the plot elements fit together too unconvincingly, but otherwise an amazing book.

5. Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem
A strange mixture of realistic, memoir-style detail with comic-book-superhero diversions. A lot of people may not find this mixture to actually work, and at times I was one of them. The descriptions of growing up white in an all black neighborhood in Brooklyn was much more effective than the exploits the two main characters have with a magic ring given to them by a homeless super hero.

6. McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 13
A comic anthology edited by Chris Ware and containing brilliant little stories by just about every working genius in the medium. Can't really go wrong here, even though of course in every anthology not every story is going to appeal to everyone.

7. April, 1865 - Jay Winik
An interesting examination of the end of the Civil War. Informative not just to novices like me, but for Civil War buffs Winik gives a new take on some of these events.

8. Down and Dirty Pictures - Peter Biskind
Not as fun as Biskind's previous book Easy Riders Raging Bulls but more fun that you'd think considering it focuses on the business guys rather than the creative guys in the movie business. Of course most of the book deals with Harvey Weinstein so you can imagine how many good stories there must be here.

9. Blankets - Craig Thompson
Though probably not deserving of all the high praise it's gotten from the comic book industry, this is definitely a beautifully told story about young love. Some of Thompson's single drawings here tell enough of a story on their own. It's maybe too slight for such a hefty 600 page volume, but we need more people doing comics like this.

10. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown
Horribly written but the ideas explored here will make you go back and look twice at some DaVinci paintings as well as rethink everything you thought you knew about Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail. Not a great book, but worth most of the hype for the ideas that it presents.

11. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - Dave Eggers
Somewhat rambling but heartfelt and interesting, especially when Eggers experiments with form and pokes fun at the nature of memoirs. The preface and notes in the beginning are brilliant.

12. Comics & Sequential Art - Will Eisner
An informative study on the theory of telling stories with comics. Eisner is a master and has a lot of unique ways of looking at this stuff.

13. Louis Riel - Chester Brown
Beautifully drawn, Herg?©-inspired biography of a Canadian legend who I, of course, know nothing about. The staging of each scene is so well planned out and executed but in such simple drawings. So much is told in some panels even without dialogue.

14. Safe Area Gorazde - Joe Sacco
The war in Bosnia is a complicated one to understand. Sacco's comic-journalism explores the conflict from the inside, relaying personal stories from people he met while there. Maybe because the multi-layered conflict is so hard to follow I didn't enjoy this as much as Sacco's Palestine book but you have to admire what he does.

15. Best American Magazine Writing of 2004
I didn't read all the entries in this anthology but there are some great articles. Especially Semour Hersh's in-depth and damaging explanation of the botched run-up to the Iraq war, Mark Bowden's examination of the art of interrogation, and Tucker Carlson's humorous travels with Al Sharpton and co. in Liberia.

16. Dude Where's My Country? - Michael Moore
A nice prologue to Farenheit 9/11, dealing with a lot of the same post-9/11 issues. When he strays from the Bush-railing it isn't as interesting. Although he does give a good case for Oprah running for president in one chapter.

17. The Filth - Grant Morrison and Chris Weston
I can't say that I really understand this story about government conspiracies and waste management but it's intriguing in it's weirdness. The kind of story you want to go over again to try to figure out.

18. Dry - Augusten Burroughs
I was a little disappointed that this wasn't ridiculously funny like Running With Scissors but still an interesting memoir about his adult life. The book explores his experience of being gay, alcoholic and working in advertising. Having, myself, experienced one of the three, I can attest to the accuracy of his accounts.

Posted at December 19, 2004 01:54 PM