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If I were to chart my reading habits over the last three years there would be a clear divergence between quality and quantity I think. Having looked over this list compared to last year's and the year before the list keeps getting longer but the number of great books has gotten to the point where really only the first two on this list could be considered great. Too many comic books and too much working on the computer until my eyes bleed is probably the reason I haven't read too many substantial books this year and most of the novels on this list are audiobooks. Anything with a (GN) is a graphic novel but I excluded any trade paperbacks that just collect ongoing comics. Anyway, enough of the preamble, here they are from best to least best:

1. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
A technical masterpiece written in styles appropriate to the range of the plot which begins in the 19th century progresses to the far future and then comes back again. Throughout there are tiny connections between each story and embedded clues to a larger tale that seems to be told. The subtelty of these connections make you wish there were more than there are though.

2. Palomar(GN) - Gilbert Hernandez
Another gigantic Love & Rockets collection (actually the first to be released but second that I've read). This is where Hernandez began developing a huge cast of characters that he is still doing amazing things with 20 years later.

3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
I regret slightly that I listened to this audiobook rather than reading the physical book which is chock full of eye candy. I don't imagine I missed much without it. The strength of this story is the character of Oskar Schell, the most likeable child protagonist I've read since Mark Haddon's autistic narrator in Curious Incident of the Dog at Night.

4. End of Faith - Sam Harris
A refreshing attack on religion during a time where everyone in the media, politics and Hollywood are being so careful not to get the Christian evangelicals and Muslim radicals riled up.

5. Against All Enemies - Richard Clarke
An infuriating and important book about 9/11. How the Bush administration dropped the ball both before and after it.

6. State of Denial - Bob Woodward
Equally infuriating and equally important. Woodward spells out the obvious about the Iraq quagmire but in a way that finally no one can really deny. His track record in recording Bush's War since 9/11 gives the damning descriptions of the fuck-ups in Iraq some best-seller level weight. It's pretty clear from reading this book how and when it all went wrong and it isn't pretty.

7. The Girl With The Long Green Heart - Lawrence Block
I read 4 books from the Hard Case Crime series this year and this one was the best. A great, well thought out long con story.

8. Like A Velvet Glove Cast in Iron(GN) - Daniel Clowes
Being a huge Clowes fan I had beeen savoring this one for a couple of years, not wanting to read it and then be left without it to look forward to. Probably no need since having now read it I could very easily jump into it's Lynchian/Pynchonian universe again.

9. American Born Chinese (GN) - Gene Yang
The first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award and it is well deserving though I was disappointed in the ending. Tying together the three separate stories seemed unnecessary and might have actually hurt the individual stories in doing so.

10. Luba: Luba in America/Luba: The Book of Ofelia - Gilbert Hernandez
After reading Palomar, it's nice to know that there is much more to read so I happily jumped into the first two volumes of the Luba trilogy. Very different than Palomar in that the story takes place mostly in America and mostly follows Luba's sisters, Petra and Fritz. Hernandez continues to develop his characters in an emotionally realistic way while placing them in situations that are magical, perverse and sometimes just weird.

11. American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Overly long, at least in Audiobook format, but Gaiman tells a fun, imaginative and gripping epic about mythological gods fighting to retain relevance in the modern New World of America.

12. A Scanner Darkly - Philip K. Dick
Less sci-fi than I expected from my first Dick novel but he won me over with his exploration of identity using an undercover narc who finds himself having to stake out himself.

13. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
Another really long audiobook and it was a sequel nonetheless. At one point I thought I was at the end but was shocked to find I still had another 6 hour mp3 file to go. Ellroy's 1960's gumshoe style becomes Beat Poetry when read aloud. You've got to love a story that ties together the JFK assasination, the RFK assasination and the MLK assasination and everything inbetween.

14. Lost at Sea(GN) - Bryan Lee O'Malley
A poignant, airy little story with beautifully simple drawings about an insecure girl on a road trip with some friends who begins to worry that her sould has been stolen by all these cats she keeps seeing everywhere.

15. A Touch of Death - Charles Williams
Another Hard Case crime book. This one stands out for the great back-and-forth between the book's outmatched anti-hero and its conniving villainess.

16. Epileptic (GN) - David B.
Beautifully illustrated and full of more imagination and introspection than anything I've read this year. It's probably too long by almost half though and you start to feel that early on when David's family takes his epileptic brother to yet another homeopathic commune.

17. No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
McCarthy is famous for his gritty and modern border dramas. This one involves a man in Texas who finds a truck full of dead Mexicans, a huge stash of heroin and a case full of cash. He of course takes the money and of course people come looking for him. The book is relentless in how it deals with the fallout but the larger story it seems to be trying to tell about men and war, specifically Vietnam, didn't seem to connect all the way with the plot or with me for that matter.

18. Making Comics - Scott McCloud
Though not as eye-opening as McCloud's must-read Understanding Comics it is still dense with valuable information for us wanna-be comic creators.

19. The Colorado Kid - Stephen King
My first foray into the Hard Case Crime series and, having read some others now, this really doesn't seem to fit with the series. King tells a great little unexplained mystery here but there are no hard luck anti-heroes and that woman in the skimpy dress on the cover is not the more modest woman who acts as King's sympathetic protagonist in the book. It may not be crime-noir exactly but it's a strong story that goes against expectations in a lot of ways.

20. Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall (GN)- Bill Willingham and others
A beautiful hardcover from the Fables series that sees a number of amazingly talented artists fill in some backstory for a lot of the characters we've gotten to know from the regular series. Not a bad story in the bunch and full of Fables' signature blend of fairy tale folklore with an adult twist.

21. American Theocracy - Kevin Phillips
Conservative writer Phillips explores the decline of America from three vantage points - Christian fundementalism, oil addiction and rising debt and shows how we're just repeating history for about the 3rd or 4th time.

22. Brooklyn Follies - Paul Auster
Auster explores bittersweet life in Brooklyn with a generally likeable stand-in for himself but surrounded by some rather forgettable Brooklynites.

23. Night Fisher(GN) - R. Kikuo Johnson
A beautiful first book by Johnson that is exciting more for the promise of his future work than for the actual story told here.

24. Tricked (GN) - Alex Robinson
Robinson follows up his extremely likeable Box Office Poison with another comic book tome and another sprawling cast of characters. This one isn't as memorable and feels like he's striving to make this an important work but it isn't quite there.

25. 12 Reasons Why I Love Her (GN) - Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones
Jolle Jones may be one of my favorite new comic artists to emerge this year. That's how much I loved her work here. It's a fairly lightweight story about a relationship but with a very real, flawed and interesting female character.

26. The Hot Kid - Elmore Leonard
Leonard goes back to his western roots and retains most of his crime-writing appeal though the plot doesn't feel as complex and the characters not as quirky as I'm used to from him.

27. The Road To Wellville - TC Boyle
A fun little comedy that takes place during the rise of the breakfast cereal in Battle Creek, Michigan. The characters are a little hit and miss, the biggest miss being with the main character John Kellogg but the comic plights of character's like Will and Charlie kept me interested.

28. Perspective For Comic Artists - David Chelsea
Perspective is one of those subjects that seem to be easier to understand when presented in comic form like this. Chelsea is an amazing artist but probably doesn't have the personality to his books that makes Scott McCloud more successful at this sort of thing.

29. Clumsy (GN) - Jeffrey Brown
Brown's scribbled memories of this relationship can be cloying or sweet depending on your mood. If you go with cloying you have to at least be happy that the relationship doesn't end well.

30. 361 - Donald Westlake
My least favorite of the 4 Hard Case Crime books I read this year. It's a dark tale of family honor and revenge but honestly I can't even remember how it ended and I only read it a few weeks ago.

31. See No Evil - Robert Baer
CIA operative Robert Baer tells us as much as he can reveal about his career in the field. It gets surprisingly boring halfway through but then picks up when Baer finds his job being hindered by government bureaucracy and corporate interference.

32. Wimbledon Green (GN) - Seth
A beautifully retro series of drawings that honor Seth's fancy of old cartoons by telling the tale of a mysterious comic book collector. There are a some laughs but it mostly just looks pretty.

33. De:Tales - Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon
I'm a big fan of the art from these two brothers but they work better when collaborating with writers I think. The stories here, though beautifully drawn, can be a bit heavy handed.

33. The Long Tail - Chris Anderson
Anderson's theory of the Long Tail is important in today's internet-driven commerce structure but a lot of it felt like old news by the time I got around to listening to the audiobook.

34. Put The Book Back On The Shelf(GN) - Anthology
A collection of comic book artists and writers interpreting Belle & Sebastian's music. It's very obvious that a number of them didn't even listen to the songs they were adapting.

Here's some books I started but couldn't bring myself to finish:

Absolute Friends - John LeCarre
I actually got halfway through this waiting for it to get into really meaty spy drama. Then I realized that it probably wasn't ever going to.

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
It didn't take long for me to get completely lost in all the characters and the seamless change of scenes and stories.

The Blind Assasin - Margaret Atwood
The second time I tried to read this highly acclaimed novel. For some reason it just didn't grab me.

It's A Good Life If You Don't Weaken (GN) - Seth
It doesn't make sense that I don't like Seth's work. His sensibilities should fall totally in line with mine but there is something about his yearning for comics of old that feel tired and humorless.

Posted at December 17, 2006 04:25 PM