Camille Alexa's Mildly Anarchistic Review of Favorites of 2008
All year long, we reviewers stand dutifully still as thousands of worthy offerings shoot past our heads like a white-hot neverending meteor shower of books and CDs, of live performances and dead ones, of chocolate bars and puppet shows and action figures and films. Sure, I read some great novels this year. I slogged through a couple stinkers, too, and tried to sort out the best and worst elements of all the rest of everything, which usually falls somewhere between the deliciously sublime and the embarrassingly foul. I try to reach out and touch as many pretty things as I can while they streak past, but mostly I just squeeze my eyes shut and tuck my head down into my shoulders, letting random things hit me as they hurtle past. There's a sense of civic duty, you see, which compels one to follow through and do one's best. The true enemy of art is obscurity, and I like to think I'm helping in some teensy way to fight the good fight. For art, that is -- not
obscurity.
So for this, my Best Of 2008 picks, I'll be for a moment completely selfish. I'll not worry about the most visible, the most widely distributed or lauded or catered to literature of the year. Some perverse element in me resists even mentioning my favorite recently-read novels. I love novels; love them whether they love me back or no. But novels are always the prettiest girls at the dance, and often get all the attention. Instead I'm going to scoop together all the other things usually peripheralized and I'm going to list, in a wholly selfish and somewhat subversive way, my favorite recently-experienced not-novel wordage. Some of it is by people I know, some by people I don't ever expect to meet; some of it isn't even from this year, though if it's included here I probably first read it/heard it in 2008. Consider this my mildly anarchistic celebration of writerly things I enjoyed most during this last year or so.
Live events, readings, recordings
I'm going to start off cheating. This first is a reading by Vonda McIntyre from her piece "A Modest Proposal for the perfection of Nature" at OryCon 2007. The audience was thin, but I was absolutely entranced by this award-winning author's frank talk about her work, her entertaining introduction to this piece, and the obvious depth of her intelligence. Though I haven't read the text of this one (hearing her read it herself was so sublime!), you can read this one (reprinted in YBSF #11) at her site . And very early this year (or it may have been at the tail end of last) I was delighted to hear Merrie Haskell's "One Million Years B.F.E." as read on Escape Pod. Again, I've never read this text in full, but this "Diary of an Anthropologist in Exile" charmed me in audio.
ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas produced a wealth of my favorites. After attending the WorldCon just a week earlier (one of the heights of which for me was T.L. Morganfield's beautiful reading at the Broad Universe Rapidfire Reading), the intimacy of Armadillocon was a bit of a relief. Some of my favorite readings of the year came out of this one, including Jessica Reisman's hypnotic and lovely reading of her story "When the Ice Goes Out", from the anthology Otherworldly Maine, which includes tales by the likes of Elizabeth Hand, Stephen King, and Melanie Tem. ArmadilloCon also produced a gripping (chilling!) reading of Samantha Henderson's "Bottles," as well as a group reading of Howard Waldrop's Nebula-Award winning "The Ugly Chickens." I'll end my list of auditory Armadillocon faves by mentioning that hearing Steven Utley read his poem "837th Dream" made my heart beat faster and my breath catch in my throat. Smart men are hot.
The quirky and low-key Space Squid hosting of Optimistic SciFi Night at the Frugal Muse in Austin, Texas produced an excellent reading from Stina Leicht and another from Patrice Sarath. Sarath's novel Gordath Wood (Ace Books) has garnered excellent reviews, but this particular reading was of a Weird Tales story about a malicious office entity born of employee dissatisfaction and corporate mishandling, titled "The Lunch Thief." Other favorite live events would have to include Karrie League's lecture "Natural Disasters, Past to Future" from the December 3rd Dionysium(as reviewed for GMR), M. K. Hobson's gorgeous reading of Stephanie Burgis's "Stitching Time" at the Diet Soap release party in Portland, Oregon, and Jay Lake being roasted as GoH Toastmaster in a RadCon role flip, during which a hoard of Jay Lakefolk dressed in mop wigs and loud Hawaiian shirts romped about the stage mimicking Jay's every move. Mr. Lake took with charm and aplomb an event which would have sent many of us hiding under polyester-covered banquet tables.
I didn't intend to dip into musical stuff in what is already an overly self-indulgent look at 2008, but mild anarchy being what it is I allow myself to mention the three musical performances I attended this year in Portland, Oregon which made me weep: Dave Brubeck at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall last April, David Garza at the Doug Fir Lounge, and Gogol Bordello live at the Crystal Ballroom.
Short stories
Maybe I should've started out with these, but I got excited. Writerly freedom and the whiff of anarchy will do that to a girl.
I'll keep this simple. The following -- in no particular order -- are stories I read in 2008 that rocked my little blue world: Jessica Reisman's "Flowertongue" (archived at Farrago's Wainscot[); Jason Stoddard's "The Elephant Ironclads" and Maureen McHugh's "Special Economics" (both in The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. by Ellen Datlow); Tina Connolly's "A Day out, With Stereoscopes" in the quirky and lovely print zine, Birkensnake; M. K. Hobson's Domovoi (originally printed in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, available on the author's site [); "Mayfly" by Heather Lindsley (archived at Strange Horizons ; Doug Lain's painful and haunting "The Word "Mermaid" Written on an Index Card"; Dave Goldman's surprisingly wistful and heartrending
"The Last Man's First Year on Earth" (archived for reading at Helix SF); "Up the Fire Road" by Eileen Gunn (in Eclipse One); the inexplicably compelling Harvey Welles and Philip Raines story "The Dam" (in Ruins Extraterrestrial) and a surprising little story I couldn't stop thinking about, "Gifts of Bone" by C.A. Manestar (in Desolate Places, also out with Hadley Rille Books).
See? Simple.
Non-Fiction/Reviews/Articles/Etc.
I adored William Shunn's hilarious, touching, and new-only-to-me serialized blogged memoir, Terror on Flight 789, in which describes having been a teenaged Mormon missionary to Canada, and an international terrorist, beginning with this first chapter, "Come South, Young Man". My other favorite in this category would include everything and anything by Genevieve Valentine. Seriously. Her lovingly scathing reviews of Questionable Taste Theatre and other satirical film reviews appear regularly in places like Fantasy Magazine and Tor.com, but even her LiveJournal comments are a riot.
Poetry
This year my entire poetic heart was stolen by Steven Utley's poetry chapbook This Impatient Ape, first printed in 1998 by Anamnesis Press. That is all.
