Best of 2008 Picks -- Elizabeth Hand

Best chocolate? Here's a story:

About ten years ago, my sister-in-law gave my family, gathered some 20-odd strong in Vermont, a box of extremely expensive Belgian chocolates for Christmas. (I can't recall the name of the company, but I'll check later.) We spent the week eating them, and then when there were only a few left, my 8-year-old daughter Callie picked one out, bit into it and cried out; then held out her hand to display a small metal bolt. (Fortunately no teeth were broken.) I took the bolt, and when we got home to Maine, wrote a very nice letter to the chocolate company's American office, explaining what had happened, and sent it off with the offending metal. I then told Callie and her four-year-old brother, "We will now be supplied with chocolate for life." Well, we weren't set for life, but a week later an ENORMOUS box of chocolates (huge box, and three layers deep) arrived with a very nice very apologetic letter from the company. We ate those chocolates for about a month. They were fabulous. Sadly, I've never been able to afford to eat them since.

The only music I totally fell in love with and played excessively was Fleet Foxes' eponymous album. Beautiful, mysterious, lyrical, it held up to obsessive re-listening. Runners-up: My Morning Jacket's "Evil Urges," Laura Marling's "Alas I Cannot Swim" and Goldfrapp's "Seventh Tree." We have great alternative radio in this part of Maine, and I find myself buying fewer albums in lieu of just trusting the DJs I like. I don't download music — too lazy, plus I'd feel guilty if I didn't pay for it. So it's back to radio.

Ah, literature! I spent most of the year researching and rewriting my Rimbaud novel, and my reading time was consumed by review work. In other words, not a lot of reading for pure pleasure. Of the books I reviewed this year, these were high points:

Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year
Allegra Goodman's first YA novel, The Other Side of the Island
Christopher Barzak's The Love We Share Without Knowing
Nick Antosca's Midnight Picnic

For pleasure, I finally read two classics, Madame Bovary and Lonesome Dove, which were fantastic — a return to that childhood sense of being totally absorbed in a novel. Alsoo Gemma Bovary's, Posey Simmond's marvelous graphic novel that reimagines Flaubert's work in contemporary France.