Friday, December 29, 2006

Hello there, remember me?

Any of you who still have me on your news aggregators and RSS feed readers, thank you. And thank you even more for those who haven't deleted this blog from your bookmarks. It's very easy for a blog to drop off the map when it hasn't had a serious update in more than six months. Thanks for sticking with me.

Anyway, I plan on coming back to blogging with the New Year. I'm now newly married with a new house. I still have many things to do around here, but it's about time I rededicated myself to writing (which has faltered badly in the last three months) and blogging will be part of that. I won't make any commitments to the amount of blogging I'll do -- I'd like to blog every day, but it seems like a little much right now. So this blog will probably be best read from a feed, where you won't get annoyed looking back every day to see if I've finally updated.

Well, to make this post worth something, here's a few links:

Jeffery Ford has posted a short story on his blog that I believe is previously unpublished.

A giant squid was captured alive and caught on film; unfortunately, it died soon after.

Movie trailers: Harry Potter, Fantastic Four and the Silver Surfer, Hot Fuzz, and The Host.

Check out Eddie Campbell's blog, well, just because he's good, but also becaues he discusses photo references and how they were used in making From Hell.

I would also like to highly recommend Chris Roberson's blog, he's got loads of good stuff. He's an interesting guy anyway: He's the author of Paragea and Here, There & Everywhere as well as the brains behind Monkeybrain Books.

What I read in 2006

You can see all of the books I read this year and their publishing information at LibraryThing. But here is the basic list. I've put them in order of enjoyment, though I could easily change around the order of the books in the middle. The list doesn't include short stories unless I read an entire collection (which is unusual for me, I tend to dip in and out of anthologies.)

Fiction
The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik
The Big Time by Fritz Leiber
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vanitas by Jeffrey Ford
Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw
The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce
Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock
Lint by Steve Aylett
Homeland by Sam Lipsyte
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Imaro by Charles Saunders
Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer
The Conqueror Worms by Brian Keene
She by H. Rider Haggard
The Shadow: The Romanoff Jewels by Maxwell Grant
Snakes and Earrings by Hitomi Kanehara
Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad by Minister Faust
Hammered by Elizabeth Bear
The Rising by Brian Keene
The Engines of God by Jack McDevitt
Cowslip by Kirk Sigurdson

Graphic novels
Black Hole by Charles Burns
Bone: One Volume Edition by Jeff Smith
Y: The Last Man, Volume 1 Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughan
Barefoot Gen: The Day After by Keiji Nakazawa
The Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal


Nonfiction
Sixpence House: Lost in a town of books by Paul Collins
Haiku Handbook by William Higginson
With Respect to the Japanese by John C. Condon

It's about 32 books. While this was a busy year, I thought I usually read more books than that. I'll track this year, as well, and see how many I read.