Another year, another load of books down …

Best in Fiction
Since it’s a couple of years old, it may be a bit of a cheat to give 20TH CENTURY GHOSTS by Joe Hill this spot, but I’m doing it anyway. First of all, 2007 marked its first publication in America, and furthermore, it arrived with a new story attached not available in its original British edition. So there. Plus, nothing excited or moved me more this year, with Hill expertly moving from one short story to another, demonstrating incredible range. If you’re into horror fiction, you’ll love it; if you’re not into horror fiction, you’ll still love it. Such appeal is the mark of a great writer.

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Our monthly depressing look at the search terms that bring pervs to BOOKGASM!

Fill your new calendar all you want with lunch dates and business meetings. Mine has publishers’ official release dates of books I want to read listed. I know some of them are bound to disappoint me – and one or two may turn out to be terrible – but for now, these are the 2008 titles on my radar, in chronological order. Hone in.

BLASPHEMY by Douglas Preston – Those of you who are regular BOOKGASM visitors know that anything by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child – together or separately – automatically equates to a “must read.” Hence, this techno-thriller, which Preston told us is “about a particle accelerator where some really strange scientific things go awry in a really bizarre and dangerous way.” (1/8)

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In formulating this year’s list, I took a long, hard look at my nominees and made, perhaps, a bold choice: I left out William Gibson. It’s not that SPOOK COUNTRY isn’t a good book – it is. What it isn’t, however, is science fiction.

Mr. Gibson, I really like your work, and SPOOK COUNTRY was one of my favorites in 2007, but other books that are actually science fiction deserve a shot. My new stance also took one of my other favorites of 2007 out of the running: CROOKED LITTLE VEIN by Warren Ellis.

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Forgive me, but I can’t read everything I want to. Time was my enemy like never before in ‘07, so these novels fell by the wayside. However, they remain on my shelf in the hopes I’ll get to them someday – either in retirement or whenever I win the lottery, whichever comes first.

And what about you? What escaped your schedule or fell victim to bouts of laziness over the past 12 months? And hey, if you’ve read any of the books on this list and have an opinion that might convince to make a concerted effort to get to them, I’d love to hear them (even more so if you can freeze time).

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In a world where the Goldman family is now making money (and taking writing credit for) O.J. Simpson’s tasteless IF I DID IT book, and where the Kindle and the iPhone have made the media act like giddy schoolgirls, we at least have the solidity of BOOKGASM, presenting good (and bad) books for us to read on a daily basis. So let’s take a look back through 2007 and pick out the best of the titles you may want to pick up with all the gift cards you got this season.

Best Books I Reviewed in 2007
So what piqued my interest in 2007? We’ll start with the fabulous debut of Lisa Unger in BEAUTIFUL LIES. Truly remarkable were her entirely believable characters, who actually behaved like normal folk when dealing with the police instead of the intensely idiotic morons we are normally used to reading about. It was also highly evocative of New York City – not just using the city as a crutch, but really writing about it.

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I, Allan Mott, simply don’t have the ego required to believe that any of you regular BOOKGASM readers have noticed – much less lamented – my absence from this fine, nearly-award-winning site during the past nine months, but I myself was shocked when I realized it had been that long since I offered up a contribution, and gave Mr. Lott the opportunity to go one day without reviewing another book about zombie-werewolf CIA agents going for one last score by breaking the bank at a 23rd-century gladiatorial casino. (Seriously, folks, can we give that genre a rest? It’s totally played out!)

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We’re taking a break from the usual column to list my picks for the 10 best crime novels of 2007.

1. BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD by Sean Chercover – I said it when I first reviewed it: This was the book to beat. Chercover is a writer to watch and I can’t wait for his second novel.

2. DUST DEVILS by James Reasoner – It was really hard to put this book in the No. 2 slot, since it was the equal of BIG CITY. Reasoner came back to the crime genre with guns a-blazin’.

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Just as they did last year with THE WIDOW OF SLANE, editors Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg have handpicked a crop of notable novellas in WOLF WOMAN BAY AND NINE MORE OF THE FINEST CRIME AND MYSTERY NOVELLAS OF THE YEAR. By year, they mean 2005, generally, and half of them come from the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

It starts with Joyce Carol Oates’ “Honor Code,” in which a girl harbors a years-long crush on her older male cousin, who killed her mother’s good-for-nothing boyfriend as revenge for his abuse. As expected, the prose is strong, the characters are morally flawed and the outcome heartbreaking. It also sets the bar high for the rest of the collection.

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I love literary mysteries, especially when they involve finding lost treasures, so I was excited to dip into Jennifer Lee Carrell’s INTERRED WITH THEIR BONES, a debut novel featuring a lost Shakespearean play.

And while Carrell certainly knows her Shakespeare, and the innumerable conspiracy theories that have blossomed around the mysterious poet, I think she needs an editor who could have worked to improve this needlessly confusing and flawed book.

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Because time isn’t always kind: economic reviews in a world full of waste!

There’s many a coffee-table book out there on cinema’s greatest superspy, but John Cork and Collin Stutz have another one in JAMES BOND ENCYCLOPEDIA. It’s not up to publisher DK’s usual design excellence; in fact, its antiquated fonts make it look like something you would’ve found on the bargain table at B. Dalton 20 years ago. But fans won’t care, filled as it is with info on author Ian Fleming and his enduring creation. Chapters delve deep into Bond and his sidekicks, villains, weapons, vehicles and – most importantly – babes, with tons of photographs. Closing out the book is a chronological look at the nearly two dozen films, featuring way-cool poster art for each. Nobody does that better.

My schedule is so insane that I barely have time to review Stefan Klein’s THE SECRET PULSE OF TIME: MAKING SENSE OF LIFE’S SCARCEST COMMODITY. Our bodies are slaves to our biological clocks, he writes, and we pay the price when we ignore it. The science author explains why time sometimes crawls and sometimes flies, seemingly faster and faster as we age. The most helpful section details how we can all use our time wisely; not surprisingly, it amounts to “slowing down,” of course. (Yes, but then how could I get anything done? It’s hopeless for me.) Late-in-the-book discussions about the physics of time – complete with illustrations – make us view the subject in an entirely different light. Recommended … provided you have the you-know-what.

The subtitle says it all in the case of DIFFERENT ENGINES: HOW SCIENCE DRIVES FICTION AND FICTION DRIVES SCIENCE by Prof. Mark L. Brake and Rev. Neil Hook, a nonfiction examination of the influence on one on the other, and vice versa, from the “diseased creation myth” of FRANKENSTEIN to modern-day authors. Basically an extended essay – with footnotes aplenty – Brake and Hook’s book is full of “did you know” tidbits, like how Robert Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND invented the concept of the waterbed. Other contemporary trailblazers discussed include J.G. Ballard, Harlan Ellison and Philip K. Dick, but of course, the foresight of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and Arthur C. Clarke do not go ignored. If you believe truth is just as strange as fiction, pick this up.

Knock Knock has a series of self-help parodies like HOW TO GET INTO DEBT and HOW TO DRIVE LIKE A MANIAC, all part of its “Self-Hurt Series.” These small-sized hardbacks might make for an amusing joke gift, but really, the joke is pretty much spent by the time you’ve read the front cover. For example, DEBT spews such advice as “spend more than you save” and “savings: don’t do it.” And over and over for nearly 200 pages. Sidebars include actual facts, so at least you might learn something, but these are disappointing after reading the same company’s COMPLETE MANUAL OF THINGS THAT MIGHT KILL YOU. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

It’s amazing how many more entries you get in a contest when you don’t make people work for it. So among a swarm, whose name got randomly picked to win Natasha Mostert’s erotically charged slice of Gothic fiction otherwise known as SEASON OF THE WITCH?

David Keith of Washington, Ind., that’s who! Congrats to David, and to everyone else who threw their hat in the ring, you can always buy it at Amazon. (After all, it’s the holidays, so go ahead and treat yourself.) More contests are coming your way in ‘08 from your friends at BOOKGASM!

Ever had a really bad day? Your worst pales in comparison to Jamey Shepard’s, as detailed in Brian Hodge’s MAD DOGS. He’s an actor whose last gig sets a world in motion that no one should have to endure.

Since he bears a strong resemblance to a big-time robber Duncan MacGregor, Jamey’s last big acting job was on a show called AMERICAN FUGITIVES. On his way to his own wedding in Arizona, he stops for gas. The trouble starts – and never lets up – when some overefficient police officer who should have retired years ago has been drinking on the job and just waiting to break some balls sees Jamey and mistakes him for MacGregor. The cop thinks he’s scored a major career coup, only to fumble with his gun and fatally shoot himself.

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Frank Leslie is really Peter Brandvold, one of the best writers of traditional action Westerns in the business right now. He’s very prolific — THE THUNDER RIDERS is the fourth or fifth book he’s published this year – and he may have concocted this pseudonym so he could saddle up with a new publisher.

I’d like to think he chose the name of an Old West gunman as an homage to Fred Glidden, who wrote under the byline Luke Short. “Buckskin” Frank Leslie is the man who shot Billy Claiborne – an OK Corral survivor – when Claiborne got pissed off because Leslie refused to refer to him as “Billy the Kid.”

End of lecture. Now close your books. There will be a test.

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Starting in 1985, I subscribed to Rolling Stone magazine for nearly 15 years, right up until the day it put The Spice Girls on the cover, and I decided maybe it would be best not to renew. I’ve seen maybe half a dozen issues since, all of which confirm my money was best spent elsewhere.

But when it was a magazine mostly devoted to music – rather than politics and/or pop-culture icons of the moment – the Q&A interviews were among my favorite features. Many from the periodical’s four-decade run are collected in THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEWS, edited by its co-founder Jann Wenner with Joe Levy.

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Forget Sudoku. And up yours, too, Kakuro. I was never in honors math, so if I want puzzles, I want something that doesn’t remind me of falling asleep in Algebra II. Like, for instance, the rising-in-popularity “spot the difference” photo puzzles from Life magazine. Now here’s a craze I could get into.

Just in time for the holidays, the magazine has packaged its trio of best-sellers into THE COMPLETE PICTURE PUZZLE BOX SET. Housed in a cardboard box are 450 brainteasers of Photoshop-enabled trickery, spread out over the interchangeably titled PICTURE PUZZLE, THE ORIGINAL PICTURE PUZZLE and THE ULTIMATE PICTURE PUZZLE.

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We’re taking a break from the dark side of the street to boldly go where tons of authors have gone before: science fiction – a genre I pretty much grew up reading. But not the highbrow type of sci-fi; no, I was more into likes of Farmer and Foster. So let’s enter the unknown of our future; hopefully there will be a few beacons of hope and not just a pile of space junk.

SPACEWAYS #2: CORUNDUM’S WOMAN by John Cleve – So this one promises high adventure for adults, with a tagline on the back proclaiming that “in space, no one can hear you moan.” They also can’t hear a book being thrown against the wall countless times in disgust. Who the hell does this book appeal to? I’ve got it: the “men” who smell like bad milk and live in their parents’ basements with their box set of UFO DVDs.

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One reason I started BOOKGASM was to keep a record of everything I read, because when you consume more than 100 books a year, one can no longer rely on memory alone. But if I didn’t have BOOKGASM, I would utilize something like READ, REMEMBER, RECOMMEND, created by Rachelle Rogers Knight.

This spiral-bound reading journal would make a perfect gift for any hardcore bibliophile on your list, with nearly 250 pages of section to help keep reading material straight, separated with handy, full-color, recipe-tabbed section breaks.

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OMG! Vermont detective Joe Gunther uncovers a disturbing child-predator Internet chat-room scam in CHAT, Archer Mayor’s 18th novel in the mystery series.

When the book opens, Joe’s mom and brother are nearly killed when their car flies off the road on a wintery night. Knowing how skilled a driver his sibling really is, Joe suspects foul play, and looks into it. Meanwhile, a floater turns up in a nearby brook with no explanation, and Joe’s gotta look into that, too.

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