The year in review

Tomorrow I’ll post my top 10 lists, but here I’ll discuss general (blog/geek) stuff. The blog has now finished five years in existenence, and I like it. It frequently functions as offline memory (what did we do for Valentine’s Day in 2004?) and way to post interesting web things (although my shared Google items took over some of that this year).

Forcing myself to read at least one book and watch one movie a week was an interesting resolution, successfully completed. I may still have piles of unread books, but I read 80 this year, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. The only problem was getting way behind on periodicals at points, but I plan to be caught up on those by the end of our upcoming vacation. I’d like to keep up the pace, but don’t want to keep the one a week thing going – maybe an average of four a month. I won’t be directly blogging them anymore, I’ve started using two sites, goodreads.com and gurulib.com, both of which I think I can make blog posts from. The latter’s not as nice, but it also covers DVDs and CDs, while just look at the former:

Kerry's books

X-Men Visionaries: Neal Adams

by Roy Thomas

Maybe it’s the fact that I used to have some of these issues (both the originals and the reprints in Giant-Size X-Men 2), but I liked Neal Adams much more here. Part of it was the inking of Tom Palmer, but I thought the stories were more…

Below the Threshold

by Allen L. Wold

A kidnapping mystery – did the aliens do it, or was it the mob? Props for a very different take, although the ending feels chopped off.

The Oregon Invasion

by Jayne Tannehill

A refreshing change after the last one, with a new takes on religion and interspecies relationships.

Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman

by Hank Wagner

An interesting mixture of biography, bibliography and review, not to mention several pieces of Neil’s collected here for the first time. Some of it is slow going, but there are priceless insights, I assume helped along by Bissette who’s …

To Conquer the Throne

by Tim Sullivan

When I put this back on the shelf, I had to go back and look at the other two V books he wrote, to reassure myself that they were not of the same level of writing as this one. This was the worst kind of fan fiction, puerile wish fulfillm…

While I didn’t come to a halt buying new things in 2008 (like Popless for music), I was pretty restrained, so much so I had to order about 10 CDs to do my annual mix in December. I sold off vast amounts of DVDs, partly to get some cash, but also to prepare for my eventual conversion to glorious Blu-Ray. I didn’t buy many books, new or used, as I had too many unread. I was a little surprised to sell off as many books as I did once I read them – many more were one time reads than I thought at first. I did keep up on comics, but whittled down some titles as the year progressed.

It was a fantastic year in video I shot, as I finally found the software that did exactly what I wanted, and I got a number of videos converted to DVD and uploaded. I wanted to get some recent ones out of the way, but this year I’m starting from the beginnning (2000) and working forwards.

Not much else to report, although I did join Facebook as a result of my high school reunion (already on MySpace and LinkedIn):