The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2009, Pt.4: Therese Littleton

Best Books and Music Consumed in 2009
by Therese Littleton

For the first time since I was a kid, I kept a list of everything I read in 2009. My motivations were twofold: first, I harbored a secret hope that I’d be asked to participate in Aqueduct’s end-of-year roundup, and second, I wanted to examine my book buying vs. book reading habits to force a little thinking about clutter and accumulation. (Turns out books aren’t the problem, yay!)

Having kept an exhaustive list, I had the pleasure of mentally revisiting all my reading and picking out the best of the best. Here they are:

FICTION

Anathem (Neal Stephenson) and The City and the City (China Mièville) were like two amazing bookends on my fiction year. Both blew my mind with good ideas, both crackled with narrative energy, and both had characters I adored.

I will go out on a limb and declare that Anathem is Dune for the 21st century. Just as Herbert blended mysticism, ecology, and empire to predict and dissect the zeitgeist of the time, Stephenson has grasped the essential elements of right now—technology, community, and doctrine—and pushed them forward to examine unexpected outcomes for humanity. Anathem is pure, awesome science fiction. Its setting is like Earth, but isn’t Earth, having one key difference: the dominant “religion” is science. Watching the action through that lens for the duration of this thick (some might say too thick) novel was an unexpected pleasure for me, giving me the exact delight and wonder that I used to feel when I first discovered science fiction.

The City and the City is a brilliant thought-novel, too, and one that allows Mièville to scoot away from what his fans expect (freaky monsters!) yet keep the core weirdness at which he excels. The book is about two cities that co-exist in the same space, and what happens when consensus reality is shattered. It’s got a great plot, very human characters, and lyrical description. It was a blast to read, and is tied with my previous favorite of Mièville’s novels, The Scar.

I didn’t read much fantasy in 2009, but my favorite was The Lies of Locke Lamora (Scott Lynch). It was easily as much fun as the best thief-centric D&D game you could ever play. The Venice-like setting and the near-constant suspense were just plain fun.

Biggest guilty pleasure of the year? Orcs (Stan Nicholls). This collection of three bloody novels (the edition I bought even has red page-edges) focuses on a renegade band of orcs trying to keep alive when every other fantasy race is out to get them. Rooting for the traditional bad guys is a hoot, and I loved that the humans in the stories were super creepy. Heaps of violence and even some gratuitous sex rounded out the experience.

In YA fiction, I really liked The Knife of Never Letting Go (Patrick Ness) and The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins), but I’m not sure I can take many more books that focus on kids in peril. The former is a kind of post-apocalyptic novel about a young boy in survival mode on a planet where all the women are gone. The latter tells a dystopian future story about children forced to fight to the death in an arena (the story reminded me more than a little of the fearsomely brutal Battle Royale, by Koushun Takami, a book I couldn’t finish). Even though both of these popular, award-winning novels grabbed my attention and gave me a satisfying read, I ended up feeling unsettled and plan to take a break from this particular sub-genre for a while.

NONFICTION

I had a great, ocean-focused nonfiction year. Perfect example: The Book of Eels (Tom Fort). I’ve been describing this book as “like Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, only much better.” Fort is a lyrical writer whose prose prompted me to get out a pen and underline beautiful sentences. And did I mention the book is about eels?

Also in an aquatic vein, I read a cute coming-of-age memoir, Saltwater Buddha (Jaimal Yogis), written by a young Buddhist surfer who left home in search of waves and zen. Yogis isn’t old enough to say anything truly profound, but his story is still funny and moving. In fifteen years, Yogis might have achieved the calm strength of super-surfer Laird Hamilton, whose combo memoir and self-help book Force of Nature was the most inspiring “inspirational” book I’ve read in a long time. Hamilton is a creature of nearly pure ego, but he loves the feeling of being a beginner, and in his book, he urges readers to get that feeling by trying things they aren’t good at.

Adrift (Steven Callahan) is a classic in the survival-at-sea genre and—lacking cannibalism since Callahan was alone in his ordeal—is refreshingly free of moral quandaries. It’s just him, a leaky raft, and the sea for 76 days. I loved how pared down his life was, how deprivation became daily experience, how he made the decision over and over again to stay alive. Exhausting, but amazing.

Finally, as a tribute to Darwin’s 200th birthday, I decided to read and annotate both The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species. My annotations are biology-focused and have been a nice way to refresh that part of my brain. I am nearly finished with the Voyage… the project is taking longer than I thought, but is utterly satisfying, and I aim to finish it. I find Darwin to be among the most readable authors in the scientific canon. Anyone who loves Patrick O’Brian would not be disappointed by the Voyage.

COMICS

I stayed faithful to my usual comics this year, especially the sublime post-apocalyptic Wasteland (Antony Johnston and Christopher J. Mitten) and the hard-hitting Viking series Northlanders (Brian Wood, et al). But I also tried out some unusual selections and found a few gems. The Complete Aranzi Hour (Aranzi Aronzo) brought out my inner tween, with terminally cute characters (Sprite, Fish, Bad Guy) and plenty of awwwww. I’m also ecstatic that Fantagraphics is releasing all the old Moomin comics (Tove Janssen) in beautiful, large-format hardcover volumes. I bought Volume 1 this year and can’t wait for more. I remember reading and re-reading these surrealistic tales of a friendly… troll?... hippo?... whatever… in the public library as a kid.

I also devoured the first 5 collected volumes of Brian K. Vaughan’s Ex Machina series, about an ordinary schmoe who gets superpowers and is elected mayor of New York. The way Vaughan deals with LGBT issues is new territory in mainstream comics, to say the least, and one of the storylines—in which the mayor defiantly marries a gay couple—garnered Vaughan a GLAAD award.

Lewis Trondheim is one of my all-time favorite comic creators, and I read Little Nothings: The Prisoner Syndrome from him this year. On the surface it’s just a series of autobiographical anecdotes with everyone drawn as bipedal animals, but the illustration style and laconic dialogue add up to a funny, very personal portrait.

And last but definitely not least, American Born Chinese (Gene Yuen Lang) was a powerful and funny glimpse into the emotional and social difficulties faced by a Chinese-American teen struggling with identity. Lang uses three perspectives—a Chinese myth, an American sitcom, and the boy’s own life—to illuminate the layers of emotional and intellectual struggle in the story. It’s excellent.

MUSIC

I only have one recommendation in music this year, because I listened to it obsessively: The Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra’s Little Big Music. It’s a collection of tunes used in the video game Little Big Planet, and it hit the perfect chord with me for music I can listen to anytime and get happy, inspired, and mellow all at the same time.



Therese is the Content Manager for the visitor center at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Her most recent publication was a story in the charity anthology Last Drink Bird Head. She is the co-publisher of the small press, Payseur and Schmidt.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Seven: Cynthia Ward and Therese Littleton

Cynthia Ward:

The Year in Review, After a Fashion

Not much changed for me in 2008. I still don't own a TV, so I still can't recommend a show. I did double the number of movies I saw...from one to two. But, as in 2007, I mostly read for review or research, I mostly read works I wouldn't have without these constraints, and I didn't find my tastes changed.

The movies I saw were Iron Man and Batman: The Dark Knight. The latter made it clear just what a loss Heath Ledger's death was, but as a film it didn't work so well, since they filmed two movies at the same time (the Joker being one movie, and Two-Face the other). In contrast, Iron Man was great fun. Instead of assuming anyone watching a superhero movie had to be a moron, Iron Man offered intelligence and subtlety in its strong writing and superior acting.

The 2008 movies I hope to see are:

Mamma Mia! (with all those great ABBA tunes);

Milk (about assassinated San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, and starring Sean Penn, whom I've not heard much praise of, though I've never seen him deliver anything less than a superlative performance);

and Twilight -yes, I really do want to see the film adaptation of the first of Stephenie Meyer's problematic, blockbuster YA novels about a teenage vampire-werewolf-human love triangle.

I haven't read 2008's Breaking Dawn, the fourth and concluding volume of the "Twilight" series, but I've read the previous three, and have the new one waiting on my nightstand. The earlier volumes (Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse) certainly aren't pleasing from a feminist standpoint, as the narrator/protagonist, Bella Swan, is passive and guy-centric enough to induce gibbering insanity even in the rabidly anti-feminist Dr. Laura. Only, that isn't actually the books' effect, as the robust sales and the screaming mobs which greet the author's public appearances demonstrate.

I find the "Twilight" series interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that it perfectly captures what teenage girls want. I mean, the most gorgeous boy in the whole school (if not the whole world) wants you, and only you. He wants you so badly, he suffers terribly from not having you; in fact, he may literally die of it. Also, the supercute guy at the other school also wants you with all his body and soul. And did I mention the most gorgeous boy at your school is essentially immortal, and has the power to make you the same? He really can give you a love that lasts forever. This stuff appeals to the ego (or, perhaps, the id), regardless of whether you're straight or gay, or male or female (though I doubt these books will ever gain a wide male audience). I read and enjoyed the "Twilight" series as if I were a teenage girl, even though I never actually wanted what Bella gets (see next paragraph for the reason why).

The other reason I find the "Twilight" series fascinating is its primary relationships: they're breathtakingly dysfunctional. Bella's relationship to her parents is inverted: she's the mature one, so she functions (like a lot of real-life Baby-Boomers' kids) as their parents. Also, her vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen, is disturbingly controlling and obsessive. The dude even wants to spend every night watching Bella sleep (Meyer's vampires don't need to sleep, you see). Even in my teenage-girl years, I would've found some guy watching me all night seriously creepy. I haven't a clue whether Meyer intended the relationships to be this screwed up; but they make you careen through the pages.

Another interesting but problematical series is Elizabeth Bear's "Stratford Man" diptych of Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth (part of her "Promethean Age" uber-series). The pair presents a secret history of both the Elizabethan Age and the poets/playwrights William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe. Magic and the fae are real, and intimately intertwined with the fate of England; and Shakespeare and Marlowe create magic with their plays, forestalling chaos and helping to keep Elizabeth I on the throne.

Shakespeare and Marlowe also become lovers, which brings us to one of the problematic elements: when Shakespeare changes from heterosexual-repulsed-by-homosexuality to happy-to-do-Marlowe, readers receive no glimpse of his thoughts during the transition. The oversight is hard to miss, as Bear otherwise gives considerable attention to the men's thoughts and feelings (to the point that I was reminded of the Japanese manga/anime subgenre of shonen ai/yaoi: homosexual male romances for heterosexual females -a subgenre that the "Stratford Man" books do not belong to, so don't read 'em for that).

The other problem is the weak structure of the first book, Ink and Steel. Perhaps this is explained by the rumor that Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth started life as a single novel. Certainly, the pair work well when viewed as a whole. And, though it's damned hard for a novelist to make William Fucking Shakespeare Of All People a convincing character (never mind Will + Kit), Bear made me believe.

Other worthwhile new books I read this year include (but, thanks to my faulty memory, may not be confined to):

Victory of Eagles, the fifth book in Naomi Novik's delightful "Temeraire" series, an alternate history of the Napoleonic era, with dragons;

Clockwork Heart, Dru Pagliassotti's romantic steampunk mystery set in a world shaped by lighter-than-air metal;

The Engineer's Child, Holly Phillips's steampunk fantasy of a new world colonized by South Asians;

The Duke in His Castle, Vera Nazarian's short fantasy novel mixing elements of Angela Carter and Mervyn Peake (not as good as either, of course, but inventive);

Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan's beautiful, unpredictable YA novel about living in an imaginary world;

and The Steel Remains, a 2009 release in which Richard K. Morgan remakes the epic fantasy by shattering it. Antiheroic, angry, and deeply noir, The Steel Remains is the best new fiction I've read this year; but, as I'm currently writing a review for another publication, I will not discuss it further here.

For older fiction, I read several of the pulp classics reprinted by the good people at Planet Stories. A mixture of sword-and-sorcery and interplanetary romance, the books range greatly in quality. The best of the reprinted authors, and the ones most likely to interest readers of this blog, are the "Queens of the SF Pulps," C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett.

The Moore titles (Northwest of Earth, collecting the complete Northwest Smith stories, and Black God's Kiss, collecting the complete stories about Jirel of Joiry, sword-and-sorcery's first sword-swinging heroine) are important, influential works of SF and fantasy, but they're also of uneven quality (though the Smith story "Shambleau" is one of the all-time best vampire stories).

I fully enjoyed the two excellent noir-SF books by Leigh Brackett: The Secret of Sinharat (which pairs its title novella with the equally strong "People of the Talisman") and The Ginger Star (the first book of the Skaith trilogy). Both books feature the interplanetary adventurer Eric John Stark, who's a sort of cross between John Carter of Mars, Tarzan of the Apes, and some 1940s film-noir outlaw played by Humphrey Bogart (which sounds weird, but Brackett makes it work). The Skaith books were the first Brackett titles I read. Their mixture of action and darkness, a new experience for me, made her my favorite writer in high school (and also helped mold me into a feminist, which is weird, since Brackett wasn't exactly a feminist). I look forward to the Planet Stories reissues of the trilogy's remaining volumes (The Hounds of Skaith and The Reavers of Skaith), and hope they'll reprint the rest of her interplanetary adventure fiction.

A couple of 2008 titles I'm about to read are Nisi Shawl's Aqueduct Press collection, Filter House (she's my collaborator on the Conversation Piece title Writing the Other, so my recommendation here is inherently suspect, but others have found it worth reading, and Publishers Weekly includes it among their Best Books of 2008); and Riversend (Juno Books), the much-anticipated sequel to Sylvia Kelso's brilliant feminist SF (or is it fantasy?) novel, Amberlight (2007).


Happy holidays and happy reading to all, and to all a good night.


Cindy's stories have appeared in Asimov's SF, the Bending the Landscape anthology series, and other f/sf venues. She writes a column for SFWA's Bulletin. Aqueduct published her book, Writing the Other: A Practical Approach (written with Nisi Shawl), in 2005.



Therese Littleton:

Some of my reading this year revealed the horrors of adolescence. I won't vouch for the writing, story, or characters, but absorbing Twilight (Stephenie Meyer) in early 2008 plunked me right down on a wave of teen trendiness leading up to the movie release in the fall. It also gave me a lot to talk about with friends and coworkers and led to some very fruitful conversations about sexism, religion, and chastity. Meanwhile, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (Sherman Alexie) was moving and memorable, mostly because I heard Alexie give an impassioned call for Native American kids to "get off the rez" just before I read it.

Stand-out nonfiction in 2008 included The World Without Us (Alan Weisman), a delirious dip into my favorite daydream scenario: the sudden and complete disappearance of humans. This is my favorite mind-blowing nonfiction book since Parasite Rex (Carl Zimmer). I also zipped through bicycle-memoir The Rider (Tim Krabbe), one of only a handful of sports memoirs I have ever read, and thoroughly enjoyed it. But the year's theme was politics, so on our road trip to Denver for the DNC, my partner and I listened to unabridged audio versions of Dreams from My Father (Barack Obama, read by the author) and Team of Rivals (Doris Kearns Goodwin, read by Richard "John Boy" Thomas). Both were excellent, and both were surely enhanced by purple mountain majesty and fruited plains going by outside the windows.

I read a huge stack of comics and graphic novels and didn't keep a list, but two of my favorites were The Arrival (Shaun Tan) and I Killed Adolph Hitler (Jason). The former is a wordless, beautiful tale of identity and memory. The latter is a perfect little science fiction story with sex and violence. Speaking of sex and violence, I started reading Wonder Woman every month, faithfully, now that DC has hired the amazing Gail Simone to write it. Simone first came to my attention through her old web site, Women in Refrigerators, an industry-illuminating catalog of dead, dismembered, and disempowered comics superheroines. Now she's in charge of Wonder Woman, and it's awesome.

Big fantasy kind of appealed to me this year, and I read three sword-and-sorcery novels that I liked: The Name of the Wind (Patrick Rothfuss), The Blade Itself (Joe Abercrombie), and The Curse of Chalion (Lois McMaster Bujold). All three scratched the fantasy itch and were really fun to read in big chunks, especially with beer.

Shirley Jackson was my literary obsession in the first part of the year. I read The Haunting of Hill House, Life Among the Savages, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I really loved all of them, and I watched the 1962 film version of The Haunting to get more chills and to see how they dealt with the lesbian subtext.

Since it wasn't a Moby-Dick year, I finally finished all 20 of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels. I started fresh from the beginning and tore through them. Very satisfying to see Stephen and Jack age and deal with the consequences of their earlier actions. I also re-read Little, Big (John Crowley) and Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides), mostly to see if these two novels held the same delicious sense of shared alienation that they did on first reading. Results were mixed, but they both passed the true test in that I decided to keep them for another go-round someday. I enjoyed The Yiddish Policeman's Union (Michael Chabon) but didn't find it as brilliant or quick-moving as Kavalier and Clay. I did love the characters, especially the ex-wife, whose singular focus on her undesirable career resonated with me this year. Keeping with the theme of the Other, I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Díaz), which made me melancholy for days. Too much violence and sadness for me to find the connections redemptive, but I still recommended it to everyone I knew who played D&D and read sci fi as a kid. So many laugh-out-loud references for geeks.

Therese is the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. She has written numerous essays and reviews for Asimov's SF, Amazing Stories, and other publications and is the co-publisher of the elegant small press, Payseur and Schmidt.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Pt. 7: Kelley Eskridge and Therese Littleton

Adding two more contributions to the conversation...

Kelley Eskridge:

Voices in my head, 2007

I've been trying to make a list of favorite texts—I want very much to be a "good student" for Timmi, who has done so much for me this year—but I just keep wanting to testify instead. So here it is: brothers and sisters, I've spent 2007 writing story and screenplay, trying to make characters come alive in all their human complexity, to give them big moments, big feelings, high stakes, everything to win or lose. I have given myself to "Dangerous Space" and this movie of mine more completely than anything in a long time, and it's the most enormous rush, and all I want is more.

So I've been searching for text that fuels that process, that helps me open deep doors inside myself and bring back what I find there. Flat-out no-holds-barred story told with such skill that the skill itself is transparent, so I am simply transported there and live it until it's done. And then come back and take a breath, and think, Okay, okay, if they can go there, then I can do it too. I have no patience right now for anything less.

I have tried to have this thing that people call taste. I've tried to like what I'm supposed to admire, even when it leaves me emotionally flat. But this is the year I gave it up: gave myself instead to stories that make me weep or yearn or burn with joy. Stories of love, sex, finding and losing oneself, the ecstatic moments of letting go and the desperate moments of holding onto what must not be lost. Stories where I can meet the parts of myself that make me feel like the tree the second before the lightning strikes.

So where am I finding this in fiction? Nowhere new… recent speculative fiction is leaving me flat, and a lot of mainstream fiction is just so fucking precious. But I've returned to some old friends: Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld—so delicate and so tough—and her Riddlemaster trilogy, whose people live so clearly in me that I know exactly the kind of friends we would be. That's the great gift of great text, a story so true that I want it to be real. Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, which pound for pound may be the most joyful books I've ever read. The Lord of the Rings, the enormity of being human and doing what must be done. And Nicola's books this year: Always, with the beautiful Aud who is powerful and fractured and so human within the cracks; And Now We Are Going To Have A Party, which tells stories I've heard for nearly 20 years in a different way, playful and searing, that makes me see them and her anew.

I'm finding it in television and films. I love Torchwood for its matter-of-fact transgressiveness, and Jekyll for making me love a monster, for making me wonder what it's like to be so free. Buffy, Deadwood, Battlestar: Galactica, My So-Called Life—such different shows, but they all understand that the small moments are where we find ourselves surprised by hard choices and big feelings.

Films that did it for me this year: Ratatouille, The Woodsman, Lawrence of Arabia, A History of Violence, and I am absolutely panting to see Sweeney Todd.

And these days I often turn to music, where big feelings are expressed with the whole body and no brakes on. Eddie Vedder singing Hard Sun; Heart and Magic Man; Ani DiFranco doing her Swan Dive live: I just want to get my feet wet until I drown, she sings, and she makes me want it too.

I was in a club a few weeks ago dancing like a dervish while Trent Reznor sang I want to fuck you like an animal/I want to feel you from the inside, and he wasn't singing to me or about me, he was singing for me. I had more cognitive dissonance from that six-minute song than I did from all the science fiction I read this year: me being sung by a man, a frisson as exciting as the first time I saw a woman with tattoos or a man in earrings and thought Oh my god, that's hot!

And it all goes back into the work. I listened a lot to The Cure this year. There's a song called Wrong Number with a chorus that goes I had the best laid plans this side of America/Started off in church and finished with Angelica—which I insisted on hearing as Started off with George and finished with Angelica. I blinked, and I smiled, and then I looked at the draft of "Dangerous Space" on my screen and thought, Okay, okay, if Robert Smith can go there then I can go there too…

Therese Littleton:

Favorite Books Read in 2007

Although in these lucky times of too many books I seldom like to retread old ground, in 2007 I re-read several favorite books: Moby-Dick (Herman Melville… I like the Norton Critical Edition), Master and Commander (Patrick O’Brian), and The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman). All three lived up to or bettered my initial assessment and I know I’ll re-re-read them all again someday.

My favorite new book of the year was The Terror (Dan Simmons). I was so absorbed in it that I took it on vacation to Hawaii to finish, even though it breaks my “No Heavy Hardcovers on Planes” rule. The scenes of freezing arctic mayhem and depredation actually had me shivering, even on the warm beaches of Oahu. The book inspired me to read the harrowing Escape from the Antarctic (Ernest Shackleton) part of the Penguin Great Journeys series of short adventure narratives. I now want to try more of these bite-sized tales of manly exploits.

Like so many others, I devoured Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling) the night it came out and loved it even through the marathon-induced headache. I also read The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner) and Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban), two very un-alike books that had two things in common: first, that I had been meaning to read each of them for a very long time, and second, that I thought they each lived up to the hype. The former is a massively enjoyable romp with a great setting and great gender-bending, two things I find irresistible. The latter is post-apocalyptic and told entirely in a difficult dialect. Swoon!

I can’t remember if I started Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) in 2007, but I’m pretty sure I finished it during this year, so I’m going to count it as one of my favorite books of the year. I loved the symmetrical structure, the inter-narrative links, and the sense of vast time passing in this book. I suspect that if it had been written in the late ‘60s, it might have been published as a science fiction paperback, with a Richard Powers cover, instead of as a mainstream literary novel.

In nonfiction, I had a slow year. The only two that really stick out as memorable were in biology: The Big Oyster (Mark Kurlansky) is a delightful compendium of mostly accurate oyster facts and intriguing recipes, all set against the backdrop of New York City history. A Natural History of Sex (Adrian Forsyth) collects a lot of the more recent evolutionary thinking about sex and presents it through animal kingdom examples… some of which are totally, awesomely squirm-worthy.

Favorite Movies Seen in 2007

I saw a lot of mainstream theatrical releases this year, and had a great time at a lot of them. I’ve tried to narrow down my list to the ones that I’d see again.

As I mentioned in the books section, I’m a Harry Potter fan, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was my favorite film yet. I really like the actors better the older they get, and the films are getting better at special effects, costumes, sets, and plotting. Another film adaptation I loved was The Golden Compass. I completely understand why some of my friends who share my love of Pullman’s books did not like this movie, but I fell head-over-heels for the beautiful look of it, and the great casting work, too.

I love surfing movies, and I saw one this year that was a new twist on the old travel-surf idea. In Singlefin Yellow, one surfboard is shipped in turn to several different professional surfers around the world, each with a distinctive riding style. It’s fun to see how they apply their own techniques with the yellow board. Along those same lines, I thoroughly enjoyed watching animated penguins surf on hunks of ice in Surf’s Up.

For sheer, testosterone-driven action, I enjoyed both Spider-Man 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum. Enough said. For sheer, delightful parody of same, I cannot recommend Hot Fuzz highly enough. From the same guys that brought you Shaun of the Dead, this violent, surprising satire of American cop movies is excellent.

Documentaries are a big favorite with me, but this year I only saw two that were noteworthy. Michael Moore’s Sicko has a scene that both cracks me up and haunts me, as he hunts through a British hospital, looking for a cashier where people pay for treatment (he doesn’t find one, of course). A more harrowing story is told in God Grew Tired of Us, an almost unbelievably moving film about child soldiers in Africa now trying to make their way in the strange land of the United States.