Best of 2008 Picks -- Elizabeth Bear

The request to list a Best Of 2008 was a real challenge for me this year, as I didn't spend a lot of time on music and books this year, what with one thing and another, and I didn't find a lot of new things that I really loved. So I'm afraid that my "Best of" will be anything but encyclopedic, and it will include things from earlier years that I only just got around to.

Best chocolate: This is a sad category for me this year, as it appears that Lake Champlain Chocolates (my favorite chocolatiers) have stopped making both their Mexican spicy truffles and the spicy orange chocolate bar, leaving me bereft. Green & Black's Maya Gold is a somewhat acceptable substitute, but the year in chocolate is salvaged by my discovery of a tiny little shop hidden in a strip mall down the street from my archery range, in post-industrial Manchester, Connecticut: Divine Treasures Chocolates, who also do business by internets, and produce amazing organic vegan chocolates. Highly recommended.

Best film? Also hard, as I think I saw a grand total of three movies in the theatre this year, and they were all about comic book characters. Of those, the clear winner is The Dark Knight, despite some flaws in structure and pacing and a couple of plot holes and moments of ...curious... characterization. Heath Ledger's Joker was a standout performance, rightly hailed.

Best television remains Criminal Minds, the inexplicable top-ten hit in which seven profoundly traumatized geeky geniuses attempt to save as many people as they can from the meat grinder of the American family, and sometimes even succeed. Bonus events for SF fans in 2008 include guest appearances by Nicholas Brendon and Wil Wheaton. Last year, I also watched The Wire, True Blood, Doctor Who, Life, House, Leverage (it's sort of what you'd get if you crossed Hustle with The A Team, and unfortunately not as good as the former or as much fun as the latter), Mythbusters, Iron Chef America, and Life on Mars, as well as some older stuff. Of those I recommend The Wire (with reservations: its dedication to dystopia eventually makes it predictable), Life (charming and often delightful, if shallow, and it has the best incidental music choices of anything I've ever seen), House (as long as you treat it like a situation comedy and don't think about the moral implications or thematic arguments too hard), Mythbusters (duh), and Iron Chef. Apparently, I didn't read many books because I was watching television instead. It was kind of nice: I haven't actually watched much TV in about a decade, so it was fun to catch up.

Best fiction: I only read 44 books in 2008, which is probably an all-time low. The standouts for fiction were Caitlin R. Kiernan's A Murder of Angels (beautifully written and chilling, if dark enough that it gave even I pause on occasion), Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island (not as brilliant as Mystic River, but an awfully good suspense novel), and an Elizabeth Moon novel of fame and vintage, The Speed of Dark, which I had somehow never read before. Best first novel: Christopher Barzak's One For Sorrow (a meditative ghost story about a young man's coming of age in a rustbelt town) and Amanda Downum's The Drowning City, which has spies, pirates, tropical diseases, blackest necromancy, volcanoes, and curry. The second of those isn't actually out yet, but I got to read it in draft, and it will be forthcoming from Orbit US in 2010. Perks of the job, man.

Best Music? Let's see here. Gram Rabbit's Music To Start A Cult To (CD stolen out of my car last spring, but fortunately I had already ripped it) is one for which I blame Ms. Emma Bull. I got it just at the very end of 2007, but was listening to it for the first time at 4 A.M. on January 2nd of last year, on the way to the hospital to attend the birth of my godson, Sunil. Fond associations aside, it's an awfully good album. Standout tracks include "Cowboy Up," "Dirty Horse," "Kill a Man," and "Devil's Playground," which I have actually been hearing as background music on the TV show Life (see above). Who Killed Amanda Palmer has been getting a lot of spin on the internet from people much more famous than I, and rightfully so. This solo album from the lead singer of the Dresden Dolls is bouncy, bitter, scathing, and incisive by turns. Good stuff. The one that's really getting nausea rotation on Winamp, though, is Ane Brun's Changing of the Seasons, which is ethereal Swedish popfolk. Beautiful, haunting, layered. And clever, clever, clever. And any album with a paen to Gillian Welch on it has a selling point up front. I heard a song or two from this on Radio Paradise, popped by her Myspace page, and promptly bought the album. I love living in the future. Emma also got me into Matt Nathanson this year, but I'm afraid I didn't do a lot of album listening--more cherrypicking songs off Amazon MP3 downloads. Anyway, he's a lot of fun, even more so live, and seems to tour relentlessly. I highly recommend popping by a concert if he's in your neck of the woods. 2008 was also a banner year for live music for me, which is probably another reason I didn't see as many movies or books as I usually might. Real standouts--Andrew Bird at the Music Hall of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Matt Nathanson at the Webster in Hartford, Connecticut, and several shows at the Iron Horse in Northampton, Massachusetts: Vienna Teng, Chris Smither, John Gorka, Jonathan Coulton. And that was my 2008 in entertainment, the high points version.