Best of 2008 Picks -- Jennifer Stevenson

2008 movies I fell for:

Lars and the Real Girl
This wins my personal prize for oddest good movie I saw this year. Troubled Lars tries to weird out his family and friends in his own tightly-wound Norwegian-American way, but they outweird him with pure love. I adored the inimitable Dr. Dagmar, the town shrink. But I'm a sucker for movie shrinks.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall
A much better movie than my friends credited. The thing about these filmmakers, Judd Apatow and his buddies, is that they aren't hateful. The most annoying characters in this film have heart, and they have merit, and they do good things once in a while. I personally adored the moronic English rocker. Too, too sweet. (Of course I didn't hate Knocked Up either, as some of my more humorless fellow feminists did. If the heroine of that one hadn't lost her rag now and then, she wouldn't have been real. In her shoes I'd have bought an Uzi.)

Good Luck Chuck
This may not be a 2008 picture, but I saw it this year. Another picture that got dumped on by women viewers and reviewers, and I suppose it was about all those fake boobies, and the hateful presentation of that large woman with acne. I personally viewed it as I do Apatow's pictures, a comic view into the male brain from the inside, so to speak; presented as flatteringly as possible ("Hey, I meant well") but also with some self-awareness. But not too much.

Great books new this year:

The New Moon's Arms, Nalo Hopkinson
I read this piecemeal, in manuscript, so it was supercool to get the real book in my hands and wallow in Hopkinson's fictitious island life and see menopause described the way it really is--magical and fucking annoying. Plus mermaids!

Pirate Freedom, Gene Wolfe
Awesome pirate neep, nonstop adventure, and a narrator voice both sweet and dry.

Flora's Dare, Ysabeau Wilce
Giant squid, blue butlers, tortured teen angst, what's not to love? Second installment on Flora Segunda, with a third to come, huzzah! The intelligent alternative to Harry Potter, and this one's for girls!

Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
Third in his Tiffany Aching young adult series about a child-witch from the Chalk Downs. Pratchett writes about Tiffany's teen crush--on the anthropomorphic personification of Winter--as if it is the first teen crush in the history of humankind. This is a pretty nifty feat, considering the sizeable body of literature. There can never be too many new Pratchett books.

Shadow Speaker, Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
This author specializes in Nigerian culture, whether realistic or, more often, as here, filtered through a lens of fantasy, near future science fiction, or mix of the two. I guarantee she will reach into your chest and grab your heart and squeeze it.

Grandmothers Against The War, Joane Wile
Nonfiction, a first-hand account of some New York grandmothers who got fed up with the war in Iraq and set about a campaign of civil difficult behavior that won them national attention.

As Good As It Got, Isabel Sharpe
Four women end up at a feel-good retreat for women recovering from the loss of a man. A weeper but with plenty of butt-kicking and fun.

Rediscovered books, or, Late to the party -- books published before 2008 but I read them in 2008

The Tyranny of the Night, and Lord of the Silent Kingdom, Glen Cook
These books are plain bizarre. A more-or-less seamless account, across two volumes, of endlessly complex interwove wars in an old world theatre of sort-of Britain and Europe and North Africa, all in thrall to the twin threats of an impending Ice Age and resurgent, malificent Old Gods. The voice is so dry, and the avalanche of detail about wars, alarums and preparations for war so exhaustive, good gravy, it ought to be dull, dull, dull to this fan of perky romantic comedy. But I couldn't stop reading it. I see no reason why there won't be any more; the world he's writing about seems to be capable of unlimited hostility, greed, and senseless violence. History doesn't stop; the historians just get tired, or die before their side loses. There may be more volumes to come. Damn, though. It completely held my interest.

Time Off For Good Behavior, Lani Diane Rich
This is what they mean by good snark. Rich's heroine has such a sour sense of humor that I find myself liking her from behind, so she won't catch me at it and bite my head off. I especially liked the delicate way she handled the stalker ex-husband, so often a device of painful hamhandedness in women's fiction.

Something Light, Margery Sharp
One of my favorite romantic comedies by an author better known for her Miss Bianca stories for children (about a mouse) and for rather long, thinky, emotional novels like Britannia Mews and Cluny Brown. The thinky books have become dated, although they have merit. But though the pall of the fifties hangs over women's heads in Something Light (1960) Sharp neither politicizes nor justifies it; it's just the world, and you can laugh both with and at her heroine without embarrassment.

Obits
(this is not part of your usual “best of” thing but I’m throwing it in, fwiw.)
Marjorie Minsk Kriz
Marge was, if not the earliest of my grandfather's girl reporter proteges, certainly one of his six favorites. She worked under him at Chicago City News Bureau back in the forties. She was very like him in temperament: brusque, decisive, stubborn, indomitable. You could just say German and leave it at that. Marge was widowed young; raised two kids in an era when single parenthood was not comme il faut; wrote Soaring Above Setbacks, a biography of Janet Harmon Bragg, the first black woman aviator in Chicago; championed the English language indefatigably against word harlots, ignorami, and the misinformed; favored gin and tonic with lime; and pampered the meanest and skinniest living Siamese cat. When the cat went, we knew Marge would go soon, as indeed she did. She read mysteries and smoked; otherwise she led a blameless life so far as her personal habits. When the phone rang at my grandparents' home out in the sticks, and my grandmother hollered, "Arnold, it's one of your blondes!" it was often Marge on the other end of the wire, ready for a tramp in the woods with her kids, my mom's kids, my grandparents, and all the dogs. She wasn't the nicest person I knew, but she had a terribly strong heart, which is often better: strong for taking life's hits, and strong for loving in her own cussed way. She was a piece of my own history and a measure of faded if still-valiant standards. I'll miss her.