The Written Nerd

Here are all the books I read (that I know of) in 2010, in crude alphabetical order. This doesn't include children's picture books, cookbooks, single-issue comics, magazines, or uh, the Internet. My own personal Best of the Year are highlighted in bold. And thanks to the superquick book search on greenlightbookstore.com (where, ahem, you can purchase any and all of these titles), you get pictures! The call for ideas is at the end. A. D.: New Orleans After the Deluge by Jo sh Neufeld ( reviewed ) Agents of Atlas by Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk ( reviewed ) Air, Volume 2: Flying Machine by G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Parker (reviewed) Arrow Pointing Nowhere by Elizabeth Daly (reviewed) Batwoman: Elegy by Greg Rucka, J. H. Williams, and Dave Stewart (reviewed) The Box of Delights by John Masefield: A Christmas book, quintessentially English in a Narnia kind of way, dreamy and eccentric and magical and stiff-upper-lip. Practically perfect. Co wboy Ninja Viking Volume 1...

You may have already seen this, but the ABA has officially announced that 115 new independent bookstores opened in 2007 ! Apparently, it's the third year in a row that we've seen over 100 new store openings. You can look here for the full list of new stores -- -- there may be a new indie store near you. I found 4 of them just in the five boroughs of New York -- woo hoo! I'll have to update my own ongoing list of local indies, which is currently pushing 70 -- I love to pull it out whenever anyone laments the fact that there are "no more independent bookstores" in New York, and we often use it at my bookstore to refer customers looking for something specific. Now they've got even more options. And more folks are discovering that's the case. In the Huffington Post last week, Michelle Haimoff writes about seven great New York indie bookstores , which she calls "The Secret New York Alternative to Barnes & Noble." McNally Robinson gets a ...

I've been feeling like a bit of a bad blogger lately. As my RSS feed clearly indicates, the blogosphere is filled with retrospectives, best-of lists, summaries of the year in reading, analyses of the state of literacy, bookstores, publishing, etc. in the year that's just ending. Last year I posted a list of all the books I'd read; this year I can't even do that, because I've lost track. (Resolution #1 for 2008: write down all books read, preferably on paper, so I can look back at them.) While I find myself unable to offer a sweeping, overarching point on the year in books, I have been having, rather typically, some personal year-end sorts of thoughts – about where I (and things) have been, where we're going, why are we doing this again, etc. (As Little Pete from Pete & Pete , the cult TV series of my youth, says in the New Year's Eve episode, "Everybody gets all wiggily on New Year's Eve thinking next year they're going to be better. Bu...