Tuesday, January 04, 2011

2010: Look Back in Peevishness

What did I write in 2010? Not many blog posts, that's for damn sure. As far as book reviews went, I probably contributed one or two fewer to The Chronicle than usual.

Round-ups are supposed to appear every six weeks, but there were some extended gaps, due to a frequent lack of space on the newspaper's part and sometimes a lack of concentration on mine. Here are the titles covered the past year:

January 24 -- Peter Straub's "A Dark Matter"," "Things We Didn't See Coming" by Steven Amsterdam and "Northwest Passages" by Barbara Roden.

March 7 -- Dan Simmons' "Black Hills," "Horns" by Joe Hill, "The Extra" by Michael Shea and Kage Baker's "Not Less Than Gods."

April 25 -- "Expiration Date" By Duane Swierczynski, "Blockade Billy" by Stephen King, "Darkness: Two Decades of Modern Horror" edited by Ellen Datlow, and "Planetary: Spacetime Archaeology" by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday.

June 27 -- Christopher Farnsworth's "Blood Oath," "I Am Not a Serial Killer" by Dan Wells, "Stories" edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

August 8 -- "The Loving Dead" by Amelia Beamer, "Kraken" by China Mieville and Matt Kindt's "Revolver."

October 3 -- "Shades of Milk and Honey" by Mary Robinette Kowal, Charles Yu's "How to Survive in a Science Fictional Universe" and "The Fuller Memorandum" by Charles Stross.

December 5 -- "Dreadnought" by Cherie Priest, "The Dead Path" by Stephen M. Irwin and Catherynne M. Valente's "The Habitation of the Blessed."

I summed everything up in a "Best of the Year" column, although I prefer to think of it as a "Notable Books I Happened to Read and Like" list.

I also wrote a handful stand-alone reviews for The Chronicle:

"Known to Evil" by Walter Mosley
"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest" by Stieg Larsson
"The Passage" by Justin Cronin
"Zero History" by William Gibson
 "Skippy Dies" by Paul Murray

What's up for 2011? I've almost finished reading the next batch of books for my January column, and I've got dibs on a stand-alone for Kate Atkinson's "Started Early, Took My Dog." I'm also going to make more of an effort this year to pitch to other markets. I'll let you know what happens.

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