What I Read in 2013

Here's the list of books I knocked over last year:

About Time vols. 2-5 by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles
Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe
English Grammar Essentials for Dummies
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Sub-Mariner Vol. 1 by Bill Everett
Sandman vols. 1-9 by Neil Gaiman
A Memory of Light by Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan
The Quest for Tanelorn by Michael Moorcock
The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Beasts of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells
In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells
The Sleeper Awakes by H.G. Wells
The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
The War in the Air by H.G. Wells
The Wheels of Chance by H.G. Wells
Kipps by H.G. Wells
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov
Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules verne
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
The Armageddon Rag by George R.R. Martin
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone
The Citadel of Chaos by Steve Jackson
The Forest of Doom by Ian Livingstone
Starship Traveller by Steve Jackson
City of Thieves by Ian Livingstone
Deathtrap Dungeon by Ian Livingstone
Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrance Dicks
Good On Paper by Andrew Morgan

So I read fifty-two books last year, which is the most I've done in a long while. It came at the expense of my comic reading, but them's the breaks.

H.G. Wells was the obvious winner here, with twelve entries to his name. I have a lot of time to listen to audiobooks while I'm at work, but I also don't have a lot of money to spend; consequently, I've been listening to a lot of works in the public domain. I started with Mr. Wells, determined to get through as many of his books as I could find, naturally starting with the sci-fi and working outwards. I enjoyed his better-known works well enough, but was surprised to find some gems further down the list. The First Men in the Moon was particularly entertaining, and I was oddly touched by The Wheels of Chance, a book about a downtrodden draper's assistant going on a bicycle holiday. On the whole I think he's a better writer when working outside of the science fiction genre; the characters are more vivid, the worlds more well-realised. His sci-fi books were more innovative, and more immediately iconic, though, and thus much more well-remembered.

I also delved into the other two grandfathers of sci-fi, Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Verne was enjoyable, if a touch episodic for my tastes. Burroughs I loved. The first Tarzan book is much better than you'd expect, and his John Carter novels are tons of fun. They get repetitive after a while, and Burroughs' reliance on coincidence borders on the absurd, but for pulp action-adventure of the era you can't do much better. He's possibly the earliest author that I'd read for pure pleasure.

George Martin's The Armageddon Rag was very good. A Memory of Light was a fitting wrap up to the epic Wheel of Time series. Sandman was pretty much as amazing as I'd been led to believe.

The Worst Book I Read in 2013: I'm giving this to the gamebook Starship Traveller by Steve Jackson. It's a lazy piece of design from a normally brilliant gamebook writer. Doctor Who and the Claws of Axos by Terrance Dicks was a contender, but I had to admire the ruthless efficiency of its prose; while I didn't enjoy it particularly, it certainly did the job it set out to do. Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Sub-Mariner Vol. 1 was also in the running, but in comparison to other comics of the 1940s it's rather good.

The Best Book I Read in 2013: This is tough. Looking at the list objectively it's probably Moby Dick, only I found that book to be extremely tough going.  The Armageddon Rag was damned good, utterly gripping. There are probably a good four or five Sandman volumes that could win it. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is my favourite book of all time, but I'll discount it on the grounds of nostalgia-blindness. A Memory of Light must be acknowledged for the sheer magnitude of the task that Brandon Sanderson pulled off, and pulled off well. But I think I'm going to give it to Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman and various artists. It's a volume of short stories mostly divorced from the ongoing saga, but each of them is brilliant. I find that I like Gaiman's work best in the short form, and here he knocks it out of the park with every story.

Reading Plans for 2014: I'm going to continue with the classics, as I have an iPod and the spare time to use it. Once I've listened to all the Burroughs books in the public domain I'll branch out into some less genre-based stuff, maybe Jane Austen or Dickens. I'd also like to read some more modern works. Of all the books I read last year, only three were written within the last few years, so I want to focus on some genre fiction by modern authors.  Perhaps China Mieville or Patrick Rothfuss or Joe Abercrombie. My tastes have become a little stale and old-fashioned. Also, I want to read more comics. There are literally tens of thousands of stories set in the Marvel Universe that I haven't read. I'd like to remedy that.

WHAT ELSE I'M WORKING ON:

It's still the three major projects at the moment. I'm nearly finished a first draft of part 1 of The Lightless Labyrinth. Once that's done I might fling it out into the wild to be savaged by vicious alpha readers. I've nailed down a format for the Marvel Guidebook I'm working on, and am now knuckling down to do the writing. I plan on creating a test volume containing all the Marvel super-hero comics from 1961, just to see how it comes out and whether it actually makes for a good read or not. Finally, I've just about hashed out the story for Jack Manley and the Interchronal Deathmatch Tournament, which will be the opening storyline if I decide to go ahead with an ongoing serial.

PROGRESS THIS WEEK:

The Lightless Labyrinth - 1,948 words
Marvel Guidebook - 1,455 words

OTHER TIME-WASTING ACTIVITIES:

What I've Been Reading
Daredevil by Brian Michael Bendis & Alex Maleev Ultimate Collection Vol. 1 by those guys in the title
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs

What I've Been Watching
Transformers: The Movie (the rad animated one, not the crap recent one)

What I've Been Listening To
Armageddon by Guy Sebastian (not by choice, even though it's quite a good pop record)

What I've Been Playing
Super Mario Galaxy on the Nintendo Wii