Cavalcade of Awesome

Well, I was shocked in 2022 that I had read the most books I’d ever logged…EVER.  And then, in 2023, I managed to top that.  Which is crazy to me because in November and December I kind of stopped reading for a while due to work.  Let’s dig into one of my most weirdly productive years ever.

As always, you can find my reading log on Goodreads. My reading goal for 2023 was 200.  And according to Goodreads, I finished out the year with 275 books.  Again, I smashed all my previous reading totals. It’s even more remarkable to me because around November, I had a streak of books/comics that I didn’t like and it killed my momentum for a month.  So this total could have been higher.

Let’s take a look at some of the GoodReads stats for 2023.

I’m pretty happy with what I was able to read this year.  Looking at it, I think I’m comic book heavy in my overall totals.  Most of that was because, like I said, in Oct-Nov, I hit a snag where I just couldn’t read any books.  It just wasn’t happening.  That’s why I’m surprised I got as much read as I did.

Let’s look at the numbers of some of the things I read.

Going over my spreadsheet, it looks like I read roughly 64 novels.  The rest were comics issues and trade paperbacks.  In the image above you can see my shortest and longest book I read.  Over Halloween I read several Poe stories.  Cask was one of them.  I also read Murders in the Rue Morgue and Masque of the Red Death.  I enjoyed them.  Longest book I read is that Return of the Living Dead Complete History.  I love that movie.  And that book was excellent.  However, full disclosure, I wound up only reading the chapters for the first three movies.  I did not care about parts 4 and 5.  That came out to about 2/3 of the whole book, not the full 751 pgs.

Here are my “most popular” and “least popular” shelved books.  Most popular was The Song of Achilles, which is EXCELLENT, btw.  Wow over 3 million other people read that last year.  And exactly 0 people read Tim Holt Western Magazine #11.  That doesn’t surprise me, but if you were wondering why I read it, it’s because that is the first appearance of the original Ghost Rider, when he was a heroic but mysterious gunslinger.

Let’s move on with my recap of my favorite books I read this year.

Rules are the same as every year.  Only books/comics I read for the first time in 2023 are eligible for this list.  No re-reads, of which I typically had a few.  I don’t usually read brand new stuff the year it comes out, but it happens.

Here are the top 5 books I read last year in no particular order. Images and links are from GoodReads pages.

Books

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller – This was recommended to me by a family member.  I’m a big fan of the Trojan War and the 2004 movie Troy, so I thought this might be an interesting read.  It is FANTASTIC.  It’s a retelling of The Iliad, but from the point of view of Achilles’ partner.  In the movie Troy, that character is his cousin, but in The Iliad and this book, he’s more of a companion and lover.  I loved this book.  It’s a fantastic retelling.  The characters are great.  I loved it.  So much so I also read Miller’s follow up, Circe.  That is a retelling of The Odyssey and also fantastic.  And then I read two of her short stories, Galatea, and Heracles’ Bow.  I’m anxiously awaiting her next book.

The Curse of Capistrano (aka The Mark of Zorro) by Johnston McCulley – I kind of got into a Zorro kick in 2023.  I’ve wanted to read the original Zorro story for many years, and in 2023 I finally did it.  And it is so much fun.  Lots of action.  Great characters.  Fun dialogue.  I was thrilled.  It’s everything I wanted a Zorro story to be.  So I read the next two McCulley Zorro stories as well; The Further Adventures of Zorro, and Zorro Rides Again.  I loved all of them.  They are really fun stories.  I hope to keep going through McCulley’s Zorro series, but I don’t know how many full stories are left.  I think a lot of them are short stories.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High – Cameron Crowe – I’m a huge fan of the 1982 movie.  Have been for years.  Finally was able to read a copy of the really hard to find book that was the basis for the movie.  And it didn’t disappoint.  The basic structure of the movie is there, but there’s a lot of extra content and even a few extra characters.  Cameron Crowe wrote a fun book and managed to capture what it was like to be a teen in high school in the late 70s-early 80s.

On Target (The Gray Man #2) – Mark Greaney –  I really enjoyed the first Gray Man novel (as well as the movie), so I thought I’d try the second book.  And it delivers.  Lots of action packed adventure.  Court finds himself as a double agent sent on a mission for a Russian gangster.  He’s supposed to assassinate an African dictator, but he works a deal with his old office, the CIA, to kidnap him instead and deliver him to them.  In return Court will get back in their good graces and can stop running from agents sent to kill him.  This was very twisty-turny.  I love Court as a character.  His mission goes sideways, of course.  Lots of fun.  Can’t wait to read more.  And hopefully they can pump out a few more Gray Man movies with Ryan Gosling.

Let’s switch over to comics! Here are the top 5 comics I read last year in no particular order.

Comics

I Hate Fairyland (2022) – I was a HUGE fan of the original run of this comic by Skottie Young.  And at the end of 2022 Young decided to return to this world.  Gert, the protagonist/antagonist from the previous run, returned to Earth, but realized that since she spent so long in Fairyland, she had no life skills.  So she has trouble keeping a job.  Then a tech guru wants Gert to go back to Fairyland to find his son who disappeared there.  I’ve read the 10 issues or so that they’ve released so far.  It’s really good, a lot of fun, and I love the art.  The first 5-6 issues felt like they were building up to something really big, and the last 4 issues felt like they were told to “wrap it up” by the publisher and it felt a bit rushed.  The story I mean.  There are a ton of action montages that briskly go over a lot of action.  That’s a small nitpick though because the issues in question are still really good.  And the art is always cartoonishly fantastic.

Batman: White Knight by Sean Murphy –  I finally dug into the Murphyverse in 2023.  And I loved it.  I read all three White Knight series; White Knight, Curse of the White Knight, and Beyond the White Knight.  As well as all the mini-series in between.  Murphy has built up this excellent Batman universe with compelling iterations of your favorite characters.  Particularly Jack Napier/Joker.  I thought I was over any more Joker adaptations, but Murphy nailed his version.  It’s so good.  As is his Harley Quinn.  For the first two books, I almost didn’t really even like Batman, he’s kind of a jerk, but that’s part of what Murphy is trying to do.  And it worked for me.  This is a great series of stories.  I look forward to more.

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest by Mark Waid (writer) and Dan Mora (art) – I love Mark Waid as a writer.  His Kingdom Come is for me, pound for pound, the best look at mythology and super heroes bar none.  And yes, I’m including Watchmen and Dark Knight.  So it was such a fun surprise to see Waid take on this title and have so much fun with it.  He really plays around with the history of these characters and how their friendship works.  And he brings in the Bat family, the Supes family, and tons of other heroes.  This ongoing book is a joyful celebration of DC, its characters, and its history.  You won’t believe the places this title goes in later issues.  Oh, and Dan Mora’s art is THE BEST.  It’s so clean and iconic.  I really love it.

Superior Spider-man by Christos Gage –  Superior Spider-man has become one of my favorite characters.  Originally written by Dan Slott, Christos Gage takes over in this series.  I love the concept that, on his death bed, Otto Octavius switches minds and bodies with Peter Parker, leaving Parker to die in his place and him to take over being Spider-man.  And no one realizes it!  Otto continues to try to be a better Spider-man than Parker ever was, but he has trouble working with other people.  He certainly beefs up Peter’s operation and does seem to make it more efficient.  This is a really great series.  They are bringing Superior Spider-man back this year, and it’s written by Dan Slott, so count me excited!

Jughead by Chip Zdarsky –  I think I’ve mentioned I was a big fan of Mark Waid (again!) and Veronica Fish’s reinvention of Archie. This was a follow up series to that, written by the great Chip Zdarsky and Ryan North who took over in later issues.  I really loved their version of Jughead.  They also bring in Sabrina who I also love their version of her.

And there you go, some of my favorite things I read in 2023.  This was a kind of tough choice, I did have a few really good things that didn’t make the list.  I always threaten it, but maybe I’ll do an “honrable mention” article to talk about a few of the other books/comics that didn’t make the list.

Hope you enjoyed this article and found something new that you may eventually love.  Let me know if you do!

So that covers the year end articles for IRM, and now the things I’ve read.  Next up…MOVIES!!  This year, I’ve actually been taking my time with movies.  I’m rewatching several I felt needed rewatches and I’m even for the first time watching a few movies I missed in 2023 to see if they’d make it into my favs list.  Normally I don’t allow that.  Let’s see if it changes anything!

2022 was, for some weird reason, a very productive reading year for me. I reached the highest amount of books/comics read, EVER. So let’s dig into that.

You can find my reading log on Goodreads. I log everything I read there. My reading goal for 2022 was 150.  And according to Goodreads, I finished out the year with 241 books.  I smashed all my previous reading totals. I was even in a position in December where I was within readch of 250, but work was really busy at that time and I didn’t really try to read a few quick things to up the number. Gotta leave some goals for next year, right?

Let’s take a look at some of the GoodReads stats for 2022.

It’s not all novels, obviously, I read a lot of comics as well.  And depending on how GoodReads has you log them, it can inflate your totals.  But I’m pretty happy with how much I got read this past year.

Let’s look at the numbers of some of the things I read.

Here’s my shortest and longest book I read.  Shortest is an issue of a comic.  Not surprising.  I started that Tom Taylor Nightwing series last year and I’m loving it.  It’s so good.  The longest is, surprisingly, another comic.  I reread the X-men: Inferno story arc.  I hadn’t read that since it came out in 1989.  And I only read the collection of the main mutant titles; X-Men, X-Factor, New Mutants, and X-Terminators.  Even just that was a lot, but there’s a whole separate collection of all the tie-in books.  At least 20 more issues of tangentially related books.  I had to draw the line there.  Inferno is great, but…no.

Here are my “most popular” and “least popular” shelved books.  Most popular was Jurassic Park.  I re-read that last year for the first time since the summer the movie came out.  It’s still a pretty great book.  I’m hoping to re-read the sequel, The Lost World, this year.   Look at that, over a million other people shelved Jurassic Park last year.  That’s crazy.  Wow.

And the least popular book I shelved was The Story of Breakin’.  Which is supposed to be an oral history of the making of the movie.  Don’t get me started on that.  It’s enthusiastic, but it’s not great.

Let’s move on with my recap of my favorite books I read this year.

Rules are the same as every year.  Only books/comics I read for the first time in 2022 are eligible for this list.  No re-reads, of which I typically had a few.  I don’t usually read brand new stuff the year it comes out, but it happens.  This year I read 5 novels that were released in 2022.  One of those 5 was a “did not finish”.  Let’s see if any of them made the list.

Here are the top 5 books I read last year in no particular order.

Images and links are from GoodReads pages.

Books

Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo – The currently final book in the Shadow and Bone series. All of this series has made it onto my year end lists in some form or another. The final two books are a duology focusing on Nicolai, who is my favorite character. The book before this, King of Scars, was a very slow starter, so I was concerned going into this.  However, this book was a fantastic ending (?) to the saga.  The story was good, characters arcs wrapped up nicely, it was so much fun.  This whole series is good, but my favorites are the middle two books, Six of Crows, and Crooked Kingdom. Leigh Bardugo is currently one of my favorite writers.  All of her books are really fun and have really good dialogue and characters.

Showtime!: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman – I’m a huge fan of pre-2000s NBA documentaries and biographies. I’ve read a couple huge oral histories of the NBA and the ABA, and tons of books about players and teams including Larry Bird, Pete Maravich, Wilt Chamberlain, and the Celtics.  This was one I never read.  It’s what the HBO series Winning Time! is loosely based on.  So after really enjoying season 1 of Winning Time! I decided to give this a shot.  And it’s everything I wanted it to be.  Pretty much an oral history of the Los Angeles Lakers starting around the year before Magic was drafted in 1979 and ends right around his (first) retirement in 1991.  It’s a lot of information but it’s a lot of fun to see all the locker room shenanigans the team got into.  And not just the players, Jerry Buss was kind of a wild man as well.  This was a really fun read.

Just One Damned Thing After Another (Chronicles of St Marys Book 1) by Jodi Taylor – Being a huge devotee of time travel books, I’ve been lurking on these St Mary’s books for a while.  Currently I’ve read a short prequel to the series, this first book, and the second book.  I think there are currently 14 books in the series.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get to finish the full series, but the first two books are really really good.  There’s a St Mary’s Institute for Historical Research at the University of Thirsk in London.  It studies historical events in “contemporary time”.  Which is a fancy way of saying, they travel back in time and study historical events.  In this book time travel exists and this research institute uses it to bolster the human record of the past.  However, the quirky staff at the Institute are disaster magnets and anything that can go wrong will.  It’s the characters that are the highlight here but there is some good time jumping action.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi – I’ve always wanted to read John Scalzi but I never pulled the trigger. I read a sample of his book Redshirts, but never actually finished it.  However this came out in February 2022, and my library had a copy online, so I quickly checked it out. And this is a lot of fun.  At first glance you think, “It’s essentially Jurassic Park”.  Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  I read another book in that pastiche that I liked a few years ago called The Great Zoo of China.  They can be a lot of fun.  This story obviously isn’t Earthbound.  The goverment discovers a portal to another dimension and a land filled with kaiju.  They set up a research station in that dimension to learn more about the creatures.  It doesn’t really go the way you expect, ie the kaiju run rampant killing people.  It’s actually more of a people villain that causes a bunch of havok, but it’s certainly a lot of fun.  And the way the research station works and the variety of kaiju are definitely interesting.

One Impossible Labyrinth (Jack West Jr Book 7) by Matthew Reilly – I started this series way back in 2010. It’s showed up on my year end list several times, as has the author, Matthew Reilly.  This is the final book in Reilly’s Jack West Jr series which is a big, epic, adventure series akin to Indiana Jones, but even bigger.  There’s a lot to digest here, it’s not just a one off book, you’re gonna need to read the series from the beginning or you’re gonna be lost.  And as a finale, this book nailed it.  I love this series, but the last three or four books have just been exquisite.  Reilly really knows how to write action and keep the plot moving.  So fun.

As usual, I also read a bunch of movie novelizations this year for I Read Movies.  However, I don’t include those in this list.  I do a separate write up for I Read Movies year end.  Check it out here.

Let’s switch over to comics! Here are the top 5 comics I read last year in no particular order.

Comics

All-New Wolverine by Tom Taylor and David Lopez – I love Laura Kinney (X-23), so I was very curious about this title where she takes over the mantle of the dead (at the time) Wolverine. I think this was also the title that introduced me to writer Tom Taylor.  This is such a great series.  I read the first three volumes in the title and I love every minute of it.  Laura gets a quirky group of characters around her and they have these awesome adventures.  I really enjoyed it.

Nightwing by Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo, and Neil Edwards – So I loved Tom Taylor from All-New Wolverine, and I kind of do like Nightwing. Actually, it wasn’t really Nightwing that drew me to this, it was Taylor and all the buzz he was getting about how good this title is. So I gave it a shot.  Taylor takes over in issue #78 and I’ve read through about issue #94.  The title is GREAT.  I love Dick as Nightwing in this.  I love Barbara Gordon.  I love that the Titans show up every once in a while.  Blockbuster is the main villain, but he’s more a terrifying mob boss than he is the smash first monster that I’m used to.  This is a really good title that I’m continuing to read because I enjoy all the characters.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl by Ryan North and Erica Henderson – I’ll admit, the buzz for this one actually kept me away.  The art is weird, I didn’t get the character, and it just seemed like this whole Squirrel Girl “thing” was just not for me.  But I kept hearing from people it’s really good, so towards the end of last year, I decided to just give it a shot.  And you know what?  I really liked it.  Ryan’s humor is a lot of fun.  He writes extra comments in the margins of the comic that are pretty weird and funny.  The first page of each comic is a Twitter-like conversation between Squirrel Girl and other heroes which is hilarious.  I just really enjoyed Squirrel Girl’s positivity and outlook.  I’ll be honest, Erica Henderson’s art takes some getting used to.  Everyone looks weird.  But over time it just works.  You get used to it.  North’s Squirrel Girl adventures remind me a lot of Christopher Hastings Gwenpool series from a few years ago.  Very much enjoyed this.

Batman: Three Jokers by Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok – I was reluctant to get into this one because I don’t really want an investigation into the nature of The Joker.  The Joker, to me, is a force of nature, an agent of chaos.  I don’t need him defined.  This does that, to a point, but it’s a really good look at how the Joker has affected the lives of Jason Todd, Barbara Gordon, and to an extent, Batman.  In the book we learn there are three Jokers; The Clown, The Criminal, and The Comedian.  And we learn how each one works.  It’s really well done and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  Jason Fabok’s art is fantatic as well.

Maniac of NY vol 2 – The Bronx is Burning by Elliot Kalan and Andrea Mutti – The followup to the original Maniac of NY.  I really like this book.  This continues the story of how New York City would deal with having a mysterious, unkillable movie slasher that can disappear and reappear at will.  You have the burned out detective on the slasher swat squad, you have the disaffected mayor, you have the cynical police force.  It’s really good.  However, there are some frustrations, but I think the comic knows they are frustrations.  The book lays out a few “hints” to the back story and nature of the killer, Harry.  Total plot threads like certain spots of the city that he seems to avoid.  And a few other things that point to a possible weakness.  However, nothing is ever picked up on.  They are completely left dangling.  It’s possible these threads will be picked up again for the possible upcoming part 3, but as a reader, that’s fascinating and frustrating in equal measures because I really enjoy this book.

And those were my favorite books and comics I read in 2022. I’ll maybe have a followup article to this talking about some Honorable Mentions.  You know, things that maybe I liked that almost made the list, but also things I didn’t like and really want to talk about.

Hope you enjoyed this article and found something new that you may eventually love.  Let me know if you do!

Okay, that covers EVERYTHING I’ve read.  Next up…MOVIES!  Stay tuned.