I’m a bit crunched for time with Christmas coming up, so I don’t have the time to really sit and doodle up a cool graphic for this year’s award ceremonies here at Bio Break. I haven’t even really thought it through past today, but I’d hate to break a tradition. So take these as an award or just a “things I recommend that I saw/played/read/enjoyed this year.”
Today’s topic, best book I read in 2012.
Winner: Wool by Hugh Howey
Wool is a series of (currently) seven novels and novellas centering around a post-apocalyptic society that lives in a giant underground silo. It’s a fascinating idea that’s coupled with cool characters and lots of surprising twists. Books 1-5 are the core story, with 6-8 designed to be a prologue series of sorts.
Runner-ups
- Eli Monpress series by Rachel Aaron — Good light-hearted fantasy in a quite imaginative world where every object has a living, thinking spirit attached.
- Prince/King of Thorns by Mark Lawrence — A dark fantasy series with a completely rotten character as the protagonist. Yet you come to root for him, and that’s the amazing part.
- Pines by Blake Crouch — A “what the heck is going on in this weird small town” story. Kind of brutal and a little confusing, but worth it for the payoff.
- The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks — Weeks is a heckuva author, and it was great to return to his series where characters use color as their magic.
- The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King — Just a side story to the whole Dark Tower series, but still it was like coming home to return to this series for it.
- The Rook by Daniel O’Malley — Buffy crossed with the X-Files crossed with Harry Potter crossed with awesomeness.
- Zero Sight/Zero Sum by B. Justin Shier — Probably my most favorite series written by a medical doctor and starring a vampire.
- The Anathema by Zachary Rawlins — While I don’t care much for the main character (or, heck, many of the characters), it’s a ridiculously imaginative, intricate, and labyrinthine setting where characters with superpowers are trained in an academy and then sent off to join cabals that fight against each other.
- Leviathan Wakes and Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey — Great space opera stuff with a goody-two-shoes war hero, a depressed private eye, and a horrible threat that may just end everything in the solar system.
- Ready Player One by Ernest Cline — If you love 80s culture, MMOs, and a pretty neat look at what the future may hold in store, here you go.
- A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin — Way better than Feast of Crows, A Dance with Dragons continues the Song of Ice and Fire saga in a way that we’d expect: with lots of blood, surprises, and deaths.
- The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss — Not quite as good as The Name of the Wind, Rothfuss’ follow-up is nevertheless good reading with one of the most compelling main characters of modern fantasy fiction.
Bio Break 
I was asked to do this for work a couple of weeks back and I was quite surprised to find I didn’t have a single fantasy or SF title in my dozen favorite adult novels of the year. Top by a margin was Dana Spiottta’s enigmatic and haunting “Stone Arabia”, closely followed by a a pack of mostly American contemporary fiction from the likes of John Dee, Chad Harbach, Nell Freudenberger and so on.
I had been extremely keen to read Rothfuss’s follow-up to the brilliant “The Name of the Wind” but I didn’t manage to get a freebie and word-of-mouth from several people I know who’d read it and were disappointed put me off laying down actual money. I’ll get to it eventually.
One of the previews shown at my theater before The Hobbit was a post-apocalyptic setting that had a few survivors in it, and hinted at some kind of secret goings-on being kept from the hero. There was a shot of a woman in a bio-suspension tube-type device, and it ended with the hero screaming at a different woman “What did you do??????”
I don’t remember the name of the movie, but my first thought was “Hey, that looks like a lot like “Wool”!
I have Pines on the Kindle ready to go, and just got The Rook based on your review. Now if I could only find a way to read and get my LOTRO dailies done at the same time! (I know – audio book, but I like the game music too much to replace it.)
Ordered about half of these. I look forward to breaking into some new authors/stories.
The Twelve by Justin Cronin came out shortly before the end of the year. It is the 2nd part in a series with The Passage being the first part. Incredible post apocalyptic tale! Think The Stand crossed with I Am Legend.