2014 Best-Ofs!

  

Best Book Read

Fiction:

Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg.  Reviewed here.

Runner-Up:

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque

Non-fiction:

Prime Obsession, by John Derbyshire, not reviewed, except for a “READ IT NOW!” if you even mildly are interested in this sort of thing.

Runner-Up:

A Stillness at Appomattox, by Bruce Catton, reviewed, sorta, here.

Worst Read

Red Tide, reviewed here.  Loved it as a kid, disillusioned on a 2001 re-read, hated it in 2014.

Best Movie

Around the World in Eighty Days, DVR’d.  All around excellence: humor, action, vision, music.

Worse Movie

Godzilla (2014), seen in the theaters, reviewed here.  Worse more in a “disappointing” sense than a “bad / terrible” sense.

Best Movie Bonding Experience with my Girls

They’ve recently gotten really into watching “Svengoolie,” the show with the portly and weirdly-dressed ghoul who hosts cheesy black-and-white movies on channel 19, Me-TV.  Specifically, the episode which aired The Mummy’s Ghost (a movie which has the most awesomely-named dog in movie history…)

Runner-up: (tie) Planet of the Apes (the original Heston version), Fantastic Voyage 

Best Phase

The nominees:

Lovecraft (January-March)

Maths again (February-April)

Tolkien Revisited (May-June, October-November)

The Iliad (July)

Silverberg and Majipoor (July-August)

Ancient Egypt (August-September)

Fr. Cedric (August-October)

World War I (November-December)

… and the winner is …

Gotta be the six weeks / five hundred-plus pages I spent with Robert Silverberg on Majipoor.

Best Experience

Great Wolf Lodge, February 2014.  What a great idea for a mini-vacation winter break!

Runner-Up: Discovering my long lost physics book from my childhood.

Worst Experience

Watching that episode of Walking Dead with the two little girls, March 2014.  Damn you, Walking Dead!

Song of the Year

Uh, dunno.  Not really a “musical” year for me.  Didn’t buy any CDs.  Didn’t listen to much classical, preferring classic rock stuff I listened to when much younger.  Listened to a lot of Grateful Dead in the fall, a lot of Jethro Tull last month or so.  Considered picking up a Doors compilation/remaster sometime over the summer but wallet was too tapped out.  Played mostly Led Zeppelin on the guitar all year long.  So, if I had to pick something to pick something, I’d pick:

“Brokedown Palace” by the Grateful Dead, only because I played it for the girls in the car one rainy Saturday.  Little One thought it an “incredibly sad song,” but neither one paid it as much attention as I did.

Best Blog Post at the Hopper

This one!