Read and Appreciated in 2003

A Year’s Best List

By Gabe Chouinard

Originals · Listmania! 2003 · January 12, 2004

2003 was an awesome year for the reader that dared to look beyond the bestseller shelves, who gathered the courage to seek out some of the hidden gems that may have been buried beneath the stacks of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. It was a year chock-a-block full of excellent work that ranged the spectrum of genres, or glimmered in between.

What makes the Fantastic Metropolis’ Read and Appreciated feature my favorite ‘best of’ list, however, is its inclusiveness, its flexibility. In the city that is Like No Place Else, it’s encouraged to bend the rules to include anything that has been Read and Appreciated, whether it’s an advance copy of Richard K. Morgan’s Broken Angels (coming to US shelves in March 2004) or a tattered old Bantam paperback edition of Walter Tevis’ Mockingbird from the mid-Eighties. These lists are more intimate, glimpses of each others’ lives through the course of a year via art, rather than staid ol’ year’s best lists.

Personally, I’ve read and appreciated… well, I think the technical term is “a shitload of great stuff”. This was an intensive reading year, as I tried to keep abreast of an avalanche of new works while simultaneously taking advantage of the bounteous flowering of reprint material that continues to appear almost daily. Not to mention those many, many hours spent combing the shelves at various second-hand stores in search of missed treasures.

Thankfully, though, I’ve discovered a purpose for keeping a weblog online. With so many books and stories clamoring for attention, it was easy to comb the archives of my blog in an effort to jar my memory. Take note—blogs aren’t just meaningless fluffery anymore! They too can have a purpose!

Coincidentally, the web itself, and various weblogs in particular, contributed enormously to my reading and appreciating. In many ways, the internet has revolutionized the very act of my reading, whether as a source of material alone or as a constant pointer to works I would have missed without fervent recommendation. So I would be remiss if I did not include some of my daily or weekly reads here, in no particular order of favoritism:

And a host of others!

But though the net provides essential reading material, there’s still nothing quite like the feel and smell of a good book.

Once again, PS Publishing tops my list of favorite publishers. Always elegant, always high quality, PS Publishing is one of the best presses around. Their stable of authors is unsurpassed for pure skill and talent, and I have yet to find a PS Publishing offering that I did not like.

There were standouts, however. In particular, Adam Roberts’ excellent novella Jupiter Magnified has been seared in my memory as one of the best tales of the year. Combining poetics and science fiction in a way that is simultaneously experimental yet accessible, Roberts has honed his skill to new levels with Jupiter Magnified. It’s intriguing, and if you can find a copy you should snap it up immediately. Likewise affecting were Paul Di Filippo’s uproarious Fuzzy Dice, Robert Freeman Wexler’s haunting In Springdale Town (which flat out gave me the creeps), and Elizabeth Hand’s excellent collection of four novellas, Bibliomancy. Also of note is Floater by Lucius Shepard, a freaky voodoo-laced thriller that skirts the edges of reality with a scalpel’s precision.