Some Books and Other Things
A Year’s Best List
Stay by Nicola Griffith. It wouldn’t have seemed possible for a sequel to surpass The Blue Place, but Griffith does it. Her Aud Torvingen, brilliant, cool, in constant battle with her own deep emotions, has become a real presence.
Powers (vol. 1, vol. 2), ongoing comic book by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming. In all his books Bendis displays his deep sense of character, his incredible ear for dialogue, and his outrageous takes on superhero and cop motifs. But Powers is his flagship title, and it just gets better and better. But then, so does Alias, and Daredevil.
Promethea (vol. 1, vol. 2, vol. 3), ongoing comic by Alan Moore, J. H. Williams III, and Mick Gray. No one stretches the possibilities of comics like Alan Moore. Promethea is a superhero who is a living story. The comic is sexy, funny, and not incidentally the first comic to delineate the ideas of Kabbalah. I was working on a book about the Tree of Life this year, and Promethea turned out to be the best source for understanding the sephiroth.
Dreams of Being Eaten Alive, David Rosenberg. A book on Kabbalah that treats it as myth and literature rather than abstract ideas. Brilliant.
The Heart of Katmandhu, Yoel Hoffman. Hoffman is a professor of philosophy in Haifa who writes gorgeous novels that feature innocents confronting the universe. I would call his style dream-like, except that no one’s dreams are so wonderful.
Feed, M. T. Anderson. YA sf novel about a future in which everyone gets the internet directly into their brains. Funny and sad, in pitch-perfect teen jargon style.
Demon In My View, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. This is the second of Atwater-Rhodes’s four vampire novels (more to come, I hope), the first written when she was 13. They are all sharply written and morally complex, but the second is structurally the most daring.
Sacred Drift, Peter Lamborn Wilson. A Sufi and an anarchist, Wilson writes about the mystical outlaws of Islam.
The Throne of Labdacus, Gertrude Schnackenberg. A booklength poem about Oedipus, Apollo, oracles, and the sources of poetry.
Der Margarete Petersen Tarot. Few Tarot decks have even approached the level of art that Petersen reaches in picture after picture. Available (for now) only in German.
Copyright © 2002 by Rachel Pollack.
