Welcome to 2008

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope all of you enjoyed the holidays – whatever holidays you had.

Things were pretty busy around our place this year. We spent a lot of time running around seeing friends and family and doing the party circuit, we hosted the relatives for Christmas dinner, we found ourselves spending New Year’s Eve with some friends in an impromptu Wii tournament (where I found out I’m really, really not cut out to be a surgeon in a hospital ER simulation videogame – especially not after a few Heinekens), and somehow I found some time to devour a couple of books and dive into the stack o’ DVDs from Santa. Since then I’ve been getting back into the work groove and we’ve been serving up a couple of episodes of the new Doctor Who every night – we’re now most of the way through Series 3 and I’ve gotta say, it’s been a long marathon, but we still haven’t tired of being Companions of the Doctor & co.

At any rate, I’ve finally taken some time to come up for air and write a long-overdue blog post or two.

Seeing as how it’s the start of the New Year, I may as well jump on the bandwagon and do a quick highlight of the “Best of’s” of 2007. On one hand, I felt a little guilty about doing this because I haven’t read every SF book that came out in ’07, nor did I see every movie or every TV show. How can I say something is the best if the field of comparison isn’t complete? However, I did precisely that when I nominated and voted for the Auroras – acted only on what I’d encountered. Not entirely fair. But there’s nothing wrong with supporting that which you know and like, as long as you’re not opposed to trying the other stuff too. So, here are my top 3’s for 2007:

Books:
1) “The Terror” by Dan Simmons
2) “From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain” by Minister Faust
3) “Farewell Summer” by Ray Bradbury
(honourable mentions to “Overclocked” by Cory Doctorow, “Soon I Will Be Invincible” by Austin Grossman, “Bad Monkeys” by Mark Ruff, “Rollback” by Robert J. Sawyer, “The Children of Hurin” by J.R.R. Tolkien and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” by J.K. Rowling)

TV:
1)”Battlestar Galactica”
2) “Reaper”
3)”Torchwood”

Movies:
1)”Stardust”
2)”Beowulf”
3)”I am Legend”

What are your SF highlights for 2007? What would you recommend the rest of us add to our “In” boxes for reading and viewing?