in no particular order:
The Story of Harold by "Terry Andrews"
- life is all small moments, that’s what’s important, all those mundane moments that accumulate and create a life, a good life – life is good, it really can be! – you didn’t expect the novel to take a breath and suddenly affirm life –
♛
Mortal Leap by MacDonald Harris
Dead-Soul Boy runs away from home; he becomes a merchant marine and travels the world. Dead-Soul Boy sees the world through his dead, dead eyes. does Dead-Soul Boy's soul ever come alive? stay tuned!
♛
Miracleman Vol. One by Alan Moore
Here be dragons, and unexplored territories - at least in 1985, before Watchmen. Alan Moore Had his ideas and themes already perfectly formed, his darker directions already mapped out. His smart deconstruction and reconstruction of comic tropes and hero archetypes never blunt his story's visceral shocks or disguise its messily emotional foundation. The dialogue and narration move from angst-filled realism to surreal poetry. His Miracleman moves from knowable to unknowable.
♛
Endless Love by Scott Spencer
I can't explain why I love someone. I can explain the things I like and love about them, the details... but explain the love itself? who can do that? I think love is one of the unexplainable things in life. it can't be quantified.
♛
Secret Hours by Michael Cisco
he is unique. his stories are often about a state of mind. spiritual transformation. mental degradation. crazed emotional highs and lows. metaphorical landscapes. terrible forms of transcendence. intellectual terrors. chthonic excavations.
♛
Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold
this is a wonderful novel about figuring out that who you are does not equal your job or your birth name or any specific, singular role or title; rather, it is the sum of all such things, and your experiences, and your internal workings, your actions and your potential, your ability to change or not change, and so much more. you = not easily summed up in one word.
♛
The Man from Primrose Lane by James Renner
when it comes to love and other obsessions, "yesterday" and "tomorrow" are mere constructs
♛
Montana Gothic by Dirck Van Sickle
a meditation on loss. it is bleak and beautiful; a tall drink of icy cold water; a dark, sad dream of a book.
♛
Lilith's Brood: Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago by Octavia Butler
Butler correctly assesses humanity's tragic flaw: a genetic tendency towards hierarchism at every level. a flaw that on the micro level leads to an inability to form relationships based on equality - and in the macro, one that could easily lead to the end of humanity's home world as they know it. oh, humanity.
♛
Lucia in London by E.F. Benson
Has fair Riseholme itself been superseded? It cannot be! Well, as we sort out this dreadful mystery, at least we are still able to sit back and enjoy Lucia make short work of London's tarsome social mores and strictures. No one knows how to climb more swiftly than Lucia!
♛
special bonus favorite: favorite novella read in 2014:
"Pale Horse, Pale Rider" by Katherine Anne Porter
...who is this new Miranda who has seen death up close, who has lived and loved and lost and died and been reborn... who has made death her friend? why, she has become Katherine Anne Porter, of course.
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