TDF Pamela's Top Ten of 2009

Another year has flown by, and it’s nearly 2010. You know… when I was a kid, it seemed like it took forever for the year to pass, but now? I blink and it’s a new year. Sheesh. But since it is the end of the year, that means it’s time for top ten posts! Keep your eyes peeled for more lists from the TDF bloggers in the next few days!

And now, in no particular order…

Books

The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker by Leanna Renee Hieber

My reading preferences tend more toward urban fantasy instead of its close counterpart, paranormal romance, but I absolutely love it when I come across a fantastic PNR book. This book? Is definitely one of them. I was startled by my reaction to the heroine, Percy. You see, she’s rather meek and unassuming, and my preferred heroines tend to be tough ass-kickers. But Percy is so sweet and strong underneath her fragile exterior that I couldn’t help falling in love with her.

Speaking of which, I got completely swept up in the semi-unrequited love affair between Percy and the brooding hero, Alexi Rychman. Oh, Alexi. He pushes all of my tortured hero buttons; he’s dark, lonely, devoted to what he thinks is his life’s responsibility, and damn, do I love to see heroes like that crack in the face of love. [happy sigh] Add to that my mental casting of Richard Armitage as Alexi, and I spent most of this book in a swoon. The romance is delicious, the setting is creative and detailed, and it’s an incredibly fun read. I cannot wait for the sequel. Read my review here.

TDF Pamela’s Rating:

Soulless by Gail Carriger

This is another one of those books that treads the line between urban fantasy (urban… historical fantasy? historical paranormal steampunk urban fantasy? too… many… genres!) and paranormal romance, but however you categorize it, Soulless is a delightful read. Yes, I just said delightful. Carriger blends Austen-esque diction with supernatural and steampunk sensibilities, and the story is carried by the two wonderful protagonists, Alexia Tarabotti and Lord Maccon.

Alexia is a preternatural, someone who completely lacks a soul and can therefore negate the powers of a supernatural–someone with an excess of soul who has become a vampire or a werewolf. She is a spinster, partly because she has inherited her father’s Italian looks but mostly because she’s smart, quick-witted, and not afraid to show it. Lord Maccon, on the other hand, is a werewolf, the alpha of London’s pack, and he pushes my hero buttons, too. Let’s see… grumpy, intelligent, tempermental, passionate… And when these two butt heads, the sparks fly. Soulless is a funny, interesting, and smoldering read, and again, I can’t wait for the sequel. Read my review here.

TDF Pamela’s Rating:

Naamah’s Kiss by Jacqueline Carey

I had read the first two books in Carey’s Kushiel series years ago, but I lost track of the series after a while. I always meant to pick them back up, but just never did. Naamah’s Kiss takes place in the world of Terre d’Ange, but is set a few generations after the events of the Kushiel books, and in my opinion, it’s a fantastic place to start if you’d like to dip your feet into Carey’s richly imagined world. I love good worldbuilding, and Carey is definitely doing it right. Her world is based on a historical version of ours, but twists history and mythology just enough that the familiar is new and fascinating. I especially loved the part of the book set in Ch’in, and I hope Carey sets the next book there as well.

The book follows Moirin, a Maghuin Dhonn witch, as she grows and tries to follow her destiny as one blessed by Naamah. Her travels take her away from her homeland of Alba to her father’s land of Terre d’Ange, where she learns the pleasurable ways of Naamah, and to distant Ch’in. Moirin is a fascinating character who is torn between her two lines of heritage, trying to adhere to her familiar traditions but also drawn to the strange customs of Terre d’Ange and Ch’in. Naamah’s Kiss is a wonderful adventure story, and I’m looking forward to more books in this series. Read my review here.

TDF Pamela’s Rating:

Bitter Night by Diana Pharaoh Francis

Diana Pharaoh Francis’s first urban fantasy is a damn good one. Bitter Night is a tense, gripping story that kept me hanging until the last page. The protagonist, Max, is utterly believable, and she is also easy to sympathize with. She’s been bound to Giselle, a witch whom she thought was her best friend before Giselle used magic and pain to turn Max into her Shadowblade, a warrior who thrives in darkness and protects the coven. Max is comfortable in her hatred of Giselle and uses her anger as a shield to protect herself. Her anger has even blinded her to the fact that her Shadowblades and fellow Sunspears have become the family that she lost when she was bound.

When she runs afoul of another witch’s plot, Max finds herself saddled with another Shadowblade, Alexander, who is much older than her and comes from a very different background. It was fascinating to see these two try to break the other’s armor, and the characters bounced off of each other very well. The story itself is obviously the beginning of a series, and as such the end of this book doesn’t feel so much like an end as a “To Be Continued…” It’s a strong debut into the genre, and I’m betting this will be a great series as well. Read my review here.

TDF Pamela’s Rating:

Storm Born by Richelle Mead

Holy cow. I can’t believe I let this sit on my bookshelf for a couple of months. This is absolutely amazing! I absolutely adore the characters, and this book definitely tweaks my love of faery stories. Eugenie is a very well-developed, likable protagonist, and the supporting characters are not flat at all, but all have distinct personalities of their own. I freaking love that. The plot is fantastic. While deceptively simple on the surface (rescue a kidnapped teenage girl from the Otherworld), underneath it’s an intricately woven story threaded through with Mead’s signature humor. Much like with her Georgina Kincaid series, I found myself laughing throughout this book.

The sequel, Thorn Queen, isn’t quite as good as Storm Born, but this is definitely a series that I’ll be following. I love the romantic competition between Kiyo, Eugenie’s kitsune boyfriend, and Dorian, the Oak King, even though for me, it’s not much of a competition. Dorian all the way! He may have ulterior motives and be a sneaky bastard, but god, do I love him. And while I do have a problem with the use of rape in the series (no spoilers here!), the books are well-written enough that it doesn’t feel gratuitous in terms of the rape-as-impetus-for-character-development issue. Scroll down to my review here.

TDF Pamela’s Rating:

The Felix Castor series by Mike Carey

Carey writes a damn good book. The Felix Castor novels are modern hard-boiled detective stories with a supernatural twist and a healthy dose of black humor. The mysteries are twisty and complex without being overly convoluted; each time, I got to the climax and gasped aloud because I didn’t expect the truth, but damn, did it make sense! I loved being along for the ride as Felix struggles against time and the bad guys to figure out the mystery before whatever Very Bad Thing that might happen happens. I also loved Felix’s sense of dry, foul-mouthed, and self-deprecating humor, along with his amazing mental backlog of obscure pop culture references. My kind of guy.

The books are written in first person, as is traditional in detective novels, and Carey writes it very well. First person is always iffy with me; it usually takes a very talented author to write from a character’s head without sounding awkward. Carey also never lets any omniscient narration slip into Felix’s stream of consciousness, so the reader only knows what Felix has figured out after Felix decides to share it in his internal narration. Carey is very descriptive, and I really appreciate it. Sometimes too much description becomes boring in its exhaustiveness, but Carey’s vivid descriptions are always fascinating and paint a strong visual for the reader. The world itself is fascinating. It’s our world, set in our time, but sometime within the last twenty or thirty years, the dead began to wake up. Some come back as ghosts while others possess their own dead bodies ( as a zombie) or take over animal bodies (as aloup-garou). There are also nastier things surfacing: demons like Asmodeus, who possessed Felix’s friend Rafi a few years before the beginning of the series. I’m very much looking forward to what Carey has planned for the next books in the series, because the underlying issue of the dead rising is a driving factor in what Felix does. His own private version of exorcism is music; he plays tunes that “describe” the ghosts on his tin whistle. That is so unusual and so utterly cool. And his dealings with the dead in these books bring about some excellently written character development. Felix is slowly growing a conscience after spending years playing ghosts into the great whatever-comes-next. His cynical atheism provides a nice counterpoint to the traditional religious reasoning behind the dead rising, and it adds a nice level of uncertainty. Read my reviews of the three books in the series here.

Movies

Star Trek

I have a confession. I’ve been a Trek fan pretty much since birth. My parents both watched The Original Series all through my childhood, and I discovered The Next Generation when I was in junior high. I… I even had a Commander Riker t-shirt. Yes, I’m blushing right now. I watched Deep Space 9 and Voyager quite often–Voyager more so because when I lived in Germany for three years, we had thirteen channels and it was on a lot. My interest kind of waned after I moved back to the States, and I never could get into Enterprise, but I still loved the series in a nostalgic sort of way.

So when I heard that J.J. Abrams was planning on rebooting the original series, I was interested but trepidacious. Could it compare to the old series? Would it be hammy or cheesy? Would it run off in a completely wrong direction?

I am very pleased to report that I freaking loved Star Trek. The casting was brilliant, particularly in Zachary Quinto as Spock. Hell, I can’t narrow it down like that. Everyone was fantastic in their roles, and (I’ll probably get flamed for saying this) I even liked Chris Pine better than the Shat as Kirk. Shatner makes my skin crawl, what can I say?

The story is creative in the way it creates a divergence from the established timeline, and is a rousing adventure, even if it didn’t make much sense in some places. It was fun enough to watch, though, that I really didn’t care if the science was hilariously bad. I know, I know. Star Trek isn’t really about science, but red matter? Destroying a supernova with a black hole? My nitpicker got a bit edgy, but again, it was so much fun that I got over that really fast.

Also, you should definitely pick this one up on Blu-ray. It looks gorgeous in hi-def, and I’m not just talking about Quinto’s Sexy Spock. ;)

Avatar

I was skeptical of the Avatar hype, I have to admit. The trailer didn’t do a lot for me, other than provoke a couple of “ooooh” moments at the CG graphics. But I thought that’s all the movie would be: good CGI. The Fanboyfriend kept reassuring me that pretty much everything James Cameron has done has been gold, but I thought that all of Cameron’s hype that this movie would change moviemaking forever was hot air that would set him up for a fall.

I was so wrong.

The CGI is amazing and it does carry the movie. It is, without a doubt, the best I have EVER seen, and Avatar has definitely set the bar for future films. The Na’vi are completely realistic, and the environments… oh, the environments. I want to live on Pandora, it’s so beautiful. The bioluminescence was gorgeous, and I loved how Cameron incorporated it into the designs for the Na’vi as yet another way to show their connection to their planet. I wasn’t thrown out by CGI blunders once during the movie; nothing looked fake. It was amazing.

I saw the movie in IMAX 3D, and before this movie, I wasn’t a fan of 3D. Aside from Captain EO back when I was a kid, the only other movie I had seen in 3D before Avatar was the re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It… wasn’t great. It felt gimmicky, as if it was in 3D only so they could lob pumpkins at the audience and make you duck. That 3D also made me kind of sick to my stomach, and I had to close my eyes every ten minutes or so to make the vertigo go away.

I was kind of afraid of Avatar in 3D, to be honest, but my fears were unwarranted. While it’s not completely immersive (unless it is completely redesigned, there will always be a problem with turning your head and having the 3D go all wonky), it’s as close to it as I could imagine. A friend of mine said that he kept feeling like he was going to inhale the little floaty embers, and that is so right. As long as I stared straight at the screen, I did feel like I was much more involved in the environment than I would have in 2D.

The plot is fairly standard: man goes into strange, alien culture, discovers that he sympathizes with them more than his own people, and fights to save alien culture. But this plot is standard because in the right hands, it works really well. Not only did I cry a few times, but I also came out of the theatre with the same feeling I got back when I was a kid and watched Medicine Man. I wanted to donate money to nature preservation charities, haha. The actors were good, particularly those playing the Na’vi characters, and damn, do I adore Sigorney Weaver. She’s just… amazing. The bad guys were over-the-top evil, the good guys were heroic and proud, and the whole thing was a fantastically good movie. I enjoyed every second of it, and I can’t wait to see it again.

TV

Farscape DVD Set

So this isn’t exactly something that’s new to 2009. In fact, the series started up ten years ago, but 2009 was the lucky year that A&E bought the DVD rights, and so we fans finally got our hands on an affordable full series set.

I was in Germany when Farscape first aired, and it didn’t show on any of the channels we got on our crappy military cable package, so I first saw it in reruns a few years ago. The first ep I saw was “Meltdown” from season 3, and that had to have been the best ep to suck me in. It was sexy. SEXY. So I started hunting down the out of print DVDs and amassed a small collection, but I had never been able to see the whole series. Imagine my joy when I found out that the entire series was being released on DVD. WOO! The Farscape panel at SDCC 09 got me even more excited, and I preordered that baby.

The series is fantastic. The CG is a bit crappy (but then this was ten years ago), but the makeup and puppetry make up for it, and the acting is great. It’s awesome to see the whole series and watch the ragtag crew of Moya slowly grow into a surrogate family. My favorite thing, though, has to be the relationship between John Crichton, the astronaut who got warped very far away from Earth in an experimental space flight, and Aeryn Sun, the Peacekeeper who discovers that there is so much more outside of the life she used to know. Not only are they both ridiculously sexy, their relationship is also wonderfully believable in its fits and starts.

So if you’re a Farscape fan and have some holiday money to blow, you should totally buy the complete series ASAP.

Video Games

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Click to drool in hi-res

So maybe this wasn’t the best game of 2009 by a long shot, but I didn’t play many new games this year, so nyah. ;) Those of you who’ve been reading TDF for a while know that I’m a serious Wolverine fangirl. I can’t help myself. I love the guy. But I always felt like he got declawed in the other video games. I mean, he’s Wolverine, for god’s sake. He routinely rips guys in half in the comics. But in games, we’re stuck with a Wolvie who just pokes and prods at the bad guys.

And then I played the demo for this game.

Holy crap. I had to run out and buy it immediately. See, this is Wolverine the way he’s supposed to be played. You get to slice bad guys’ arms off. If you hit them with the right combo move, you can even rip some of them in half.

OH YEAH.

Ahem. Every time I talk about this game, I feel kind of weird for feeling such glee about the violence. I mean, I just cheered about ripping a guy in half. That’s not usually my thing in games. But there’s something about X-Men Origins: Wolverine that turns me and my friends (who would sometimes sit around and watch while I played) into raving lunatics. It’s just plain fun. The storyline is ostensibly based on the movie, but in my opinion, the game’s storyline is much more interesting than what went into the movie. There’s a lot more background covered here, and while a lot of the story is running around, climbing walls, and eviscerating bad guys, it comes off as much more developed and thought out than the movie.

And if I might be shallow for a moment, the developers got videogame!Wolvie to look just like Hugh Jackman, and I have to say, I love it that Wolvie’s wifebeater gets ripped off as he fights. Of course, the shirt magically reappears when you level up, which cracked us up to no end, but until those level-ups, I get to drool over computer generated Hugh Jackman’s body. Heh.

And finally….

Shallow Honorable Mention
X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Click for full size lusting opportunity

I know, I know. This was not that good of a movie. But… but… I’m shallow. I admit it. And there was enough man candy in X-Men Origins: Wolverine to sate even the lustiest fangirl. This movie isn’t on my list because of its filmmaking merits. It’s here because the men are hot.

We got angsty, naked Wolverine. We got drawling, sexy Gambit. We got wisecracking, ripped Deadpool. We got dangerous, brooding Sabretooth. Hell, we even got Will.I.Am in a freaking cowboy hat. It was ALL sexy.

Well, except maybe for that kid who played teenage!Cyclops.