Some but not many of these books were actually published in 04. At any rate these are the best books I read this year, listed by most recently read

- My Life by Bill Clinton
- Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
- Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason
- Cosmétique de l'ennemi by Amélie Nothomb (French)
- Complete Peanuts 1950-1954 Boxset by Charles Schulz
- Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- Péplum by Amélie Nothomb (French)
- Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

I got to check out a bunch of books on audio format this year, makes driving quite enjoyable really, for example I finished Bill Clinton's voluminous bio in just 4 days. By the way, your local library probably has these books for you to check out. When I'm rich, I'll donate a buncha money to the Santa Clara County Library


In comics, I've almost entirely stopped the weeklies in favor of trades, it's cheaper and better to read complete stories. There was a big crossover for Bat titles so that was a good reason to tune out. Superman has been so underwhleming even with star penciller Jim Lee, blame it on the scribe (Brian Azzarello). I got a couple of Powers trades and I'm almost caught up on the newer stuff. It's generally excellent. Sleeper actually slipped off a lot, I'm not at all into the title anymore which is a shame. Kirkman's Invincible and Walking Dead have been consistently very good. DC's big summer buzz was around a title called Identity Crisis and I'm lookin forward to checkin that out when it becomes collected. Over at Marvel, there was a major relaunch of X-Men with popular tv/movie writer Joss Whedon. He really delivered even with all the silly debates over the return of the glorious spandex costumes. Some other standouts this year were Y: The Last Man, Authority - Revolution and Ex-Machina. I've dropped PVP and Liberty Meadows altogether (wasn't worth it)

Early in the year, I read Blankets by Craig Thompson and it was pretty amazing. Very indie though. Jimmy Corrigan and Clyde Fans were so disappointing, I'm kinda bummed because they had such good press.