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By Sean Clark, on December 20th, 2012  Day 4 of the Twelve Podcasts of Christmas is now live. We spent the last two days rounding up our C4 picks for the best books from this year (and some old ones thrown in), and today’s episode has us somewhat hypocritically discussing what value, if any, Best-of lists have.
You can see the full final list of C4′s Best Books of 2012 here.
You can either stream The Page Count episodes from the player below, or you can subscribe for free on iTunes or your favorite podcast player by searching for “Page Count.” Links and show notes can be found here.
By Nico Vreeland, on December 19th, 2012  It’s Day 3 of our Twelve Podcasts of Christmas marathon. In Day 2, we started discussing our favorite books of the year, and today we finish that discussion. Listen to either below, find us through iTunes or get our raw feed for other players.
The coming days will feature a heated round of the Kakutani GameTM, devised by Marc Velasquez, some readings of embarrassing poems and stories that we wrote in high school,the continuation of Eric’s technically malfeased drunk review, and much much more. Stay tuned!
By Nico Vreeland, on December 18th, 2012 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
Everybody’s doing their best-of lists for the end of the year, so there aren’t too many good reviews out there these days. Additionally, I believe I’m currently composed of 50% “holiday food” which is itself 50% fat and 50% essence of laziness.
This is a coy way of saying that we’re not gonna be sticking to a regular schedule for the rest of 2012. We’ll still have plenty of stuff—12 podcasts of Christmas, and some assorted reviews might still make it in—but we’re letting WBBR (along with our veneer of professionalism) go by the wayside until after Belsnickel returns to his farmland home.
Have a happy holiday, and we’ll see you next year.
By Sean Clark, on December 17th, 2012 We decided to mix things up with The Page Count this month. Introducing the 12 Podcasts of Christmas! The gang locked themselves in an apartment with some microphones, santa hats, and enough beer and blueberry moonshine to kill an average-sized elf from liver failure. We’ll be releasing the results in bite-sized podcasts over the next week and a half. Enjoy, and have a happy Chrismahankwanzika.
(We apologize–again–for the audio quality. We’re still trying to figure out how to best include our New Orleans correspondent but with our normal set-up, adding him in contributed to losing episodes. You’ll notice in these ones that we really nailed it for his audio, but now the rest of the gang is pretty quiet. Fear not, we’ll make sure the audio quality is top notch for my Drunk Review double header of Victory at Yorktown and Monday Night Jihad.)
You can either stream The Page Count from the player below, or you can subscribe for free on iTunes or your favorite podcast player by searching for “Page Count.” Links and show notes can be found here.
By Mike Beeman, on December 17th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months and beyond. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it. This is the final piece of our 2012 series.]
So it’s that time of the year again. “Best of” season. We all know that “Best of the Year” lists are completely subjective, a handful of famous writers are over-represented, the idea that anyone can read a broad enough range of books published in a given year to judge which is among the best is obviously ridiculous, etc. But, hey, they are also kind of fun. I read a lot of good books this year, the vast majority published before 2012, but here are three I read in and of this year that stand out (and one from a previous year for good measure):
 May We Shed These Human Bodies, by Amber Sparks
It’s hard to believe this is Amber Sparks’ first book: most of the short stories in this collection have appeared in some of the indie lit world’s best-known magazines. With multiple publications in Annalemma, The Collagist, Unsaid, Pank, Gargoyle, Barrelhouse, and others, Sparks’ surreal and quirky stories were already ubiquitous both online and in print by the time this collection came out. It’s easy to see why. The stories in May We Shed pack a lot in their often few pages, forming mini-fables that combine timeless themes with modern sensibilities (see Death and the People, where a jaded Grim Reaper interrupts the all-powerful gods as they play Mario Kart). Sparks’ tales offer enough variety from story to story to avoid too much repetition. Reading this collection is like dipping into pockets of complete surreal-yet-recognizable worlds, and the only complaint I can think of is that sometimes Sparks lets us out too soon.
 Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
Fountain earned my undying fandom when I first came across his amazing short story “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers” in the 2005 O’Henry collection. In a very strong collection, this story was a stand-out. Although he made us wait for Billy Lynn, famously shelving a novel he struggled with for years, the wait was worth it. Billy Lynn follows the members of Bravo Company, soldiers recently made celebrities from a viral video of their action in Iraq, as they are treated to the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving game. Steeped in pop culture, fluidly switching between past and present as the nineteen-year-old soldier Billy Lynn muses on his life and sudden celebrity, Fountain digs deep into what it means to be returning from war and preparing to leave for war again. Although his extensive research shows on every page, what impressed me most was not Fountain’s accurate portrayal of the soldiers, which was spot-on, but the way he captures the non-soldiers, everyone else—i.e. you and me—as we approach the soldiers to mumble thanks and platitudes about honor and sacrifice. Aside from an annoying and unnecessary typography stunt, this book is pitch-perfect.
 Fires of Our Own Choosing, by Eugene Cross
Unlike Sparks and Fountain, I had did not discover Eugene Cross until his book came out -an obvious oversight on my part. I heard him read half of a story from “Fires” at a reading in DC and immediately bought the book. The collection, largely set in and around Erie, Pennsylvania, chronicling disasters in the lives of Cross’ working-class characters, is a combination of Ron Rash and Bonnie Jo Campbell. Thanks to Cross’ experiments with different forms and points of view, this collection never comes off as repetitive even as he mines the similar themes in each story. I can’t wait to see what this writer has in store for us next. Read my full review here.
By Eric Markowsky, on December 14th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months and beyond. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it.]
2012 involved a lot of moving around for me, which meant I had a chance to do a lot of reading on buses, trains, and planes, but also that I lost track of what I’d read pretty easily. Looking back at my year in books turned out to be a great pleasure for me, a scavenger hunt through my memories looking for prizes I knew I’d like because I’d hidden them there myself. So here it is, my Best Books of 2012, in categories more personal than just simply current.
 Best new book: This is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz
Hands down the best new book I read this year. In my review, I tried to respond to some of the critics who seemed intent on pointing out two things: (1) this isn’t Diaz’s anticipated sci-fi apocalypse novel, and (2) some of these stories have been around for a while. To them, I say: (1) shut up, and (2) who cares? These are great stories, some are new, and all of them are being collected for the first time. All nine story endings are beautiful, so give each one the attention it deserves. Start at the beginning, and don’t spare a sentence just because you might have seen it once before already.
 Best debut: A Partial History of Lost Causes, by Jennifer DuBois
I’m a sucker for books about modern Russian history (Revolution on), and if you can squeeze in some chess and a little desperation, even better. If that’s not your idea of a good time, there are still plenty of reasons to read DuBois’s debut novel. The plot has its hiccups, but the writing is sharp, thoughtful, and charged, and the characters are great, even the minor ones who don’t seem all that important at first–maybe especially the minor ones who don’t seem all that important at first. Everyone in this book has something to say worth hearing, but only some of them get the chance to say it. The least we can do is try to listen. …
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By Sean Clark, on December 13th, 2012 [In this feature, we highlight a handful of the best book reviews appearing over the weekend in major newspapers. Follow it here.]
Anomaly, by Skip Brittenham and Brian Haberlin. Reviewed by Ben Fritz (Los Angeles Times).
Here’s a debut sci-fi graphic novel penned by a lawyer and longtime reader of Heavy Metal magazine. This is more a puff piece than a review, but it’s interesting all the same. The elevator pitch for the book (Earth ruined by overpopulation; humans migrating; pre-human alien conflicts to circumnavigate) sounds interesting enough–if kinda Mass Effect-y. And, most likely due to Brittenham’s professional connections, the movie option’s already been picked up. If you want to be first in line to pronounce the book was better, give this a go.
Find it on Goodreads.
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With Robert Lowell and His Circle, by Kathleen Spivack. Reviewed by Michael Dirda (Washington Post).
A memoir about hanging out with a bunch of poets isn’t something that interests me, especially not a clumsy one at that. But I could read Dirda’s reviews all day, especially when he doesn’t like the book and quietly castigates its “ramshackle” shortcomings.
Find it on Goodreads.
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Quickly: I’m really glad the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize is a real thing, and equally glad I didn’t win it. This 2-volume LoA compendium of American sci-fi might have to be a later addition to my Christmas list. Columbia has a “gang scholar.”
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Very Important! This Calvin & Hobbes search engine is maybe the best thing that has ever happened to me.
By Nico Vreeland, on December 12th, 2012 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their favorite books from the past 12 months---and we let a few older ones slip in, too. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009, 2010, and 2011 while you're at it.]
This was an up-and-down year for me. Almost every new book by one of my favorite authors wound up disappointing, but at least one delivered a rousing success, and I found a few new names to put on my watch list. Here we go:
Best Books
 Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
Flynn’s third book was the best novel I read this year—an original mystery that delivered the twists and turns of an intricate plot, and didn’t sacrifice prose or characterization.
Her previous novel, Dark Places, made my 2009 Best Books list. It was similarly excellent, though completely dissimilar in every other way. Different characters, an entirely different setup and plot and structure.
I think the mystery genre can learn a lot from Flynn: books should be written carefully, not coughed out every six months; characters don’t need to be endlessly serialized; and character work should be prized as highly as plot mechanics. Hopefully Flynn’s wild success this year will prompt some changes from other big-name authors. But I’m not holding my breath.
 Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
The winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction was also my favorite nonfiction book of the year—and possibly the best nonfiction I’ve ever read. Boo chronicles life in a Mumbai slum, and after spending three years there, she gets into her subjects’ heads to such a degree that it feels like a novel.
This is a phenomenal piece of nonfiction, and also manages to slide in one of the best uses of ebook technology I’ve yet seen: the “deluxe” ebook edition comes with videos of the slums and people Boo writes about, providing a mind-blowing reminder that they and their incredible stories are all real. …
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By Nico Vreeland, on December 10th, 2012 [This feature is a brief summary of interesting books coming out each month. Follow it here. Click the title links to find these books at Goodreads.]
Still not on schedule yet with the radars, so it’s super short. I’ll do better next month. Almost certainly.
Definitely
Raised from the Ground, by Jose Saramago (out now)
 Saramago has an interesting style. He’s not quite up my alley, but you can’t ignore a Nobel Prize winner. Especially in a month this devoid of big names. It’s also a relatively old book, first published in 1980 in Portugal, but this is somehow the first English language translation. Who’s running the show over at Saramago HQ? Here’s a quick tip: when your man wins the Nobel freaking Prize, translate ALL of his books into Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic, in that order. It’s really not as hard as you’re making it look. Anyway, it’s about “the grim reality of [...] farm laborers’ lives” in southern Portugal.
And that concludes this month’s Definitely section.
Maybe
City of Dark Magic, by Magnus Flyte (out now)
It’s unclear whether there’s actually magic in this “fast-paced and wildly imaginative” debut novel, or, for that matter, whether it’s fast-paced or imaginative. It does feature a city, so that’s nice. Specifically, Prague, where a graduate student learns that her mentor might have been murdered, and things go from there.
Me and the Devil, by Nick Tosches (out now)
I had this one marked in my Book Radar google doc, but then I found out it’s about vampires. Even if it’s literally the best vampire novel ever written, I don’t know if that’s enough to get me over my allergy to vampire novels. (Also, it’s probably not the best vampire novel ever.)
Umbrella, by Will Self (out 12/11)
This Booker Prize shortlistee (published in America only two months after that designation stopped being relevant) follows a psychiatrist at a Victorian mental hospital who becomes intrigued with a patient in a coma. Evidently it’s quite dense, so try before you buy.
Because I Said So!: The Truth Behind the Myths, Tales, and Warnings Every Generation Passes Down to Its Kids, by Ken Jennings (out now)
That guy that won Jeopardy! seventy-something times in a row has a new book out. Sounds decently entertaining, if schlocky. This feels like a Christmas present kind of book.
The Folly of the World, by Jesse Bullington (out 12/18)
Flavorwire says this eccentric half-fantastic novel (about a couple of criminals trying to profit after a massive flood turns 1421 Holland into a small ocean) is full of “Bullington’s trademark wit, bonkers black humor, and mischievous imagination.” Take that with a big grain of salt, but it sounds good enough to give a shot when there’s not much out there.
By Nico Vreeland, on December 7th, 2012 The Kobo Mini is Chamber Four’s official first pick among E-Ink ereaders, but until yesterday, I’d never tried it (our budget is small enough to step on and crush). The Mini got to our top spot for two reasons. One: we gravitate toward basic models when picking E-Ink ereaders (if you’re thinking about getting a $180 Kindle Paperwhite with 3G, for example, we think you’d be better off with a $200 Nexus 7). Two: Kobo is the only major ereader whose default store sells universal ebooks. That means that if you want to switch to another ereader, you can take your Kobo books with you, which is emphatically not true of a Kindle or a Nook.
Anyway, I bought my mom a Mini for Christmas (hopefully she doesn’t read this blog very often), it arrived yesterday, and I couldn’t resist “setting it up” for her (i.e., trying it out). And so I figured I’d jot down a few quick thoughts. I’ve only played around with it for a bit, so feel free to tell me where I’m wrong, but this is stuff I would’ve liked to’ve known before I bought it (though I still would’ve bought it).
Size and Best Usage
 This is probably the defining feature of the Mini, hardware-wise. It has a 5″ screen, a full inch smaller than either the base Kindle model or the base Nook. The Mini also has a pretty thin bezel around its screen (unlike the Nook) and no hardware buttons to take up space (unlike the Kindle). If you put those elements together, the Mini feels very small. From a glass-half-full standpoint, it’s the difference between sticking the Mini in your pants pocket and having to put it in your backpack. For me, that’s great. The only ereader I’ve used that came close to this was the Astak Pocket Pro, which was still bigger because of its hardware buttons (and anyway doesn’t appear to be available anymore).
These days I do most of my reading on an iPad or iPhone. I never take the iPad out of the house unless I’m going on a trip, primarily because of bulkiness. So out in the world, I read on my phone. That system has advantages (no second device to carry), but also big disadvantages (reading late at night will keep you up).
Most of all, I’m starting to believe the (somewhat anecdotal) evidence that says I read less when I have the option to hop over to the Internet with two taps. Of course, I get distracted most often when I’m reading a bad or mediocre book, but I’ve definitely noticed a problem, and I’m not alone.
That opens up a niche (despite doomsayers) for current and future ereaders: they can survive as a cheap second (or third) device that has one function, reading. For this function, the Kobo Mini is pretty great. …
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