I love reviewing books on Boing Boing; I've been a bookseller, off and on, since I was 16 years old and I know few pleasures keener than turning people onto books that I love. Inspired by the positive attention the repost of my 2007 review of How to Cheat at Everything garnered, I decided to do a little analysis of the last year's most popular books, on a quarter-by-quarter basis. I've put together a series of posts to run this week with each quarter's top reviews. Here's the hit-parade from Summer 2012:
A Wrinkle in Time, worthy graphic novel adaptation:
Hill and Wang's A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel is Hope Larson's really wonderful and worthy adaptation of the original. Larson is very faithful to the original text, and the graphic form really suits the story, as it allows for direct illustration of some of the more abstract concepts (such as the notion of folding space in higher dimensions to attain faster-than-light transpositions of matter).[Buy it]
Supergod: Warren Ellis's horrific arms-race endtimes: Warren Ellis and Garrie Gastonny's Supergod is a magnificently grim and horrifying superhero comic, in which a British government scientist narrates the sequence of events that killed the planet Earth, in whose rubble he sits.[Buy it]
Sandman box set: Gaiman writes, "I’m thrilled. You have no idea how long I’ve been asking DC to do one of these. (Er, about 16 years.)"[Buy it]
Philip Pullman's Grimm's Fairytales: Philip Pullman — best know for his Dark Materials series — has written a new edition of the Brothers Grimm stories, called Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version. It's the 200th anniversary of the Grimm collection, and Pullman's edition includes author's notes and Aarne–Thompson classifications.[Buy it]
Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore: The perfect nerdish fantasy: Robin Sloan's Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is one of those instant geek classics that gets right into the romance and magic of high-tech, a book akin to Cryptonomicon or Microserfs.[Buy it]
Dark Lord: an evil overlord trapped in a kid's body: Dark Lord: The Early Years gets right down to business: an unnamed narrator suffers a million agonies, while calling out for his hellion lieutenants to aid him, and we quickly learn that this is the Dark Lord, feared and tyrannical ruler of a distant kingdom, and that he has been transported to a suburban parking lot in our world.[Buy it]
Makers: economic manifesto: Simply put, Makers is a thrilling manifesto, a call to arms to quit your day job, pick up your tools, and change the future of manufacturing and business forever.[Buy it]
Sailor Twain: don't fall in love with the mermaid of the Hudson valley: Sailor Twain tells the story of Captain Twain of the Lorelei, which plies its trade up and down the Hudson valley, while the ship's owner, a dissolute Frenchman, seduces the wives of the gentry in the owner's cabin.[Buy it]
Giants Beware: kids' graphic novel that will delight adults too: Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre's Giants Beware is an absolutely delightful kids' graphic novel about a brave young girl who dragoons her friends into going off in search of giants to hunt.[Buy it]
Coding Freedom: an anthropologist understands hacker culture: Biella Coleman is a geek anthropologist, in both senses of the epithet: an anthropologist who studies geeks, and a geek who is an anthropologist.[Buy it]
