And we’re back. Here’s the other half of my annual media retrospective, focusing this time on my literary pursuits.

While my movie-viewing dropped off a bit last year, my reading increased significantly: I completed 36 books total, up from 22 total last year. I don’t believe there was any real competition between the two activities, i.e., reading vs. viewing; the biggest factor in my increased book consumption was riding the train on a near-daily basis. Also, some of the novels I read — The Colorado Kid and the Star Trek: New Frontier books — were a bit on the thin side. Not that we’re measuring, of course. Here are the titles, broken into convenient categories:

Books Completed in 2006 (fiction)

1. The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
2. Battlestar Galactica: Armageddon by Richard Hatch and Christopher Golden
3. Battlestar Galactica: Warhawk by Richard Hatch and Christopher Golden
4. The Tokaido Road by Lucia St. Clair Robson
5. The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi
6. Cell by Stephen King
7. Paragaea: A Planetary Romance by Chris Roberson
8. Star Trek: New Frontier, Book One: House of Cards by Peter David
9. Star Trek: New Frontier, Book Two: Into the Void by Peter David
10. Star Trek: New Frontier, Book Three: The Two-Front War by Peter David
11. Star Trek: New Frontier, Book Four: End Game by Peter David
12. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
13. Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (Doc Savage #1) by Kenneth Robeson
14. Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin
15. The Armageddon Rag by George R.R. Martin (re-read)
16. Eddie and the Cruisers by P.F. Kluge (re-read)

That’s 16 works of fiction, up from 13 (which included graphic novels) in 2005. This year, I chose to list the graphic novels separately. I’m not sure why, since I made a big deal last year about how they ought to count as literature. I still think they’re literature, I’ve just decided they’re a different kind of literature. In any event, here are a couple of comments before I list those:

Favorite fiction books of the year: The Tokaido Road, Paragaea, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, and The Armageddon Rag

The one fiction book that made me cry this year: The Ghost Brigades

The “so bad I can’t believe I finished not only one, but both of them” books this year: Battlestar Galactica: Armageddon and Battlestar Galactica: Warhawk. Dreadful, miserable things. (One of my big gripes with media tie-ins is when the author can’t even be bothered to watch a few episodes of the source material to get the terminology of the universe correct. Not to mention the gender of the minor characters. Bridge officer Rigel was a girl, people.)

And moving right along:

Books Completed in 2006 (graphic novels)

1. Blade of the Immortal, Volume 3: Dreamsong by Hiroaki Samura
2. Blade of the Immortal, Volume 4: On Silent Wings by Hiroaki Samura
3. Blade of the Immortal, Volume 5: On Silent Wings II by Hiroaki Samura
4. Blade of the Immortal, Volume 6: Dark Shadows by Hiroaki Samura
5. Blade of the Immortal, Volume 7: Heart of Darkness by Hiroaki Samura
6. DC: The New Frontier, Volume 1 by Darwyn Cooke
7. DC: The New Frontier, Volume 2 by Darwyn Cooke

I liked all of these, so there isn’t much to say in terms of awarding “favorite” status and such. I will say that I loved the Jetson-y art and sheer comprehensiveness of DC: The New Frontier and that Blade of the Immortal is quite simply a brilliant piece of storytelling, in any form.

And now for what my fifth-grade teacher used to call “true” books:

Books Completed in 2006 (non-fiction)

1. Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of Broadcast Journalism by Bob Edwards
2. The Investigation: A Former FBI Agent Uncovers the Truth Behind Melvin Dummar and the Most Contested Will in American History by Gary Magneson
3. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil
4. Longitude: The True Story of the Long Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel
5. Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
6. Looking for a Ship by John McPhee
7. Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
8. Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper
9. Conservatives Without Conscience by John W. Dean
10. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly
11. Scary Monsters and Super Freaks: Stories of Sex, Drugs, Rock ‘n’ Roll and Murder by Mike Sager
12. 1939: The Lost World of the Fair by David Gelernter
13. There and Back Again: An Actor’s Tale by Sean Astin with Joe Layden

My favorites in this category included The Investigation (I’m fascinated by Howard Hughes in general and the infamous “Mormon Will” in particular), Longitude (an amazing story of perseverence), Travels with Charley (pure Americana), and Under the Black Flag.

The Singularity is Near, which postulates that human beings will merge with technology within the next 50 years and evolve into some new and ultimately non-physical species (just like Decker, Ilia, and V’Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture!) was too far out and downright scary to be plausible, in my opinion. And 1939 — which I still hope to blog about in detail — was a strange, uneasy fusion of fiction and non-fiction that didn’t really satisfy me as either a novel or a history.