Time.com has posted my top 10 video games of the year and my top 10 graphic novels of the year. Take a spin through them. There may be no better time this year to call me an idiot! Though there have been some pretty good ones. And the year ain’t over yet.
What did I leave off? As far as the video games go, I note that there’s no massively multiplayer love on there. It’s surprising how few really good new entries there were this year, when you think about how heavily this was tagged as a growth area. Should Tabula Rasa be on there? It’s really hard to know — part of it is that the deck is stacked against MMO’s, critically, because they’re so hard to review. Blah blah blah.
Graphic novels: I put two webcomics on the list, Achewood and Erfworld. I couldn’t decide whether webcomics belonged on a graphic novels list at all, and I wasted way way too much time thinking about it before I finally decided these two were just too deeply great to leave off the list, whether or not it really made sense, and their greatness qualifies them for virtually any list of anything. Then I went to bed and slept soundly.
I also wrote Time‘s list of the best novels of the year. This may or may not interest you, but my pick as best novel of the year, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, is worth a look just for its extremely authentic portrait of a fat, awkward Dominican-American nerd. Not something you see enough of in contemporary literature.