Happy New Year!

Wishing everybody a very Happy New Year. I hope 2013 will bring you plenty of happiness (in the shape of books or otherwise) and success.

I shamelessly pinched this from Scott Snyder’s Twitter feed.
Unfortunately, I don’t know who it’s by…

If you will permit me a bit of a digression, I also wanted to take this opportunity to say a huge, heartfelt thank you to Alyssa: without her, I would be a very miserable curmudgeon. She has helped me edit and improve so many of my reviews (if you find a typo, garbled sentence or any other flaw, it is my mistake alone). In other words, she makes me look good.

Alyssa has brightened up my life in every way. We met when I had been ill for many years, but she looked after me and didn’t run away. She enables and at least looks fondly upon my many geeky passions and obsessions, and has never judged me for my tastes. Here is to many more years together. I love you, and hope I make you as happy as you make me.

Farewell, 2012

After 552 posts and 182 books read in 2012, I want to also thank everyone for reading Civilian Reader – site traffic has exploded this year, with many more new and returning readers and subscribers. I’ve added comic and graphic novel reviews, expanded the range of publishers covered, and continued the near-weekly series of author interviews.

I hope you have discovered many new authors, novels and comics to enjoy. And so 2012, we bid you good night…

Booker Prize Longlist Announced

The Booker Prize longlist has been announced. The prize is awarded for the “best English-language novel by an author from the Commonwealth”. Here is the list:

-  Nicola Barker, The Yips (Fourth Estate)

-  Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)

-  André Brink, Philida (Harvill Secker)

-  Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)

-  Michael Frayn, Skios (Faber & Faber)

-  Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday)

-  Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)

-  Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)

-  Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)

-  Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)

-  Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

-  Sam Thompson, Communion Town (Fourth Estate)

I have read none of them. More can be found on the prize’s website (which is also where I got the image). The shortlist (of six) will be announced on September 11th, and the winner will be named October 16th.

“12.21” by Dustin Thomason (Dial Press/Random House)

It’s the end of the World as we know it!

For decades, December 21, 2012, has been a touchstone for doomsayers worldwide. It is the date, they claim, when the ancient Maya calendar predicts the world will end.

In Los Angeles, two weeks before, all is calm. Dr. Gabriel Stanton takes his usual morning bike ride, drops off the dog with his ex-wife, and heads to the lab where he studies incurable prion diseases for the CDC. His first phone call is from a hospital resident who has an urgent case she thinks he needs to see. Meanwhile, Chel Manu, a Guatemalan American researcher at the Getty Museum, is interrupted by a desperate, unwelcome visitor from the black market antiquities trade who thrusts a duffel bag into her hands.

By the end of the day, Stanton, the foremost expert on some of the rarest infections in the world, is grappling with a patient whose every symptom confounds and terrifies him. And Chel, the brightest young star in the field of Maya studies, has possession of an illegal artifact that has miraculously survived the centuries intact: a priceless codex from a lost city of her ancestors. This extraordinary record, written in secret by a royal scribe, seems to hold the answer to her life’s work and to one of history’s great riddles: why the Maya kingdoms vanished overnight. Suddenly it seems that our own civilization might suffer this same fate.

With only days remaining until December 21, 2012, Stanton and Chel must join forces before time runs out.

The Mayan calendar said the world would end in 2012. So, naturally, there have been a ton of novels working with that premise cropping up all over the place for the past two years (at least). This is probably one of the higher-profile options, given how successful Thomason’s co-authored The Rule of Four was.

I picked this book up at BEA 2012, and decided to read it on my epic bus journey from New York to Toronto (that is truly epic if you’re not from North America). The fact that I managed to read the whole thing over those hours is a testament to both the pacing and Thomason’s prose. However, despite how easy it was to get through, the novel was not without some weaknesses.