Last week we talked about our favorite book-related things of 2008; this week we’re listing the stuff we’re most looking forward to in 2009:

Georgette Heyer's mysteries:
Starting in March, we’ll be getting beautiful new reprints of Heyer’s mystery novels, thanks to the fine people at Sourcebooks. In a perfect world, these re-releases would be followed up by the BBC announcing their plans to adapt Heyer's novels for television… but we’ll take what we can get.

The Where The Wild Things Are movie:
We're still a little stunned this movie is even getting made, and we have no idea how we’ll feel about it once we’ve heard more about the plot, but it sure looks pretty.

Boys Before Flowers, the K-drama adaptation of Hana Yori Dango:
We’re already two episodes in, and it’s just as ridiculous (and ridiculously fun) as we’d hoped!

The American release of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea:
There’s no exact release date yet, but we can expect to see Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, Hayao Miyazaki's lovely-looking adaptation of The Little Mermaid, before the year is out.

Nodame starting up again:
We don’t begrudge Nodame Cantabile creator Tomoko Ninomiya her maternity leave, but we’re really looking forward to her returning to work. We’re just not built for such hardcore cliffhanger action.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer cartoon:
This project has been dead in the water for years, but it’s been showing some faint signs of life recently. Will 2009 be the year the animated adventures of the BtVS crew finally appear on our TV sets?

Follow-up books:
Suzanne Collins’s 12, Lisa McMann’s Fade, Kelley Armstrong’s The Awakening, David Anthony Durham’s The Other Lands, Rosemary Clement-Moore’s Highway To Hell... 2009 is giving us a bumper crop of hotly anticipated sequels.

The Eoin Colfer-penned addition to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series:
Douglas Adams, alas, has left us—but we have a lot of faith in Mr. Colfer’s ability to write a great installment for this iconic series.

Labels: lists, Year in Review

2008 was, in many ways, a serious bummer for the book world. A lot of industry jobs were lost, some great authors died, and the projections for 2009 are not encouraging. But some good stuff happened, too—stuff we've compiled in our annual list of our favorite book releases and literature-related events of 2008:

Great cookbooks:
2008 gave us some top-notch cookbooks, including The Splendid Table's How To Eat Supper and The America's Test Kitchen's Family Baking Book.

Excellent anime adaptations:
We loved the anime versions of Nodame Cantabile: Paris Hen, Majin Tantei Nogami Neuro, and the still-running Skip Beat!.

The ending of Tramps Like Us:
The final volume of this outstanding josei manga gave readers exactly what they were hoping for: a dreamy, quirky, utterly romantic happily-ever-after.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:
Joss Whedon has a bad habit of ending his series with a knife in his audience's back. (I've always wondered if he's a fan of tragic operas, which also rely heavily on the obvious-but-effective drama created by killing off their most vulnerable characters.) Still, about, oh, 35 minutes of the 43-minute-long Internet musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog was awesome, and there's no denying that’s a pretty solid ratio.

Several awesome sequels:
...including Ysabeau S. Wilce's Flora's Dare and Catherine Jinks's Genius Squad, both of which managed to feel like complete stories, even as they built on earlier books and hinted at future installments.

The joys of 100% legal manhwa:
Yen Press kicked into gear in 2008, making all of the Korean manhwa titles dropped by the now-defunct group ICE Kunion available again. It took the better part of three whole years, but I finally got my hands on the second volume of Park So-Hee's Goong!

Puffin Classics:
In a year where very few things were both awesome and budget-friendly, the 2008 re-issues of the Puffin Classics paperback editions featured lovely cover art, introductions by big-name authors, and a dirt-cheap $4.99 cover price.

Sense and Sensibility:
I was convinced this adaptation would suck (in my defense, ITV's 2007 adaptations of Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park were very disheartening), but the BBC did an excellent job of adapting Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Exciting new series:
...including David Anthony Durham's Acacia, Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games, and Kelley Armstrong's The Summoning. I have no idea how I'll feel about later installments in these series (I'm particularly worried about Collins's next installment—it's going to take me a very long time to forgive or forget that last Underland Chronicles book), but at least they kicked off with a bang.

A surfeit of Wordcandy-worthy nonfiction:
We usually review novels, but 2008 saw the Wordcandy staff receiving more than our fair share of entertaining, thought-provoking nonfiction. Standouts included Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson's Where Does the Money Go? and Komomo and Naoyuki Ogino's A Geisha’s Journey: My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice. We doubt we would have encountered these titles in the normal course of bookstore-browsing, so we were grateful to the publishers and PR agents who sent them to us, and happy to have a chance to share them with our readers!

Labels: Year in Review

1. 2008 is the year that disappointed ICE Kunion readers will finally find closure, as Yen Press promises to restart their abandoned titles sometime this spring. We’re also looking forward to several Tokyopop releases, including Gakuen Alice and I Wish.

2. There’s going to be some great titles coming out for kids. Meg Cabot (who’s moving to a new publisher) has a new series aimed at the 9-12 set, and we’re really excited about Wendelin Van Draanen’s new standalone title, Confessions of a Serial Kisser.

3. Sourcebooks is releasing several more Georgette Heyer titles. False Colours, Lady of Quality, Black Sheep, and Friday’s Child should all be out before June, as well as a few of her non-Regency romances. We’d really like to see some of her mysteries being reprinted, too, but, hey, we’ll take what we can get.

4. There are several literary film adaptations coming out that we’re looking forward to. See, Hollywood is finally focusing on source material that we totally don’t care about, which makes us much less picky. We are already planning to shell out our hard-earned cash for The Spiderwick Chronicles, Prince Caspian, and Speed Racer. (We admit it—we might even seen Speed Racer opening night.)

5. ...on the other hand, chances are good we’ll end up foaming at the mouth over the BBC’s upcoming adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.

6. 2008 looks to be a good year for romance novels, including at least two more Lisa Kleypas titles and the conclusion of Nora Roberts’s Sign of Seven trilogy. If we’re really lucky, we’ll see another standalone title from Jennifer Crusie this year (at the very least, we should see a due date for one).

7. We’ve been hearing a lot about Novala Takemoto’s Kamikaze Girls (an enormously successful 2002 novel that was turned into both a manga and a film), and American audiences will finally be able to get their hands on a translation—Viz Media’s version will be out this month.

8. Fans of mysteries featuring “re-imagined” literary figures will have plenty of options—Gyles Daubeney Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde and a Death of No Importance and Laura Joh Rowland’s The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte will both be out this winter.

9. A House of Many Ways, the sequel to Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air, will be out in June. And if Ms. Jones is feeling really generous, we hear there might be another Chrestomanci book coming out, too!

10. And, last but definitely not least, the final volume of the wonderfully bizarre, profoundly romantic manga Tramps Like Us will be out on February 13th. Once we have our hands on the complete series, we’re planning to make everyone we know read it. NO ONE IS SAFE.

Labels: Year in Review

10. From the elegant new edition of Strunk and White's Elements of Style to the lovely Annotated Secret Garden, 2007 was a great year for beautifully-designed reprints of classic novels. We were particularly impressed by Penguin's edition of The Three Musketeers.








9. As longtime Buffy the Vampire Slayer devotees, we were totally stoked when Joss Whedon announced that he would be continuing his story in comic book format. We've been a little underwhelmed by the artwork for this series, but the storylines are great.








8. 2007 was full of solid film adaptations. We haven't had a chance to see the coolest-looking one of all (the just-released Persepolis), but we did enjoy the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie, the Nancy Drew movie, and the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust.








7. There have been a number of highly effective fantasy, sci-fi, and horror releases in the past year. William Gibson’s Spook Country, Kat Richardson's Poltergeist, and Dan Simmons's The Terror were all outstanding, and we were thrilled to finally get our hands on Sergei Lukyanenko's Nightwatch trilogy. (Note: While the first book in the trilogy allegedly came out in 2006, it only seemed to turn up in bookstores in 2007.)





6. There were a ton of great picture books released in 2007, sure to appeal to both children and adults. We were particularly impressed by Peter Sis's The Wall and Brian Selsnick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret.









5. 2007 saw a number of excellent romance releases. Lisa Kleypas released Sugar Daddy, her first non-historical romance, and started a new series, Jennifer Echols wrote another great teen romance (The Boys Next Door), and Nora Roberts's new Sign of Seven series kicked off with a bang.








4. It isn't available in English yet, but plenty of Internet-savvy anime geeks watched 2007's wonderful animated adaptation of Tomoko Ninomiya's Nodame Cantabile.









3. 2007 was a great year for entertaining and informative non-fiction. We were particularly impressed by Michael A. Stusser's The Dead Guy Interviews, Tina Gromberg's Out of Line, and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.








2. Suzanne Collins' Underland Chronicles and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series both ended with more of a whimper than a bang. Luckily for us, 2007 still produced a towering pile of excellent, wildly creative YA fiction, including the aforementioned The Boys Next Door, Ysabeau S. Wilce's Flora Segunda, Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Catherine Jink's Evil Genius, Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy, and Cynthia Leitich Smith's Tantalize.



And...

1. Our #1 Wordcandy-approved happening for 2007 was the massively overdue release of the fourth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!. This series was put on hiatus for the better part of two years, and offered a textbook example of why it can be so frustrating to read manga: it's very unpleasant to invest time and money in a series, and then discover that the English publishers have put it on hold indefinitely. We were thrilled when ADV brought this delightfully bizarre series back from the dead.

Labels: Year in Review