Another year is nearly gone and best of lists are starting to appear. Here's mine. I'm just making up categories as they come to me.

Best Read

This is a tougher for me. I'm split between The Dragons Path by Abraham and Prince of Thorns by Lawrence. Dragons wasn't perfect but it was a great traditional type fantasy and made me remember why I love that. Prince on the other hand was a great début with polished prose and a great example of "darker gritty" fantasy.

Going to have to give it to Abraham by a hair.

Best Début

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence.

Best SFF Movie

They were all shit! Oh I for got Rise of the Planet of Apes, It wins.

Best SFF TV Show

Well I only watched two this year, Falling Skies and Game of Thrones. GoT gets it for production value.

Best Commercial Blog(commercial in that the they receive ARC's and/or have ads)

Toss up between The Hotlist and The Wertzone. The Hotlist is good if you want free books and to read exerpts but it's got way to many ads. The Wertzone on the otherhand is ad free and despite Adam being a one man forum spamming machine he does do a good job of making people aware of news and promoting authors via his reviews.

Wertzone wins.

Best Non Commercial Blog

Travels Through Lest. Elfy is a great reviewer and really should have more followers on that blog.

Best New SFF Community



I love that spoiler code Click it in case you're confused.

Thanks for that Chris. I am truly touched. That's the nicest thing anyone has said about my humble blog. I have had a couple of authors comment on the reviews recently, though. Tara O'Shea (who won the Hugo for her Dr Who essay collection) commented on my Hugo post, and Laura Resnick liked my review of Vamparazzi.
I don't generally rate anything other than books and I'm not doing my own best reads of 2011 post until the year is done and dusted, but my top 4 reads for the year thus far are in no particular order: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie, A Dance with Dragons by George R.R Martin, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making by Cat Valente and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. Hopefully I'll find a 5th to add to the list by year's end. I have hopes for The Iron Jackal by Chris Wooding, which I just started today. Curiously enough they're all this years releases which is odd for me. Be warned The Girl Who Circumnavigated etc... is way out in front and it's going to take something truly momentous to knock it off.

I forgot all about The Heroes. I probably enjoyed it the most of all Abercrombie's books but it's still to damn depressing to be my favourite of the year. I need happy endings .

Being depressing is Abercrombie's stock in trade. I remember Pat Rothfuss on a panel at Worldcon saying that he liked Abercrombie's books, but damn they were depressing. You finished them thinking there was no good in the world, and why did you continue to live?