The 2006 End Game

This was a sorry year, in many respects. It introduced still more scandals into Washington, D.C. (see here and here), pushed the U.S. military death toll in Iraq over the 3,000 mark, and forced us to deal with Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism, Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping antics and religious extremism, Dick Cheney’s atrocious aim, and pop singer Britney Spears’ oddly exposed crotch. But as end-of-the-year list-makers confirm, the last 12 months also had their high points.

Blogger Uriah Robinson of Crime Scraps celebrates 2006 as the year he discovered “authors Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri, Gianrico Carofiglio, and Carlo Lucarelli” and realized “Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall were as good as I remembered after a 15-year gap in reading their police procedurals.” L.A. Noir’s Stephen Blackmoore remembers fondly a few books he read over the last 12 months, among them Saturday’s Child, by Ray Banks, Already Dead, by Charlie Huston, and Pale Immortal, by Anne Frasier. Meanwhile, Bill Crider delivers one of the most broad-ranging “year in review” rundowns I’ve seen yet, incorporating not only his “favorite new TV series slogan,” from NBC’s Heroes (“Save the cheerleader, save the world”) and his “best paperback writer news” (“Stark House will be publishing a brand-new Gil Brewer novel”), but a bit of self-congratulation for the “topic I avoided entirely this year (well, except for once): Lindsay Lohan’s nipples.” Crider, however, more than made up for that restraint with his coverage of Paris Hilton ...

Happy New Year, everyone!