My Best of 2006 lists

Best of 2006

It’s the end of the year, time for all the best-of lists. I’m a junkie for reading those things and for making lists. I don’t know why.

Top 10 Films

I’m a film buff. I try to catch quite a few films each year in the theaters. I’m fortunate, living in St. Louis, that we have some good art-house theaters, so I can catch interesting independent films, and am not just limited to whatever Hollywood spews forth. And I don’t have to wait for all this stuff to be released on DVD.

Actually, it was a good year for films. There were quite a few good mainsteam Hollywood releases as well as the indies. I was fortunate to be able to skip crap like Basic Instinct 2 and the almost daily cheap horror films foisted on dumb teenagers. So I had to come up with a top 20 list, or else a top 10 list with a number of Honorable Mentions. Each of these films were well worth the eight or nine bucks spent for a ticket. However, this list will change over the month of January, when some really cool films like Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth, which have been discussed on the Internet by film critics on the coasts, finally make their way here to the middle of America. But those two films, as well as possibly Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Children, replace some of these films on the top 10 list. And then I will come up with an explanation of why I chose the films that I did. But, for now, here is what I came up with.

1. Sophie Scholl
2. United 93
3. L' Enfant
4. The Three Burials of Melquiedes Estrada
5. The Fountain
6. The Science of Sleep
7. Brick
8. Cars
9. Inside Man
10. The Prestige

Honorable Mention:
Casino Royale
The New World
Pursuit of Happyness
Stranger Than Fiction
Citizen Dog
Wordplay
Little Miss Sunshine
Cache
Thank You for Smoking
Don't Come Knocking
The Aura
The Departed


Top 10 books

This is a list of the ten favorite books I read this year. This is not a list of books released during 2006. I’m always behind on my reading, so the books I noticed this year and want to read, I’ll eventually get around to next year, or the year after. But my list of books I read this year, that were written sometime within the last century, goes as follows:

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter Miller
The Sparrow - Maria Doria Russell
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Oxygen - Randall Ingermanson and John Olson
River Rising - Athol Dickson
Outriders - Kathryn Mackel
Body Piercing Saved My Life - Andrew Beaujoin
Double Vision - Randall Ingermanson
Speaker for the Dead - Orson Scott Card


Music: an obsessive series of lists in the spirit of High Fidelity (only I’m not depressed when I make these lists)

Top 10 Songs

Laughter Ever After - Andy Lewis with Betty Lavette
That's Where Jesus is - Lost Dogs
Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
Bellrays - Third Time's the Charm
Sparks - As I Sit Down to Play the Organ at the Notre Dame Cathedral
My Brightest Diamond - Golden Star
Decemberists - O Valencia
Robert Randolph - Deliver Me
Elf Power - An Old Familiar Scene
Neko Case - The Needle Has Landed


Top 10 Albums

The Decemberists - The Crane Wife
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Robert Randolph - Colorblind
Lost Dogs - The Lost Cabin and the Mystery Trees
My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me the Workhorse
Elvis Costello/Allen Toussaint - The River in Reverse
Elvis Costello - My Flame Turns Blue
Joanna Newsom - Ys
Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood
Sparks - Hello Young Lovers

Top 10 Concerts
1. Robert Randolph and the Family Band - The Pageant, St. Louis. Robert
tore the roof off that joint!
2. My Morning Jacket - The Pageant, St. Louis
3. Over the Rhine - Blueberry Hill, St. Louis - The jazziest I've ever
seen them
4. Mute Math - Cornerstone 2006
5. Lost Dogs - Cornerstone 2006
6. The Choir - Old Roxana Theater, Roxana, IL - A rare concert
appearance
7. Hem - Blueberry Hill, St. Louis
8. Devotchka/My Brightest Diamond, Blueberry Hill, St. Louis
9. Joanna Newsom, Blueberry Hill, St. Louis
10. Kevin Max/Violet Burning, Off Broadway, St. Louis


And one final list, just for fun, 10 favorite numbers:

777
471417
1000000000000000
-1
99
867-5309
6.02 x 10^23
666
13
pi