One of the best things about writing about multiple media is that you’re not subject to the tyranny of Best Of lists. I could no more decide between Shame and Hugo for a numbered slot than I could pick between Revenge and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (though can we please get Kanye writing rhymes for and about Emily Thorne? I need an update on Snoop Dogg and his Sookie Stackhouse obsession). However, there were a lot of things that made me happy this year, and because Oprah’s not rockin’ it anymore, here is a semi-chronological-but-unranked list of my 26-odd favorite things to consume or discuss in 2011. A similar list of my least favorite things will follow tomorrow.

1. Frank Ocean makes us all hurt so good: I’m more irritated than anything else by the antics of Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. But it’s worth it for Frank Ocean, who rocks specific melancholia like nobody’s business. “Novacane” was one of my favorite songs of 2011.

2. Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch: Before y’all accuse me of getting all Armond White up in the business, let me be clear. I don’t think Sucker Punch is an affirmatively good movie or that Snyder is a visionary director (though I appreciate that he actually has a distinctive visual style). But as aestheticized meditation on the horrors of lobotomy, a frightening and overlooked part of American mental health history, I found it unexpectedly moving. Plus, Snyder circumvented a ban on female leads with the movie.

3. Cedar Rapids sets Ed Helms loose: Up In the Air, but for people who actually live in flyover country, and Parks and Recreation with a deeper undercurrent of bitter darkness and isolation. There should be more popular culture about the struggle to be fundamentally decent.

4. War photographers movie The Bang-Bang Club and HBO’s biopic of the Louds, Cinema Verite: After the death of Tim Heatherington and as Joao Silva recovered from his injuries, The Bang-Bang Club offered a look at what it takes not just to put yourself in danger as a war photographer, but at what it means to be an observer rather than someone who intervenes. Conversely, Cinema Verite went back to the invention of reality television to explore what it means to be watched — and dissected — by a mass audience.

5. Game of Thrones is brilliant, and even the frustrating A Dance With Dragons is grist for the mill: I worry that George R.R. Martin’s universe is spiraling completely out of control, too big for any series to contain. But the first season of the HBO adaptation featured great performances, particularly by a host of very young actors and a smart sense for cuts and world-building. I don’t know if we’ll reach the end of this fascinating, maddening saga any time soon. But the ride looks like it’s going to be delightful.
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In my quest to read all of David Liss’s novels, I finally finished The Coffee Trader, a companion novel of sorts or prequel to his Benjamin Weaver novels that explain how Benjamin’s uncle, Miguel Lienzo, became the man of consequence he is. Like all of Liss’ novels, it’s a useful explanation of some part of the financial system — in this case, commodity markets — and why it should be regulated in general (though not in this case, because that would prevent our hero from triumphing over an unworthy enemy). But it’s also a great meditation on the rise of personal productivity.

After drinking coffee for the first time, Miguel reflects:

How many times, after conducting business in taverns, had Miguel’s wits suffered with each tankard of beer? How many times had he wished he had the concentration for another hour’s clarity with the week’s pricing sheets?…The coffee’s scent began to make him light-headed with something like desire. No, not desire. Greed. Geertruid had stumbled upon something, and Miguel felt her infectious eagerness swelling in his chest. It was like panic or jubilance or something else, but he wanted to leap from his seat.

Similarly, coffee for Hannah unleashes a sense of potential, the idea that she should be able to learn more about Jewish law, that she should be able to read. The berries and the drink give both of them the sense that they’re not bounded by fate and the limitations of the body; that they can, if not entirely conquer tiredness, push it back for a time; that they can reach for greater clarity than that normally available to them. Their success in personal and private life is incumbent on them, not on God’s favor, and if they are clever enough, not the approval of their community or their adherence to artificially imposed norms.

As we know from discussions of the current recession, productivity is not a cure-all if we don’t have the resources to consume. If the workforce as a whole is much more productive, tapping into your full productivity doesn’t actually give you the sort of advantage that Miguel Lienzo got from drinking coffee (and, of course, from working as an independent operator rather than for a firm). So there’s something sort of wistful about a look back to a time when the new standards seemed full of nigh-magical promise and opportunity.

Novelist David Liss likes to send his heroes up against sweeping forces of societal change, whether Jewish boxer-turned-detective Benjamin Weaver is running up against the rise of the stock market and paper money in books like A Conspiracy of Paper and The Spectacle of Corruption or Ethan Saunders is investigating the circumstances surrounding the founding of the Bank of America in The Whiskey Rebels. In his newest book, The Twelfth Enchantment, Lucy Derrick, a young woman with more than a passing resemblance to some of Jane Austen’s most famous heroines, finds her community and her life under threat by the rise of the Industrial Revolution. And Lucy learns that she has the magical talent to stand against some of the more destructive forces at work behind the rise of England’s mills. We spoke about writing political fiction, Austen’s secondary characters, and magic as a social get-out-of-jail-free card. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve written mostly straight historical fiction in the past. How did you decide to make the switch to fantasy?

I’ve always loved genre fiction, and at some point, I knew that I wanted to do something like this. It might be more accurate to say did I decide I wasn’t going to write genre fiction? I got started on a different track…I was in grad school and I decided I want to write a novel. I went with the old adage that you should write what you know. What I knew was 18th century Britain, so what I decided I would do is write a novel based on my dissertation research. For whatever reason, I decided to play it straight and not doing anything paranormal with that book. I’ve always been resistant to being pigeon-holed and being told that because this was the kind of novel I’d written, this was the kind of novel I had to keep writing. I’ve been able to get away with it so far.

Well, even though The Twelfth Enchanment is a fantasy novel, it’s deeply engaged with social issues. It’s always fascinating to me that Austen’s novels, which are very brittle and funny about class, aren’t really engaged with larger social issues.

[There were] two different things I wanted to do. One, which I wrote about in io9, was magic as it was understood in the period. The other thing was I was really interested in was what you were talking about, the narrow view of the Jane Austen novel. She was living in and writing about a period that was going through an incredible economic upheaval that rarely in any way creeps into her books, and then only in the most oblique ways. That was where I began. In terms of the character’s evolution, I guess what I would say is I’m very resistant to writing characters who are contemporary people who happen to be living in the past. I wanted to write about someone who felt to me like a realistic 19th-century character with a realistic set of 19th-century worldviews and interests. To have her start out as someone who is conscious of and aware of and active about these issues never felt realistic to me. Her evolution from apathy to interest I always felt needed to happen in the book, rather than to be introduced to his woman who is a social activist.
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