 A little while ago, I realized I could get this video filmed on time, or I could get it filmed with hair that looks nice. I'll let you figure out which choice I made. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So as we approach the end of 2020, I think we can all agree it was definitely an interesting year. You know, for a couple of people it was probably great. For a lot of people it was not great. But I'm just here to talk about stuff I read in 2020. You know, the best, the worst, the weirdest...all that kind of stuff. This was an alright year for my channel. I reached 50,000 near the beginning, and I didn't quite reach 100,000 by the end, but there was still growth there, so I'm fine with it. And intro stuff, intro stuff, intro stuff. Let's get to the best and the worst. So the award for weirdest book I read in 2020 is No Contest, the Tim Worth Chronicles Dream State. So this one was a Patreon request. It's not very well known. In fact, I mentioned in the review that when I got to it, it had literally zero ratings and zero reviews on Goodreads, because it's just some self-published Amazon Kindle store thing. It is a bizarre book. Like, it includes spider aliens and this weird magical matrix that humanity is apparently in, and a main character who decides he wants to commit suicide after having a swirly, and a villain who cuts off someone's ear and then cooks it on a stove to intimidate them. There's just a lot of very, very strange stuff goes on in this book, and I could not get into it if I had all day here, so I'm just gonna move on before we all lose our minds. However, I will say that one's just the weirdest in terms of the content it has. Like, in concept, it sounds fine. You know, it's just a kid discovers he has superpowers and then goes off and fights bad guys. You know, it doesn't sound that weird. The weirdest one in concept is actually the A-Circuit series, which were those horse romance novels written by Michael Bloomberg's daughter. Those, um, you know, you just hear that and you think, why does this exist? And I could not tell you if I tried. The best fantasy I read this year, that one has to go to Rhythm of War. Now, I know there were a couple of contenders this year. You know, there are stuff like Kings of the Wild, which is a fantastic book. You know, it's self-contained. Most of the characters are a lot of fun, because they're basically just the same adventurer archetypes that you see in most fantasy novels, except, like, 30 years later and they're all old and fat. And they just go on one last adventure together. It has a nice sense of humor, all that. It's a lot different, but it is a really good, fun book. And then there is the Bands of Mourning, which is, you know, it's Mistborn, so obviously it's pretty good. And that one does a good job of going more in depth with a lot of the characters and having just, you know, fun action and stuff, but it's really the ending of the very last couple of pages where shit gets real. And I was like, oh my lord, I wasn't expecting that. That put it in contention for this spot. But overall, I just have to go with Rhythm of War because, again, it has a crazy ending, which, you know, I'm not going to go into spoilers here, but crazy, crazy ending and along the way, it just does not go in the direction that you would expect this kind of epic fantasy story to go. And a lot of the characters are still fantastic and the world itself is still fantastic. I wish they had gone a little more in depth on certain parts of it, but whatever, it's overall just a really, really solid book and I have a couple of complaints about it mostly regarding its length. But overall, just Rhythm of War, it has to be the best fantasy I read this year. I'm sorry, like the instant I finished it, I said I want Stormlight 5, but we got to wait another three years or so. The best science fiction book I read this year, obviously it's Prey by Michael Crichton. Like, I didn't talk too much about this one because I just don't have that much to say about it. It's Michael Crichton, so if you're at all familiar with Jurassic Park or Sphere or Congo or anything like that, it's going to be something like that. You know, some sort of weird technological thing goes wrong and a group of heroes has to try and stop it. And that's basically what happens in Prey. A group of nanomachines or nanobots, whatever you want to call them, gets loose and starts hunting animals and wildlife and stuff and they're afraid it's going to start hitting humans, so they're like, okay, well we got to figure out a way to stop this and that's the story. And it's really good, it's fast paced, you feel the stakes right away. The characters aren't particularly good, but Michael Crichton was never very good at that, but that's fine because the story just keeps you going all the way through. And so Prey, admittedly I didn't read that much sci-fi this year, so it didn't have that much competition, but Prey is still a pretty fantastic book. The biggest disappointment I had this year was a comic series called Drafted. Now I brought this up a little bit in my Obama Nations of fan fiction video, because this is a comic series which is totally normal for the most part, but then they had a weird spin-off that starred Barack Obama, it was odd. But you know, this series started off with the coolest concept I'd heard in a long time. Basically, aliens come to Earth, they take over and they say that they're drafting all of humanity into their galactic war with another alien species. And I just thought, yeah, that sounds awesome, that sounds amazing. And then they do nothing with that idea. You know, it's a very short series, it's only like 12 issues I think, and there's a couple of really easy-to-spot plot twists that come in near the beginning and near the end, and the characters are decent, but not that great, and just overall I had... I know you're not supposed to have too high hopes for things because you'll inevitably be let down, but man, I was like just based on that idea, I was up here, and then they just did nothing with it, you know? It's kind of like how I was complaining about Fallen a couple of months ago, when they kept bringing up these cool ideas that would make the story much more unique and much more interesting, and then they just did nothing with them. It's a similar idea. I have to mention the runner-up though, and that would be the New Order and the Revival, which are the second and third books in the Young World trilogy, because I liked the Young World, I thought it was a solid book, and then the New Order basically comes out and says, yo, guys, there is... turns out there wasn't an apocalypse, yeah. I know you thought you were the last humans on Earth and that you were about to save the world, but yeah, turns out that's not true, so the stakes are drastically lowered throughout the rest of the series, and then the story is just not as interesting because again, you're no longer saving humanity, and they could have worked that out by just having them save a small portion of themselves, which they kind of do, you know, they're trying to save their tribe, their family, yada yada, but they still don't do a particularly good job of it, and yeah, it was just not as bad as drafted, but still a very big disappointment to me. The best romance I read this year, and keep in mind when I say best romance, I don't mean the best romance novel I read this year, I mean, the best romance that I read in a novel this year is Wax and Starris from Bands of Morning. Now, Wax and Starris have been an item for three books now, but in the first two they didn't really interact that much. They were just... I mean, Wax was the main character, he was the hero that went around doing stuff, and Starris was the woman that he was basically being forced to marry in order to save his family and his family name, and it was, you know, not... it wasn't that interesting because they didn't do much with it. It was like, oh, I have to choose between my duty and what I want, which, I mean, that's fine. It's just the relationship itself wasn't that good. But then in Bands of Morning, Starris actually gets some decent development. Like, this was around the time I realized that she's pretty clearly on the autism spectrum somewhere, and she has her own strengths and weaknesses and her own insecurities about stuff, and she realizes that she is kind of a weirdo, but she's just doing her best to make it work, and her and Wayne actually do start to bond over that, and by the end, it's clear that they are genuinely in love. They aren't just getting married for political or business or financial reasons, and so I really didn't expect that to happen, and if I'm being honest, Brandon Sanderson is not that great at writing romance, so I wasn't expecting to see one this good, but I really liked it, and I want to see where it goes in the future, so easily the best romance I read this year. The worst romance I read this year, by a pretty huge margin actually, was Patch and Nora from Hush Hush. Now, I'm not going to talk too much about this one because I've only read the first three books in the series, and I want to hurry up and get the fourth one out, and sometime in January, I should have my thoughts on the whole series collected, and we'll get to that when we get to it, but all I'm going to say for now is that in those supernatural young adult romance, Twilight ripoffs, they all follow certain patterns, and one of those patterns is that the male love interest is just creepy and possessive, and they usually try not to make that too bad, but in Hush Hush they leaned into it really hard, and this relationship has so many red flags, like it is nothing but red flags. I cannot see a single flag of any other color, I can't even see the relationship itself behind all those red flags, but it's bad. Take my word for it. We'll take my word for it for another month, and then you won't have to take my word for it. It's awful. The best nonfiction book I read this year was America's War for the Greater Middle East. Now, okay, I don't talk about the nonfiction I read on here too much because it's just not that interesting. I don't have that much to say. It's like, oh, this was kind of cool. I didn't know this about history, and it showed it to me from a different angle. That's kind of neat. And yeah, that's basically what America's War for the Greater Middle East is, although that's not a super accurate title because it talks about areas outside the Middle East that the U.S. Army has been fighting in forever, but it is a catchier name than America's War for the Middle East and the Balkans and North Africa and Central Asia. But anyways, the point is it just goes over stuff that's happened over the past 50 or 60 years and how the United States government and military and public and politicians and yada-yada has had some successes but also massive, massive failures and just the author's take on how to fix those and how to move forward from this and try to make a world that's more stable and more peaceful for everybody. And you may disagree with some of his takes, I certainly did, but honestly, I would recommend this for people of all sorts of political persuasions just so you can have that information out there and his take on it and you can realize, okay, this is a complex situation, but maybe we can find a way out of it. The best book that took place in Colorado is Monument 14. Not very stiff competition in that category this year. It was either that or Battlefield Earth. That was it. Monument 14 is not very good, but it was still kind of cool to have something that took place in the area that I'm from because the only really famous book I can think of that takes place in Colorado other than Battlefield Earth, obviously, is The Shining, but even then that one takes place way out west in the mountains and everything whereas Monument 14 takes place in Monument, which is very close to Colorado Springs, which is where I live, so that's kind of cool. Have some representation, all that. Write about Colorado. Somebody, please. The biggest quality drop I saw this year was in the Wise Man's Fear because if you've read the series, you know what I'm talking about. The first book, The Name of the Wind, I thought was pretty good, overrated, but I enjoyed it. Wise Man's Fear genuinely feels like a really obnoxious, drawn-out Dungeons & Dragons campaign where the characters just go all over and do random stuff and even though there is an actual story, there's no progress being made. Only it's even worse because there's only one character and he's not that great or that interesting. Like, sure, you can go on about, oh, well actually, in the future, he failed so like, maybe things aren't going to work out great and I'm interested to see where that goes and like, yeah, sure. I'm also kind of interested in that, but Quoth is just not that good of a character, I don't think. He's obnoxious. He's not fun to follow around and he might be fine if there were like, other people around him that actually followed him on his adventures and also contributed to the story and stuff and people that he could work off of. That would be fine, I think, but just having him by himself is really obnoxious and, you know, I will say, at least, Patrick Rothfuss can write prose amazingly well and that kept me going throughout this whole thing, but honestly, the book is just a very good view on how neckbeards see themselves. And now we're coming close to the end, so we're going to have to talk about the worst book I read this year. Now, this one was hard. This one was hard to decide on because I read a lot of terrible books this year. You know, I did several videos on terrible series that I read all the way through, but the problem with that is that trying to pick just one book out of those series is extremely difficult, and after a lot of thought, I eventually decided on Empire of Storms, which is the fifth book in the Throne of Glass series saga, whatever the hell it's called. Now, I'll come right out and say House of Night is a worse series than Throne of Glass and Throne of Glass is already pretty bad overall, but House of Night is just pure insanity and pain from beginning to end, but the problem is that all of the books kind of blended together in that way. You know, they all had some really dumb stuff in them, and while I was about to say they all had some good stuff in them, but really no, there's one or two decent ideas in there, but they were at the very beginning and they never did anything with them, so, you know, I'm not going to say anything positive about House of Night, but yeah, all the books just kind of blend together in one blob in my mind, whereas with Throne of Glass, each of the books, I still remember most of the events that took place in them, and they're all pretty shitty in their own way, and Empire of Storms is easily the shittiest in that regard, because this is the only one where I can't find a single thing that I actually liked about it. Like, okay, I kind of liked one action scene in there, where one of the characters transformed herself into like a water dragon thing and fought some other water dragons, that was admittedly a cool scene, but other than that, it was just the characters wandering from place to place, and to make it even worse, there were groups of characters that the story decided to focus on each of them and just like go back and forth between chapters, and all they're doing is just wandering from place to place. That's it. Like, the main character, Eileen, is just wandering from place to place and talking to people and saying, hey, there's a bad guy, he's doing bad things, you should help me stop him do the bad things, and the guys say, no, I will not help you stop the bad guy do bad things, because bad guy do bad things, not bad things, me, not do. Yeah. This is also the book where the series just straight up turns into porn. Like, if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. Like, partway through the book, like, characters have had sex in these earlier books, but it's just kind of implied or mentioned vaguely. You know, it's like, it mentions they woke up in the morning together and they were naked, and it's like, oh, okay, it's pretty clear what went down there, but they don't go into a lot of detail, and they're literally describing sticking her hand down his pants and finding velvet steel. Actual words used, by the way. I still remember them, even like, eight months later, because it's that obnoxious and stupid. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But I think the real thing that makes Empire of Storms so much worse than any individual House of Night book could be is how long it is. My copy was over 600 pages. It did not need to be that long, guys. It did not need to be. Like, I know I said that it was just characters wandering around, not doing much, but yeah, that's what happens. Like, you have maybe, maybe 200 pages worth of story in this. Like, if you cut out all the pointless traveling and the pointless love interest-y stuff with characters that are not important to anything and aren't that interesting on their own, if you cut that out, this book would be so much shorter. And, oh my God, I don't even want to talk about it anymore. Let's just move on. It was the worst book I read this year. That's all. And the best book I read this year, Drumroll, is De-Evolution by Max Brooks. Now, this one, I don't even know what else I can say about this one. I raved about it quite a bit in my review of it, even though it wasn't a particularly long review, and I don't have anything else to add. It's a fantastic book. It's written by Max Brooks, who also wrote World War Z, and the way he writes horror is just beyond what anyone else can do. Like, he commits to detail in a way that makes it creepily plausible, even though we know, yeah, zombies aren't real, and we know Sasquatch isn't real. Guys, I said in my review of that book that Sasquatch is not real. He's not. People in the comments were upset with me. He's not real. He isn't. It's not going to happen. But anyways, even though we know that stuff's not real, he commits to detail in a way which makes it kind of plausible, and to me and to a lot of other people, that's what makes it creepier. Like, I think I mentioned a long time ago that I like creepypastas that seem almost like they could be real, and that's why, because there's a part at the back of your head that's saying, oh, I hope I never run into this, and also his stories aren't just about one person or a group of people or anything that are in trouble. It's about how society can so easily break down and none of us are prepared for that and what happens next. And so that's so much scarier than any creature or monster or anything ever could be. And so for that reason, Max Brooks is one of the best authors of this generation. I wish he could work more, but he just spends five or six years researching and then he'll write a book. So we don't get a lot from him, but what we get, the quality makes up for the lack of quantity. So yeah, the best book I read this year, I have basically no problems with it. It's The Evolution by Max Brooks. If you haven't read it, check it out. It's fantastic. So that's about all I have to say on that, and I just want to say that, well, like I mentioned at the beginning, this has been a hell of a year. I know I lucked out when I sort of fell into having this job because I can work from home. I don't have to really worry about getting sick or getting other people sick. And my job is ironically much more secure than a lot of other peoples right now because I don't have to worry about the company I'm at, closing or cutting hours or anything. So I understand that I really lucked out here and I appreciate every single one of you watching or donating money on Patreon or anything like that because you're taking money that you don't have an infinite amount of and you're giving me some or you're taking time out of your day to watch some of my stuff. And I know it's probably been a difficult year for a lot of you. I know depression and anxiety and stuff can happen following being stuck indoors for a long time. I know many of you have not been able to see friends and family over holidays like you wanted to. And that can be difficult. And if I could help you in some small way to overcome that, then, well, I'm glad I could help. Times are difficult right now and I don't really have a solution for that. Obviously I'm just one guy. I can't just tell you everything's going to be all right because I don't know if it will be. What I will say is that you shouldn't sit around and hope that things will just instantly get better. And I'm not trying to say that everything is on your shoulders either. Like sometimes the world just kicks you in the ass and you don't have any real options. Like a lot of us are... Well, a lot of us are just kind of screwed at the moment and the government and corporations and all them are not going to help us. So I don't know an instant solution to this. Like decades of neoliberalism and austerity have led us to this point and stuff like climate change is only going to get worse. So I'm not trying to be all doom and gloom here. I am trying to make this a celebration of the good things that we had this year because there were a couple. I'm sure everyone has at least a few moments or things that they liked about what went down in the past 12 months or so. And even if you don't... Well, come here. Come to my channel. Watch some stuff. Maybe that'll help. Maybe it won't. But I hope you all have a lovely day anyways and I hope you have a great Christmas, a great new year. If you don't celebrate Christmas, I hope you just have a lovely day or whatever holidays you might be celebrating. And I hope I can see you in the year of our Lord 2021. Bye.