LET IT ALL GO: 2011 BEST-OF. I'm sorry this is so late!

Best books read (nonfiction): David Carr, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life--His Own
Johnny Weir, Welcome to My World--a perfect cocktail of humility and glamour!
Christopher C. Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage (video talk here and my comments on it here)
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, The Soviet Intelligentsia, And the Russian Orthodox Church
Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying

and it's just so different from the others that it deserves its own category, but I read the Sayings of the Desert Fathers for the first time this past year, and I know I'll be returning to them.

Best books read for the first time (fiction/whatnot): Imre Kertész, Fateless
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Christopher Coe, I Look Divine
Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

Best movies watched for the first time: Of Gods and Men
Solaris
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains!
Ivan's Childhood
This Gun for Hire

also should be mentioned: Attack the Block (more), A Boy Called Charlie Brown, Black Caesar, Everything Must Go, The Hunger, I Start Counting, The Island (Остров), Less Than Zero, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Macbeth (1979), The Nun's Story, Smoke Signals, The Virgin Spring

Best theater (etc): The Mariinsky Ballet, Anna Karenina
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", Arena Stage
"Venus in Fur," Studio Theatre
Mariinsky, Giselle
"King Lear," Synetic Theater (I ultimately didn't think this production worked--it was a kind of commedia dell'arte/Eurotrash interpretation--but it was interestingly wrong!)

Best blog posts: "Stronger at the Broken Places"
"The Proper Basis for Marriage Is a Mutual Misunderstanding" (service journalism)
"How a Thrill Becomes a Law"
Notes from the Oriented to Love retreat
A series of posts, which I wish I could redo but which still have value, on the Mountain Goats

and a bit more service journalism: a list, with notes, of my favorite children's novels from Diana Wynne Jones

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): "Beyond Liberalism," my essay for Cato Unbound's symposium on "traditionalism in a futuristic world" (and the follow-up, "Tradition's Comedies of Error"; my other follow-up, "Who Put the Tradition in 'Traditional Marriage'?", is fine but not as good)
"Flawed Reflection" (my review of the oh-so-controversial "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery"
"Breaking 'The Rules'" (review of Extravagant Expectations and Premarital Sex in America)
"How to Convert" (title is misleading!)

...And wow, I think that's it, since my Weekly Standard reviews are subscribers-only. Uh, I'll do better this year! Ouch.

KISS AND CRY: MY YEAR IN REVIEW. I'm spending the tail-tip of 2010 researching, re-reading, and watching figure skating instead of movies, so it should be safe to do the best-of now. I can always edit if something happens in the next five days.

Best books read (nonfiction): Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality
Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place
Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism
Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage
Joy Goodwin, The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, And the Battle for Olympic Gold

Best books read (fiction/whatnot): Good grief, I read so little of this. 2011 will be so much better!
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
Janos Nyiri, Battlefields and Playgrounds
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring
Edmund White, A Boy's Own Story

Best movies watched (for the first time): "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
"Police, Adjective"
"Spider Baby" (and more!)
"Salome" (1923) with the Silent Orchestra

also deserve mention, and I can't pick among them: "The Business of Fancydancing," "The Comedians," "Hidden Fortress." And I should say that my mind has returned to the rancid, cruel, sad "Deadgirl" many times since I watched it; I wrote about it briefly here and here.

Best theater: "Richard III" (Hole in the Wall Theater, New Britain, CT)--yes, I'm going to bat for this as the most committed, insightful, and just plain awesome show I saw this year.
"The New Jerusalem" (Theater J)
"Passing Strange" (Studio Theater)
"In the Red and Brown Water" (Studio Theater)
"Antony and Cleopatra" (Synetic Theater)

Best blog posts/series (six, not five, as is traditional)--super double extra gay this year, apparently: My series on Jay Prosser's book, which begins here.

My exchange with John Corvino on gay marriage: Ross Douthat, Andrew Sullivan, John Corvino, me, Corvino again, me again here and here.

Famous Authors' Texts from Last Night.

"Poker Face" (on the closet as a near occasion of sin). Prompted this exchange w/Jendi Reiter.

"Home and Dry" (what I think is the most beautiful argument for gay marriage).

"Order from Confusion Sprung" (my problems with the language of homosexuality as "intrinsically disordered). Much more here.

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): "Live Through This":

To be a Catholic is to accept certain questions as things to be lived through rather than to be answered.

more

"The Great Unweaving":

I'm sitting outside a downtown Starbucks with two George Washington University undergraduates, talking about sex, politics, and religion. Michele Walk and Conor Joseph Rogers fit my stereotype of contemporary American college students. They're sincere, confident, and hyperaware of the ways in which they're different from their parents.

Michele and Conor also represent a growing demographic: They consider themselves both pro-life and supporters of gay marriage.

more

My Gay Catholic Whatnot piece for Reality magazine, available for 1.70EU here.

"Six Imperfect Metaphors for Conversion."

My review of the National Gallery of Art's Spanish sacred painting and sculpture exhibit (subscribers-only).

Also, I finished the novel. I'm looking for an agent, so if you have suggestions (or if you can help hook me up!) I would be deeply grateful. It's a queer coming-of-age story I guess, with stigmata geekery, feminism and its limits, and morning sickness. Lit-mainstream, if you can believe it.

THE SEASONS COME, THE SEASONS GO: 2009 best-of. I'm posting it now because I've accepted that I probably won't finish Under Western Eyes in 2009. Previous years' compilations can be found on the sidebar....

I did a lot of re-reading this year, and read a lot of fiction I don't need to revisit. I also separated out plays for the first time. Those facts combine to make the book lists a bit thinner than usual. So I've starred the books and plays-I-read which I would recommend without qualification to anyone who reads this blog. The unstarred things are often amazing, but not as universally-recommended.

Best books read for the first time (nonfiction): * Alan Bray, The Friend. Hands-down winner. One of the most beautiful and mind-expanding books I've ever read.

Speaking of the Eucharist, I love how thoroughly Bray has placed this sacrament at the heart of his book. Anyone interested in Eucharist as love-feast and as quintessential Christian prayer cannot afford to miss this book, for real.

more!
* Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion.
* Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.
* Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Perfumes: The Guide.
Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.

I... don't want to be a bitch, but if this is service journalism then I should probably note that the Cherlin wouldn't've made it onto a best-of list in any previous year. I did a lot of re-reading and a lot of reading of subpar fiction this year. The Cherlin has a lot to recommend it, as I hope my review makes plain, but it's just not in the same league as the other four. And The Friend is just interstellar distances beyond the others.

Best books read (fiction/whatnot): Huh, this was not a fiction year for me. I did a lot of re-reading, as well.
Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten.
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood.
Paul Celan, Last Poems.
James Agee, A Death in the Family.
Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution.

Best movies watched for the first time: "The Trial."
"Barton Fink."
"Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... And Spring."
"Ran." (Yes, by this ranking you can tell how difficult it is for me to separate personal-favorites from best-of.)
"Up."

almost made it!: "(Untitled)," "The Squid and the Whale," "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," "The Descent."

plus honorable mentions for various shorts in the two discs of "Avant-Garde: Experimental Film of the 1920s and 1930s." One; two.

Best blog posts (six, not five, as is traditional):
"Song for a Future Generation": I wrote a lot about friendship and kinship and same-sex love this year. This post might be the best place to start. (more)
"The Most Important Word in the Declaration of Independence Is 'Created'": Or, why there's no point in requiring "secular reasons" for political stances. With bonus aesthetic theory and America-as-argument.
"Falling in Love (Is So Hard on the Knees)": A response to the best criticism I received for my Commonweal piece about Gay Catholic Whatnot.

What I actually meant can perhaps be discerned by noting that I don't only begin the Commonweal piece with my coming-out story. I begin it with two parallel love stories: my crush on a high-school girl, and my Catholic conversion. The implicit narrative of the essay is the story of how love of Christ and His Bride the Church became more central to my life than lesbian love (real love, not just crushes!), and how, therefore, I began to interpret the latter kind of love in light of the former.

Both of these loves are things I really experienced my own self. So my argument probably should not have been cast in terms of experience vs. tradition, but in terms of which experiences lead us to reinterpret prior experiences and transform our response to subsequent experiences.

more
"Wear Your Insides Out": Beauty is a killer mutant cat that hides inside another cat.
"Politics and the English Language," a two-part thing about gay marriage and the rhetoric of its opponents. The second post is by far the more important one, I think, but the first post provides context and concessions.
It is now my duty to completely drain you: Against sincerism.

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): "Romoeroticism." Possibly the most interesting thing I've ever written for money?

This year, just like last year, Gay Pride weekend coincided with the feast of Corpus Christi.

more
"Defining the Relationship." Do you have a personal relationship with Jesus?

We need to keep in mind that it's okay to challenge God -- Abraham did it. It's okay to howl at God in desperation -- Job did it. It's even okay to laugh at God -- Sarah did it. All of them still understood themselves to be bound to God, to hold Him as their Lord, even as they expressed themselves in ways that wouldn't make the parish council happy.

more
"Church Ladies," First Things review of Catholic and Feminist.
"Shelf Life," my American Conservative column on MLK library. I also liked my piece on Malcolm X Park. Both are subscribers-only.
"Sublimity Now!"

But it would be a mistake to map the Burkean sublime too quickly onto a Christian sublime. In the Christian worldview, sublimity is like cheap lipstick -- or the ashes of Ash Wednesday: It gets all over everything.

more

Best plays (read or watched): Studio Theatre, Rock'n'Roll. (And a * for the script, which I also read for the first time.)
* Edward Albee, The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?: Notes Toward a Definition of Tragedy. I'd seen this before but never read it. It's a harsh, brilliant, scathingly funny play.
"A Midsummer Night's Dream," adapted and performed by the Synetic Theater.
* Elie Wiesel, The Trial of God.
"Dracula," adapted and performed by the Synetic Theater.

My published short fiction: "Better." What if the aliens are just better than us?
"A Story Like Mine": For every scar there's at least one story.

God bless, and see you in the new decade. Remember that New Year's Day is also the feast of Mary, the Mother of God, a holy day of obligation. Drag yourself to church!

SOMEDAY ALL THIS WILL BE PICTURESQUE RUINS: Best of 2008.

Best books read (nonfiction): Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, Frederick Roden
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise/Heloise and Abelard, Etienne Gilson
I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, Francis J. Spufford
Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia (more)
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon

Best books read (real books): The Little Friend, Donna Tartt--I'm not sure what I can say about this other than, READ IT NOW, since even discussing its general thrust and genre would be spoilerous. But I can tell you it is a terrific portrayal of childhood; it's in some ways the opposite of The Secret History, and less addictive but just as accomplished; the ending is better, the prose is just as good (less urgent, more composed); basically this is an amazing book, part The Plague, part A High Wind in Jamaica, but mostly sui generis. If you liked TSH you owe this to yourself, but even if you didn't like it, this one is different enough that you should check it out.
Cards of Identity, Nigel Dennis
Ladies Almanack, Djuna Barnes
Penthesilea, Heinrich von Kleist
Earthquake Weather, Tim Powers--sequel to both Expiration Date and (the terrific) Last Call; the terrible gifts of the god Dionysos, Powers's usual fantasy of salvage deployed in the service of placing America in mythic tradition. Dark, painful, redemptive and expiatory... and featuring one of Powers's best characters, Cody, certainly my favorite of his women.

Best movies watched for the first time: Ringu
Tokyo Godfathers
Repulsion
Shock Treatment
The Way Things Go

Best blog posts (six, not five, as is traditional):
A ridiculously long post on conservatism, complicity, and things that aren't Godel--basically my position statement at the moment
How to Make Your Child a Gay Activist
Skirting the Issues (my review of the Shakespeare Theatre's all-male Romeo and Juliet)
Resurrected words battle zombie words (ridiculous, ragged post about language, leadership, philosophy, and why our political rhetoric fails so epically)
The best horror anthology never made (with bonus theology!)
Mixing memory and desire: Notes from my Theology on Tap presentation (about gay Catholic whatnot)

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): "Theology of the Body in Pain" (on torture)
"The Weakerthans: Liturgy of the Other Hours"
"Tainted Love" (on Heloise and Abelard--see link above)
"When I Was Cruel" (review of Alan Moore's Small Killing)
"The Serenity Player" (review of Hermann Hesse's Glass Bead Game)