Publishing crisis? What publishing crisis? Despite the crash and burn of the big mainstream presses, all of them now owned by giant corporate conglomerates, it was actually a fantastic year for literature in general; it's simply that most of the best titles came from small and basement presses, or were sometimes even self-published. It's partly a changing of the guard, partly an overinflated market readjusting itself, but it seems that just like music in the previous few years, the most interesting and exciting books coming out these days are firmly within the underground, the world of small marketing budgets and not much mainstream notice.

Between old titles and new, I had the privilege this year of writing and posting a total of 122 book reviews here at CCLaP; 83 of those books have been published within the last two years, making them eligible for this "Year In Books" series of best-of lists I'll be publishing here this week. I'll be looking back at 38 of these titles, in fact, and writing brand-new micro-reviews of every single one, not only encapsulating what I liked about them in the first place, but examining what several months of introspection have done to my original opinion. They're broken down into four themed lists, one of which will be coming each day this week:

The best of the best
Worth a second look
The best cutting-edge
The CCLaP Guilty Pleasure Award

I hope you'll get a chance to follow along all week; or if you'd rather wait, at the end I'll be publishing a free downloadable standalone eBook version of the entire series, for not only American and European laserprinters but also Palm OS and the iPhone, as part of CCLaP Publishing's ongoing minor "White Paper" series.