For fiction, Ernest Cline easily took the top spots on my list with both Ready Player One and Armada. He took my childhood love of video games and pop culture and turned it into two amazing narratives that had me laughing, gasping, tearing up, and everything in between. John Scalzi's Redshirts was also a great idea for a book... the characters find themselves in a Star Trek-like reality where they realize they're "red shirts," a.k.a. the ones that always die on away missions while the gold and blue shirt wearing leadership always miraculously survives. And I had to put Brandon Sanderson's Calamity on there because it was a great ending to his YA superhero trilogy which I've been a huge fan of since the very beginning.

For nonfiction, I really enjoyed Grant Morrison's history and analysis of the history of comics characters in Supergods, and finally got around to reading Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and have to say I now know what all the fuss is about.

I had three favorite new podcasts this year, in addition to the regulars that I continued listening to. Keepin' It 1600 is a politics podcast co-hosted by former Obama senior strategy and communications advisor Dan Pfeiffer and Jon Favreau (Obama's former chief speechwriter, not the director ). Even though they were admittedly overconfident and a little condescending about the election coverage, they both have an amazing inside perspective at what a presidential administration has to deal with and needs to accomplish and their commentary has been fascinating. I also loved Dead Pilots Society (from Ben Blacker, the same guy who hosts the Nerdist Writer's Panel), where he does table reads of pilot scripts that everyone loves and were bought by networks but never actually made it to screen. And, for pure entertainment value, My Dad Wrote A Porno has been absolutely hysterical. A British man discovered that his elderly father has taken to writing (very bad) erotica under a pen name, so naturally he figured the best thing to do was to find two friends so they can read and discuss a chapter a week in podcast form.

Earlier this year, I read Civil War for the first time, in anticipation of the movie coming out, and I wasn't disappointed. It's one of the best alternate storylines I've read in a long time. Lazarus was a surprisingly good read with a fascinating and well-conceived take on a post-apocalyptic world, and Red Ten (a superhero adaptation of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None) continues to be a favorite despite the fact that they only put out one issue this year.

I'm not putting any favorites or highly recommended on the script section of my reading list because a lot of the writers on this list are my friends and/or colleagues and I don't want to play favorites with my friends and business associates.