There's nothing as visceral as television and movies to entertain and bring new worlds and new ideas to life. Unless it's books. I've recapped my literary obsessions of 2007, a disparate list of four novels that, oddly for me, contains three war-themed tomes, so here are the shows and films that captivated me over the past year, a year in Hollywood shadowed by a writers strike.

Maybe reading those affecting accounts of past wars partly explains my repugnance for articles and blog posts about striking writers, with their country presently at war, comparing them to soldiers in battle. But there's little doubt the Writers Guild of America is facing an uphill battle in their fight against the media conglomerates, with one central issue in particular – the right to greater residuals for online distribution – that they need to win. It hasn't been pretty, and it's only going to get uglier. My new year's wish for Hollywood is a quick and fair end to the strike.

The Television That Transported Me

House: It's hard to say anything new about my insatiable fondness for House, which entered its apparently truncated fourth season in September. Yet while it might be boring to name it year after year on my top TV list, there's nothing boring about the show that successfully shook up the cast and formula with an inspired faux-reality hiring game. Hugh Laurie continues his reign as the best actor on television, inhabiting the role of the fascinating, infuriating Dr. House, who inexplicably makes women on both sides of the screen swoon. He's the perfect man, except for the emotionally crippled bastard thing.

Dexter: I watched the two seasons of Dexter this year in a somewhat eccentric fashion, starting with the first half of the first season on DVD, then the first few episodes of the second season on television (ruining the ending of the first season for me), followed by recordings of the rest of the second season after I'd had that ending ruined for me, and finally the last half of the first season on DVD. Even the disjointed viewing and spoilers couldn't deter my enthusiasm for the season-long arcs that built to a crescendo, and the darkly dreamy central character who isn't as evil as he thinks he is, but isn't as wonderful as the rest of us think he is. He's the perfect man, except for the psychopathic serial killer thing.

Pushing Daisies: Bryan Fuller's new series was the critics' darling, and they mostly said the same thing: perfect pilot; it'll be dead in three episodes. It defied expectations to live, only to have its full season pickup dashed by the writers strike. Still, those of us who are charmed by its whimsicality and romance have been treated to the sweet tale of pie-maker and detective Ned, who can raise the dead with a finger and kill them again with a second touch, and his newly alive childhood sweetheart Chuck whom he can't ever touch again. He's the perfect man, except for the emotionally stunted, creepy powers, in-love-with-an-almost-dead-woman thing.