The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2008

edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant

“As in every year since 1988, the editors tirelessly scoured story collections, magazines, and anthologies worldwide to compile a delightful, diverse feast of tales and poems. On this anniversary, the editors have increased the size of  the collection to 300,000 words of fiction and poetry, including works by Billy Collins, Ted Chiang, Karen Joy Fowler, Elizabeth Hand, Glen Hirshberg, Joyce Carol Oates, and new World Fantasy Award winner M. Rickert. With impeccably researched summations of the field by the editors, Honorable Mentions, and articles by Edward Bryant, Charles de Lint and Jeff VanderMeer on media, music and graphic novels, this is a heady brew topped off by an unparalleled list of sources of fabulous works both light and dark.” (via Amazon)

Good Things: Hey, look, it’s an anthology! I grabbed this one pretty randomly off the shelf at the library. I’ve been meaning to read more short stories, and “the year’s best XYZ” seems like a pretty reliable endorsement, no? Flipping through it, I landed on a poem by Catherynne M. Valente, “The Seven Devils of Central California,” and that’s when I knew the book was coming home with me–Central California doesn’t get featured a whole lot in fiction, especially not the San Joaquin Valley, where I’ve lived for 20 of the last 24 years of my life. Unfortunately, that particular poem ended up being a bit too obtuse to end up on my favorites list, but there are a number of stories that really impressed me, listed here in the order they appear in the book:

1) The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics, by Daniel Abraham. The title sums it up pretty well: a money-changer encounters a dangerous, powerful man, and is forced to outwit him in three puzzles regarding money, exchange, and value in order to escape with his job and his life.

2) “The Fiddler of Bayou Teche,” by Delia Sherman. A beautiful trickster tale set in Louisiana, where a young albino girl named Cadence makes a deal with a devil. Probably my favorite of the collection.

3) “Winter’s Wife,” by Elizabeth Hand. Teenage American Justin’s neighbor, Mr. Winter, marries a strange woman from Iceland who is more than she seems.

4) “The Gray Boy’s Work,” by M. T. Anderson. This is one of the few more obscure, opaque works in the collection that left me interested instead of annoyed. A sort of spooky American fairy tale; a boy’s father returns from war, and embodied concepts like Despair and Victory haunt their house.

5) “The Hill,” by Tanith Lee. A historical mystery, where an English spinster librarian is hired to sort the library of a near-empty mansion with an expansive menagerie, and the animals begin to act very strangely. (Miss Constable had a strong, practical narrative voice that I liked quite a bit; the drawback for me was the exoticization of non-English countries that, while appropriate for the story’s time period, still bugged me.)

6) “Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz Go to War Again,” by Garth Nix. A surprisingly sad fantasy by the author of one of my favorite fantasy series; a knight and an animated puppet travel from town to town, righting a very particular kind of wrong. I’ve read some of Nix’s books and short stories aside from the Old Kingdom series and generally found them disappointing in a good-but-not-as-good sort of way, so it was great to finally read a story that engaged me as fully as Lirael, Sabriel, and Abhorsen did.

7) “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change,” by Kij Johnson. Dogs have gained the ability to speak, and many have subsequently been abandoned by their masters, who have become uncomfortable with the way the master-pet relationship has changed and is continuing to change. A young woman, Linna, visits abandoned dogs at a park to record their fables about One Dog, and to try to help them.

Bad Things: My main complaint with this volume is that, for something titled “the year’s best XYZ,”there were a lot of stories that left me unimpressed. I’ll admit that I skipped over a fair number of them, especially when I started noticing a pattern where many of the stories a) were narrated first-person by b) a young-to-middle-aged white guy who c) acts as a thoughtful observer to certain mystical or horrific events that teach him an important lesson about his young-to-middle-aged white guy life. Do you know what I mean? There was such a narrow scope, and it started getting really repetitive. I really would have liked to see the inclusion of more POC, and stories from more countries and with a greater variety of circumstances. It’s supposed to be the year’s best, for pete’s sake! The ones that really tended to grab me (as you can see above) varied from the pattern or stood out in some way.

Overall: A somewhat uneven collection of stories with some incredible standouts and some forgettable works. Includes a long series of introductions listing the best fantasy and horror novels, media, comics, and music of 2007, if that sort of thing floats your boat. It’s unfortunate that 2008 was the last year of the anthology, because while I suspect that I would continue to skip a portion of stories for more recent years, there would be a few really knockout pieces that would, like this one, make the whole thing worth it.

MORE More Cheap Books

Good news, everyone! I semi-religiously follow Amazon’s Kindle Daily Deal page because I’m a cheapskate like that, and guess what! For the next six hours (I should have checked this morning, whoops) all three of the books in Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking trilogy are on sale for $0.99 each! Plus, there’s a free short story prequel to the series, “The New World,” available for I-don’t-know-how-long.

via kallichore.wordpress.com

I’ve been meaning to read this series for ages and ages, and what an opportune time! I can’t convince you that you should read them too, because I haven’t read them myself, but they’ve been talked about all over the place and won awards and blah blah blah, and really–can’t you take a risk, when you’re getting a whole trilogy for $3? Go on, buy ‘em! (Okay, so I’m a terrible influence when it comes to spending money. But c’mon, really, $3 ain’t bad.)

P.S. Anyone who doesn’t have a Kindle, I hope you stuck your fingers in your ears and went “LALALALALA” for the entirety of this post. I’m sure good book deals are coming your way in a variety of other capacities, though, never fret!

Short Story Wednesday

I wrote these short almost non-reviews on my challenge page, but I wanted to give them their own post for Short Story Wednesday, too!

1) The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1/7/12) – First, just go read it so we can talk about it like civilized people. I mean it, young person! It’s less than 4000 words so it won’t take long. Okay. You’ve read it, right? I really don’t want to spoil it for you. Alright. I don’t actually have a lot to say about it. The creepiest thing is that there’s absolutely no reason given for the lottery. My friend, Leah, who linked it to me, mentioned the Hunger Games, so I didn’t have a growing realization that the lottery wasn’t a happy thing – I pretty much knew it all along. But still. No justification. No religious fertility rite, no making the masses compliant. Just nothing. The Wikipedia page on the story is worthwhile – go read that, too. :P

2) Kolkata Sea by Indrapramit Das (1/10/12) – This story is very short, just over a thousand words, so there’s not a lot for me to say. This future could easily be a dystopia, right? But Das just shows people getting on, which is, imho, how it’s all going to go down. People get on.

I also read Farm 54 this week, which is a graphic novel that is basically comprised of three short stories, so I’m going to include that (which I wrote about on its challenge page), too.

1) Farm 54 by Galit and Gilad Seliktar – This book takes place from the mid? 1970s to the late 1980s and is a semi-autobiographical account of Galit’s growing up in Israel. The main character, Noga, deals with love, sex, a lot of death, and a couple of other themes that I’m having a hard time placing. There’s a strange… Noga doesn’t feel like she has too much agency – perhaps because she is looking back on her life? Maybe because, though she is looking back at her own life, she doesn’t do a lot of introspecting, doesn’t explain why she did what she did. The whole book is very sparse, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

General Reading Challenges

This post is for general and/or miscellaneous reading challenges. If I include any lists here, they’re for my own reference.

Off the Shelf Reading Challenge 2012

Read books that you already own! If you acquire it in 2012, it doesn’t count. I’m going to sign up for the Trying level, which is to read 15 books from your shelves. Hopefully I will read more, but again, I don’t use reading challenges to force/pressure myself. :) (See also the Unread Book Challenge for essentially the same thing.)

The 2012 Short Story Challenge

Simple – read at least twelve short stories in 2012! I meant to read more short stories last year, so hopefully this will give me  a good kick in the pants. First on my list is Lady with the Little Dog by Chekov.

1) The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1/7/12) – First, just go read it so we can talk about it like civilized people. I mean it, young person! It’s less than 4000 words so it won’t take long. Okay. You’ve read it, right? I really don’t want to spoil it for you. Alright. I don’t actually have a lot to say about it. The creepiest thing is that there’s absolutely no reason given for the lottery. My friend, Leah, who linked it to me, mentioned the Hunger Games, so I didn’t have a growing realization that the lottery wasn’t a happy thing – I pretty much knew it all along. But still. No justification. No religious fertility rite, no making the masses compliant. Just nothing. The Wikipedia page on the story is worthwhile – go read that, too. :P

2) Kolkata Sea by Indrapramit Das (1/10/12) – This story is very short, just over a thousand words, so there’s not a lot for me to say. This future could easily be a dystopia, right? But Das just shows people getting on, which is, imho, how it’s all going to go down. People get on.

I Want More 2012 Book Challenge

This challenge is all about reading more by authors you’ve read and loved but have more books for you to enjoy! Like normal, I will sign up for the lowest level, Waited Too Long, which bids me to read 2-4 books. My authors include – Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Austen, Octavia Butler (though maybe she and Austen shouldn’t count as I’ve actually read almost everything by them…), Vernor Vinge, Justine Larbalestier, Elizabeth Bear,

1001 Books 2012 Edition

I’m going to go for the “Got to Trials” level, meaning I’ll read (hopefully) five books from this list. I find lists like these interesting – they show the biases of the creator. With 1001 books, though, I’m sure I can find a ton of great ones.

Possibilities (either I have access or am particularly keen) – Never Let Me Go or Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, On Beauty or White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Life of Pi by Yann Martel, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, Tipping the Velvet or Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, something by Murakami, something by Rushdie, Cat’s Eye or something else by Margaret Atwood, Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg, The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks, Neuromancer by William Gibson, Ragtime or something else by E.L. Doctorow, Sula by Toni Morrison, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Cat’s Cradle or something else by Kurt Vonnegut, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, Foundation by Isaac Asimov, The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson, Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Thin Man or something else by Dashiell Hammett, The Waves or something else by Virginia Woolf, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Brothers Karamazov or something else by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna Karenina or something else by Leo Tolstoy, Middlemarch by George Eliot, The Moonstone or something else by Wilkie Collins, North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, Dead Souls by Nikolay Gogol, Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sense & Sensibility by Jane Austen, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, Evelina by Fanny Burney, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Have Already Read (which doesn’t mean I can’t reread!) – The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, Jazz by Toni Morrison, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Watchmen by Alan Moore & David Gibbons, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell,  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, Persuasion by Jane Austen, Emma by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen,

OMG SO MANY BOOKS I AM FULL OF REGRET AUUUUGH