I finally finished this massive Tor.com anthology yesterday! Now I want to spin around in a field singing about how I‘m free, like Elsa!
Alas, the book ended on a dull note with five stories inspired by the same John Jude Palencar painting. I ain‘t wild about his work (yeah, I know; major #unpopularopinion), and I wasn‘t wild about any of these stories. Sadness.
At least I had tteokbokki to see me through the last one.
Every year I choose a big-ass project book to tackle. This year, with my massive fiction magazine backlog finally sorted, I decided to quit avoiding this 3817-page anthology of every story Tor.com published in their first five years. Now I‘m eight stories from the end and it‘s gonna feel really, really weird without it lurking in the background of my life.
I woke up so tired I felt drugged, then compounded the experience with a very trippy story by Jeff VanderMeer.
I also ate fried bleu cheese & bacon bread, because sometimes such things are necessary.
What do I do the day after my 29th consecutive Readathon? Read some more, with a large, calorie-laden coffee in hand.
This is the last of many Harry Turtledove stories in this massive anthology. Sometimes I love his stuff; sometimes I feel like you need a US history degree to get it. This one is maybe about Ernest Hemingway (MAYBE; I know way less about him than the world assumes I do) except he‘s a dinosaur or an alien, and it‘s working for me.
Casey helped me read my daily short story this morning. “The Ruined Queen of Harvest World” by Damien Broderick was as stylish and cruel as a stereotypical cat; appropriate, in a novelette about uplifted cats on a garden world. I‘m glad Broderick‘s got a couple of stories in this massive anthology.
The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com | 
