Tropismic

It's one of those days . . .

On the much brighter side, Tim Pratt has posted the Fourth Annual Tropism Awards, in which I share a billing with Kelly Link. This is surpassing neat.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be

In which I offer, unasked, my two cents' worth of Stuff I Read This Year and Liked. It's a little like a meme.

I must first confess that I have not read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Hopefully this will not skew the results too much. Where novels were concerned, I particularly liked Caitlín R. Kiernan's dark and truthful Murder of Angels, Patricia McKillip's elegantly metatextual Alphabet of Thorns, Tanith Lee's swashbuckling young adult novel Piratica, and Christa Faust's "lucha-noir" Hoodtown. (Feelings on Catherynne Valente's The Labyrinth and Jeannelle Ferreira's A Verse From Babylon have already been expressed. But they are up there.) Although not published this year, Mary Gentle's 1610: A Sundial in a Grave, Jeff VanderMeer's Veniss Underground, and and Kage Baker's The Anvil of the World were also encountered in 2004 and greatly enjoyed.

Hands-down, my favorite collection this year was Mary Gentle's Cartomancy. Closely following were Theodora Goss' chapbook The Rose in Twelve Petals, Poppy Z. Brite's The Devil You Know, and Gemma Files' The Worm in Every Heart. The last word on individual novellas and short stories will have to wait until I am returned to my own natural environment of bookshelves and magazine stacks, but The Faery Reel is entirely justified in the amount of space it takes up on my shelf.

Unrelated to the printed story, I also saw The Flight of the Phoenix—the original with James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, and Hardy Krüger, not the remake—in December, and went through a brief phase of wondering again just what is wrong with Hollywood that we don't produce cinema like that anymore. Fortunately I saw The Aviator a few days later and my tentative faith in modern film was restored. House of Flying Daggers was meltingly beautiful to look at, but you really have to love tragic climaxes in the tradition of grand opera, ten-minute arias and all, to love this movie.

More when I remember it . . .