My Own Year's Best Wolves

My Own Kind of Freedom, by Steven Brust
I almost didn't count this novel-length Firefly fanfic, but then I realized that a) if I didn't, it would only be because I was vaguely embarrassed to be counting fanfic, even one by Brust, and b) wtf kind of attitude is that to be letting myself get away with? Hard to judge it as a novel, too busy enjoying the feeling of being back in the 'verse, which was mostly spot on.
(30/300)

The Year's Best Fantasy and Science Fiction 2007: 20th Annual Collection, edited by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant, and Ellen Datlow
There are some brilliant stories in here, and I still dig hugely on the annual recaps ... but about half of these stories are of the 'abandon all making sense ye who enter here' slippery kind. Some of them are really good, among the brilliant bits! But 250 pages of abandoning the requirement that a story make sense, in that entirely mundane stuff-happens-and-then-other-*related*-stuff-happens way, is about 200 pages too many for my poor brain. The sense-making stories were almost all either good or great - but the other ones, the not-internally-consistent ones, well, even when I loved them they made me cranky. I think I want about three of those per Year's Best anthology, not half the book. I am old-fashioned.
(31/300)

A Companion to Wolves, by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
Now, this book is splendidly (sometimes terrifyingly) internally consistent, and that's part of what made it work so well. Bear and Monette take about 15 different hoary genre tropes and just knock them all ass-over-teakettle with gleeful abandon. And then they prop them back up on their feet and make them do their jobs. Also, I am once again reminded that I really really like it when authors use smell and touch and taste and movement in their physical & emotional descriptions and/or manipulations, and not just those other two. Don't read this book if you can't handle reading about violently uncomfortable, uncomfortably violent group sex; otherwise, jeez louise, it's awfully good.
(32/300)

Cartoon History of the Maytrees

The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part I, by Larry Gonick
I have loved Larry Gonick's way of taking vastly complicated things and explaining them in a simple way since I read his Cartoon Guide to Statistics back in the early 90s. I'm glad he's still doing this stuff. (And just so you know, the "Modern World" discussed so far goes from about Columbus to about 1812....)
(33/300)

The Maytrees, by Annie Dillard
A Taoist novel, a poet's novel, rich and dense and small and life-spanning. It made me miss the taste of waves.
(34/300)