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Last week, I broke down and got the Hugo Voter Packet after John Scalzi mentioned it on his blog. It contains electronic copies of all the fiction works in the four major categories (Best Novel, Novelette, Novella, and Short Story), Best Related Work, Best Graphic Story, and excerpts and samples of much of the rest of the categories (minus, naturally, Best Dramatic Presentation), all for the price of a supporting membership to AussieCon 2010 (worked out to $65 and change in 'Murrican money and not them funny Aussie dollars). (Which means I'm not going to attend, but I'm eligible to vote on the Hugos.)

So far I've read Hope-in-the-Mist, a biography of Hope Mirrlees, the author of Lud-in-the-Mist, a seminal work of fantasy that seems to have inspired enough fantasy authors that when I finally got my hands on a copy and read it, it was an anticlimax because I'd heard it hyped up too much. :) I've also gotten partway through The Inter-Galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children’s and Teens’ Science Fiction, and my reactions are, at the moment, mixed, and I can't really put a finger on why.

The Kindle is getting a workout -

sleary pointed to calibre, a free ebook converter which allowed me to put everything on the Kindle ~~even the on that came with DRM on it, although I had to do something else first ;)~~. Formatting's a bit messed up, but nothing's perfect and as I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro and Word, I suspect I could have fixed a lot of the formatting issues if I cared to.

Anyway! Go! Look at the list of nominees and tell me what I should read next and why! :)

(Also, I am now eligible to nominate for next year's Hugos, so if there's a book published this year that you think deserves a nod, let me know and I'll consider getting hold of it and reading it. :)

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If you haven't read The City & the City yet, I'd recommend it. The God Engines was not my favorite thing ever. I've read the Watts and Cornell stories but can't remember a thing about them. If the Swirsky story is something about robots, I've read it and it was good.

I've got nothing so far for 2011 nominations but I'll let you know. Most of the 2010-published books I've read are the tail end of series.

Thanks!

I've only read two nominated works. The City & The City was a perfectly fine book but didn't have the punch I would want to vote for it, if I were voting. No reason not to just go ahead and read it if you're going to anyway, at least not that I can think of.

The God Engines I thought was pretty good, and very different from Scalzi's usual (which I can't remember if you've read any of).

The nominated work I am personally most interested in reading is Catherynne Valente's Palimpsest, as I liked The Orphan's Tales a lot. However, her work can be a bit dense, so I can certainly see people not liking it.

I have liked a number of Robert Charles Wilson's recent novels, but I haven't read Julian Comstock, and I suspect that I won't like it as much as Spin or Darwinia.

I've read Agent to the Stars and the Old Man's War books. Looking forward to TGE, to see how it differs. :)

It's not smartass. :)

Oh, and for this year, I will join everyone and her sister and mention N. K. Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

The Kindle excerpt for that didn't thrill me much, but the way people keep talking, I may have to give the longer work a try and see if it grabs me later on.

Palimpsest is one of my favorite books, so I'm thrilled it got nominated for a Hugo! It's beautifully written, and manages to really revel in the English language without dipping into the purple prose side of things (IMHO, anyway). The author is also on LJ as

yuki_onna. :)

Also, Girl Genius is amazing and you should read it on the web at GirlGenius.net if you haven't already. (Do I remember rightly that you like Gunnerkrigg Court? It's in a similar-ish vein.)

I'm leery of Palimpsest only because I tend not to do well with ... complicated? dense? prose things, and what little of Valente's other stuff I read, I slid off of. But I've heard wonderful things about it.

I haven't read Girl Genius yet only as a matter of never remembering to go to the site and do so, and not being able to do so when someone mentions it and reminds me. XD

Last week, I broke down and got the Hugo Voter Packet after John
Scalzi mentioned it on his blog.

You, too? I've so far really enjoyed Kage Baker's The Women of Nell Gwynne's (which is the main book I bought the packet for - it's out of print already) and slowly make my way through Ian MacDonald's Vishnu at the Cat Circus...

The smaller pdfs are hell for the Sony PRS505, and I have to increase fontsize which destroys some of the intricate layouts. Oh well.

I've given up on Valente's Palimpsest after the first ten pages. Maybe I can handle her prose when I'm rested... There's still Charles Stross' Palimpsest to go ^^

Also, not all the works are included - some only have links, and Gail Carriger's Soulless only the first five chapters, this also goes for some of the Campbell nominees.

I got it primarily for Hope-in-the-Mist and Boneshaker, but had considered several other books in it. It's unusual this year that I haven't already read anything nominated - I've usually read at least one or two.

Calibre took the PDFs into a format I could increase the type size on - regular PDFS can't be done that way on the Kindle, which drives me nuts on NetGalley books in PDF format - but it also put the meta-information at the top and bottom of the page into the text, so I have to go learn to ignore it as I'm reading. :) I could probably fix that with Acrobat Pro, but it hasn't bothered me enough to spend time figuring out how.

Oh yes, that's why I don't want to convert the pdfs to anything else. I hate the messed-up layouts.

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Ditto!

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Re: Ditto!

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Re: Ditto!