When I started as a public librarian, I checked out a few annual “Best of” anthologies to get a sense for different genres: sports writing, science writing, crime fiction, short stories in general. I recently found The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2024 (Hugh Howey and John Joseph Adams, eds.) on sale, so I gave the ensemble-cast audiobook a listen.

Disappointingly, the stories were of varying quality. I expect better in an anthology with the word Best in the title. Or let me be more accurate: the stories were all good, speaking on a plot level, but the prose was not always up to snuff.

The phrase “achingly beautiful” should not appear in your short story, because that phrase is hackneyed. If I’m editing, I’ll let that slide in book-length manuscripts for some authors, because prose craft is not everyone’s forte. I will not let that slide in a short story, because you’ve only got three thousand words, give or take, and each one needs to count.

I absolutely, positively would not let “achingly beautiful” appear twice in the same fucking story. Which it did in one of the stories in the anthology.

My favorite fantasy short story was “John Hollowback and the Witch,” because I am a sucker for good witchy stories. Amal El-Mohtar has been on my TBR for years. I’m going to seek out her longer fiction on the strength of this story. My favorite science fiction short story was “Calypso’s Guest,” by Andrew Sean Greer. I love a familiar story thoughtfully retold.

And there was a short story I expected to dislike. I won’t name the writer, but I had bounced off his novels because his prose disappointed me, but he did a great job with the short story.

K. J. Parker has been one of my top-tier, can’t-miss writers since 2009, back before anyone knew he was the pseudonym of Tom Holt. To no one’s surprise, I enjoyed his newest novella, Making History.

As usual with Parker, the genre is low fantasy. It’s a make believe world with make believe characters, but the setting could pass for preindustrial Earth. The local monarch has conscripted a group of scholars to create a convincing set of archaeological ruins. Our main character, a linguist, is in charge of forging the ancient texts that will be uncovered at the miraculous discovery of the site, scheduled for nine months hence. The king will murder him if he gets it wrong.

Parker’s writing is always dark, in the sense that his characters make poor choices and people die, sometimes lots of them, but it’s always funny too. His writing is sharp and clever. “She looked at me as though I’d been spelt wrong.” What a terrific line.

Ian Bedford did a fine job with the audio narration, for those who want to go the audiobook route.

Though The Gospel of Loki is only my second time reading Joanne M. Harris, I feel comfortable extrapolating: She never disappoints.

I love her care with the language and her inventive storytelling. Here we get Norse mythology from the perspective of Loki, everyone’s favorite lying trickster liar. It is true that he is a philandering sociopath with dubious paternal instincts and a penchant for sowing discord, but he’s funny and charming and he can shift back and forth between his fire aspect and his human form.

If you’re familiar with Norse myths, you will recognize these stories, but Harris delivers them in a fresh way, so you won’t be bored. I enjoyed the audiobook narration Allan Corduner, who reads Loki with the charm and suaveness he deserves.

Terry Pratchett's character Death, to borrow the words of his new apprentice, is "tall, wears black, he's a bit ... skinny...."

The new apprentice is a young man named Mort. ("What a coincidence," Death says when they meet.) No one else at the hiring fair was interested, so with some trepidation, Mort agrees to apprentice himself to a skeleton who shepherds souls after they die.

The job comes with perks, like riding Death's noble steed Binky, but it also comes with difficult responsibilities, like standing aside while an assassin kills a princess. When Mort chooses to interfere with that assassination, he accidentally opens an alternate dimension.

The sprawling Discworld series has many good entry points, and this is one of my favorites, because it's the first book where Death is a main character. 

I like the first two Discworld books just fine, but with the third book, Pratchett starts to get his footing.

Equal Rites introduces one of the great Discworld recurring characters, Granny Weatherwax, who has just attended the birth of the eighth son of an eighth son, a perfect candidate to inherit a wizard’s staff. The ceremony is done and completed before the child’s father and the bequeathing wizard realize their gaffe. The son is actually a daughter.

Everyone knows girls can’t be wizards. But little Eskarina has a wizard’s staff, and there’s no taking it back.

It is not a coincidence that I’m revisiting Discworld during these troubled times. The books are a balm for the soul, funny and smart. And most importantly, they have an emotional core that makes you feel better. That makes you better as a person.

Most of my pleasure reading comes from audiobooks, but this year I’m reincorporating time for print each day, alternating between a Discworld book and a not-Discworld book. For this series re-read, I’m going chronologically by pub date.

The Light Fantastic is the second in the series. Lots of Discworld fans will apologize for the first couple of books, observing that Terry Pratchett hadn’t yet entirely got his footing. That’s not exactly wrong, but early Pratchett is still delightful. The gentle social satire he’s best known for isn’t much on display, but you still get a fun adventure fantasy with laugh-out-loud moments.

Rincewind, the wizard school dropout, is on the run with Twoflower, the tourist, because people keep trying to kill them. Rincewind only knows one spell and he’s never uttered it, so he can’t defend himself with magic, but he’s excellent at running away.

If you haven’t read Discworld yet, this book might not be the place to start. Lots of people bounce off it. But you might like it just fine. I do. I’m less concerned about which book you start with, as long as you start somewhere.

Fairy Tale is one of the most satisfying books Stephen King has written in ages. If you haven’t read him in a long time, or ever, you probably think of him as a horror writer. That is accurate but incomplete. The man’s been writing professionally for over fifty years. He’s written fantasy, science fiction, Westerns, thrillers, literary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries, and probably some other fiction genres I’m forgetting, to say nothing of his nonfiction cultural criticism. Or On Writing, which endures as one of the best books for writers and would-be writers.

Fairy Tale presents us with Charlie, a boy whose mother dies young and whose father responds by diving into a bottle. Despite growing up under these difficult circumstances, by the time he’s a teenager, Charlie is a decent kid—the sort of kid who stops to help when he discovers an old man in distress, even if that old man has a reputation for being an asshole, even if his dog is rumored to be vicious.

I don’t want to spoil the plot, but this is an adventure story with a magical realm and a princess and a great evil that Charlie must defeat. And I am only slightly ashamed to say I cheated and looked to the last few pages to find out if the dog survived.

I read A Practical Guide to Conquering the World, a nominally fantasy novel by K. J. Parker, pseudonym of Tom Holt.

I love K. J. Parker to an unreasonable extent. I’m not really capable of objective criticism with his books. Sorry if you were looking for that here.

As is typical, this book is fantasy in that there geography and the cultures are made up, but there’s no magic. It’s about people in an approaching-Industrial society who make war on one another.

After something like fifteen years of my intense Parker fanhood, I think I’ve figured out why I like him so well. It’s his prose style. It’s witty and droll. Every sentence, every paragraph is an exercise in deadpan delivery. I would give my left kidney to write like he does.

The hero of this book, if that’s what you’d prefer to call him, is a professional translator. It’s not that he has political aspirations, but when he realizes a young woman is slated for execution due to a mistake in translation, he intervenes. And the young woman happens to be a princess from one of the distant, savage tribes.

Parker excels at world-building. He’ll happily go on a tangent chock full of details about the intricacies of bow design or the how the clearing of a forest affected a region’s agriculture and economy.  It ought to be tedious but isn’t.

This was a delight as an audiobook. Ray Sawyer isn’t great at female voices, but one, no one will ever accuse Parker of passing the Bechdel test, and two, the characters aren’t the main point of Parker’s novels. Sawyer’s the perfect narrator for the book because his reading is bony dry. He deadpans his way through the whole novel.

Apart from Stephen King, who is a category unto himself, my favorite horror writer is Christopher Buehlman. I read The Daughters’ War (2024) and immediately chased it with a reread of the sequel, The Blacktongue Thief (2021).

Both are sword-n-sorcery dark fantasy novels. The Daughters’ War follows Galva, a duke’s daughter marching into battle with the goblins. Most of the fighters in this war are women, since the goblins killed or maimed the men in previous wars. Her unit uses war corvids, an untested  new weapon concocted by wizards with a knack for experimental biology. Each woman fights with two of these giant murder birds.

Galva reappears in The Blacktongue Thief, set nine years after the events in The Daughters’ War, though now the point-of-view character is Kinch, a professional thief. They travel together, reluctantly, to find a missing princess. And this time the baddies are giants.

There’s no shortage of books with these familiar elements: goblins and giants, wizards and witches, quests to find missing princesses. But Buehlman’s novels are far better than most of what’s out there. His prose is what I aspire to. His characters become real people to the reader, and the plot takes you places you do not expect, with thoughtful world-building and vivid settings.

Nikki Garcia does a terrific job reading The Daughters’ War, particularly in some of the battle scenes. Her narration stirred my blood and made me want to hit something. And Buehlman narrates The Blacktongue Thief. In his other career, he is a stage performer, and it shows. His reading is incredible.

Since moving to Minnesota in May, my pleasure reading has dropped way off. Things have been bananas, especially with the ongoing mold problem in my basement. I don’t know when I’ll get back to weekly book talks. Occasional book talks, that’s more realistic.

Departing from her signature mind-bending science fiction novels, e.g., The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North turns to Greek mythology in Ithaca.

This is the story of a city populated by women and old people and very few children, because the men have been absent for years, waging war against Troy and/or sleeping with island witches.

When skirmishers attack Ithaca, it falls to the women to save the city. This is difficult for Penelope, who must be quiet and empty-headed, lest she give the impression that she means to wrest power from her husband Odysseus, never mind that he’s been gone for years without so much as a postcard.

Complicating matters, Penelope’s cousin Clytemnestra just murdered her awful husband Agamemnon, and now she has arrived in secret in Ithaca, seeking refuge.

North has a gift for words. She writes characters who stay with me for years, and while battle and action and drama are plentiful, she is a contemplative writer, giving care to details and inner thoughts even as the raiders attack.

If you’ve enjoyed the outstanding Greek retellings by Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller, Ithaca will be up your alley. And if you enjoy audiobooks, Catrin Walker-Booth is a captivating narrator.