The nominations for the 2008 Aurealis Awards have been announced. They’re not on the web yet, though they should be on the Aurealis Awards website fairly soon.   I’m delighted to say, though, that my anthology The Starry Rift, has been nominated in the inaugural ‘Best Anthology’ category.  I’m very grateful to the judges, and want to also congratulate my fellow category nominees Jack Dann for Dreaming Again and Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt for The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I’m honored to share their company.  My sincere congratulations, too, to all of the nominees int he the other categories.

And so this is Christmas.  I’ve spent most of 2008 either reading short fiction, working on anthologies, or doing Locus stuff.  I’d meant to read a lot of novels, and I started quite a few that I found surprisingly easy to drop at the 100-page mark (I’m not sure if this says more about my year or the books, but there you go).

Anyhow, here are four books that I’ve read, that I’ve loved and that I would unhesitatingly recommend to you as possible gifts for the ones you love:

1. The Knights of the Cornerstone, James Blaylock (Ace)It has been more than ten years since James Blaylock, one of my very, very favorite writers has given us a new novel, and this one is a peach. It’s a dark contemporary fantasy that features a typical Blaylockian reluctant hero faced with much weird magical stuff. I couldn’t ask any more.
2. Little Brother, Cory Doctorow (Tor)
   This is the book where Cory found his voice.   The first three novels are good (and each one is an improvement from the last), but this is where he really managed to write SF for the 21st Century, and really showed how YA SF should be done. It’s got infodumps and backstory and all kinds of stuff that should drown his tale, but they don’t.  I figure they’ll be reading this one in thirty years.  Definitely read it now, though.
3. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury)
   The reason I love Neil Gaiman’s prose is that his writing voice is warm, welcoming and intimate. He brings you into the story, makes you feel a co-conspirator in its telling, which is a remarkable gift. The Graveyard Book is Kipling’s Jungle Book recast as the story of a young boy growing up in a graveyard.  It’s enchanting and left me wanting to re-read Coraline just so I can see which I love more.
4. Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan (Allen & Unwin; Knopf)
   I love Margo Lanagan’s stories, but this is the first novel of hers that I’ve read.  I’d wondered if she could bring the power of her short fiction to something at novel length and this dark, weird recasting of the Brother’s Grimm resoundingly proves that she can.  I don’t know if it’s the best novel of the year, but it’s so darned close it doesn’t make much difference.

And there you have it. Four treats for Christmas.  Please buy books for the ones you love. If you can, buy local from a favorite bookstore. Great local book stores are a gift in themselves, and we need to support them. My local is Planet Books, which is wonderful and I recommend it unhesitatingly and frequently.  My favorite mail order book supplier is Justin Ackroyd’s Slow Glass Books. Either would be a good place to get any of these books.  Of course, I’ve linked here to Amazon so you can check them out, and Amazon is a fine place to buy, but I’ll always feel that your local is the place to start if you can.

There has been talk around the place about the many and varied cutbacks at major publishing houses in the New York.  There’s no doubt that those cutbacks will have all kinds of effects on people working directly for those publishing houses, on people working in the field generally, and on readers. Ultimately, we potentialy face less choice, less editorial freedom and so on.
A couple people, most notably John Scalzi and Lou Anders, have suggested that readers get out there and buy books, both as a way of giving great Christmas gifts and as a way of supporting the industry.   It’s a good idea, and it got me to thinking about a meme:

1. Choose four books published during 2008 that you loved and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to others
2. Write a brief description (it doesn’t have to be much – a few words, a sentence)
3. Post the descriptions on your blog under the title Books for Christmas
4. Link to some suitable book retailer that you’d like to support

To keep it simple, make sure you have no direct connection to the books you’re going to blog about – no books you’ve written, edited, or published (you can blog about those another time), just books you’ve loved.  And link to other posts if you see ’em.

My post later today or tomorrow!

I’ve not decided how or where or in what form I’m going to blog about my 2009 reading, but I’m pretty much resolved to do so.  The changes at Last Short Story have me reading much earlier than usual – I normally deliver the year’s best and take a month or so off short fiction, but this year I’m already a couple magazines and anthos into next year.

There’s much to do, of course, that might derail me.  In addition to festive celebrations, I’m back at the day job, which looks like it’s going to be interesting and challenging, but for some reason just now feels more like an entirely new thing and kind of intimidating. I’m also waiting on copyedits for the year’s best and the much-delayed Godlike Machines, while doing my part to complete New Space Opera 2.  I also have a couple unwritten proposals sitting in the back of my mind, bothering me, which I should get to soon.

Still, what am I reading? Well, I’ve just finished off the January issues of F&SF and Asimov’s, and am working my way through Peter Crowther’s We Think, Therefore We Are.  I found the opening salvos from the magazines for 2009 pretty solid, but overall unspectacular.  The best in F&SF, for mine, was Charlie Finlay’s “The Minuteman’s Wish”, which apparently ties in with some upcoming novels.  It’s a good story, but does feel like it leads into something longer, rather than being complete in an of itself.  The best in Asimov’s was probably Will McIntosh’s “Bridesicle”, which I would describe as a very solid professional piece of short SF centered around the old theme of why would people revive frozen corpsicles in the future.  It’s too early to say much about the Crowther anthology – I’m only four stories into it – but it seems worth your while.  When I’m finished it, I’ll say more.  Then back to Ellen’s Poe, I think.

So, I was woken at about 2.30am this morning and didn’t get back to sleep.   Not good for the first day back at work.  Went to the office for the first time in five weeks, and everyone was lovely, but this is a new job really and I was feeling tired and out of my depth.  I’m sure all will be good, but it just left me on edge. I then got home to find that the 20kg box I mailed on Saturday to Victoria containing the dead CD player was sent to me rather than the right place. So, rather than crashing for a while I took MJ and Jess to gym and went and fronted the Post Office about it. It’s now on its way to where it needs to go.  I got home and felt tired and irritable.  As a result, I’ve closed down my Facebook account for a while.  This isn’t a big deal and isn’t a thing against anyone or anything – I just didn’t want to think about status updates and friend requests and vampire pigeon wrestling matches.  Another day, yeah?