I’ve finished the Hugo nominations for short stories. Actually, I finished them about a week ago and just forgot to post.

“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”, by Rachel Swirsky – This was my favorite short story. For such a short story, it took me a while to get into it. In the beginning of the story, in my mind, I kept seeing flashes of artwork in the style of How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?. However, the end caught and held me.

“The Ink Readers of Doi Saket”, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt – This one was ok. I felt like I should like it more than I did. I’m not sure why it didn’t click for me.

“Selkie Stories Are for Losers”, by Sofia Samatar – This was my least favorite. It wasn’t a bad story, just not one I could relate to.

“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”, by John Chu – Originally, I thought this was going to be my favorite short story. For me, it’s a tough choice between this one and “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”. I particularly love how Matt is so very bad at dealing with his emotions. I always find it comforting when reading about someone more stunted than I am when it comes to talking about stuff that matters. I am trying to imagine living in Matt’s universe and I suspect I would just stop talking.

Other Hugo-related stuff
I watched Hunger Games in prep for watching the movie that was nominated for this year, Catching Fire. I thought the movie did a good job of following the book. Perhaps too good in that there’s a huge amount of stuff I don’t think you’d catch without reading the book first. Given that, I decided I should read the second book before watching the movie. I borrowed an ebook from the library and finished it the same day. I have the movie checked out and am going to try to convince Jaeger to watch it with me tomorrow night¹

In some ways, reading Catching Fire was an excuse to avoid the other books I’m trying to read. Right now I’m in the middle of both The Lives of Tao and Nexus. Neither are my usual type of book and I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I was planning on leaving The Wheel of Time till last but if this keeps up, I might change my mind and start on it instead of finishing these two.

Regarding the Wheel of Time, I’m still waffling over my approach. I’m currently leaning toward reading summaries of most of them and actually reading the last three. Many, many years ago I did start the Wheel of Time series but gave up after several books when there didn’t appear to be an end in sight and I didn’t trust the series to ever be finished. So, I assume some of it may come back to me when I read the summaries.