Fantasy: The Very Best of 2005
I'm a sucker for a good anthology, and because I read mostly speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, and horror, heretofore known as F/SF/H), I gravitate to those Best of Whatever Year spec fiction anthologies, like Fantasy: The very Best of 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year 2006, edited by Rich Horton. Both of these are new books in Pigott Library and available in the short story collection on the second floor.
I finished Strahan's anthology recently, and found it to be full of excellent stories, but not too full, if you know what I mean. Anthologies like The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and The Year's Best Science Fiction are great, but they are too huge to take anywhere, and almost overwhelming in their contents. I do try to read them every year, but I never get through it all before going on to other things. This much more manageable anthology has 16 stories by a variety of authors, many quite well known, like Peter S. Beagle, Neil Gaiman , M. Rickert, and Jane Yolen, to name a few. Almost all of the stories are worth reading twice, and the beauty of a collection like this is that everyone will have a different opinion on which stories those are.
Personally, my favorites were "Snowball's Chance" by Charles Stross, "Boatman's Holiday" by Jeffrey Ford, "The Language of Moths" by Christopher Barzak, "Anyway" by M. Rickert, and "Monster" by Kelly Link. Most of them are dark stories, with damaged or cynical narrators and ambiguous or disturbing endings. That's the kind of stuff I love (and the kind of stuff I write, or try to write). You may be different. I didn't care for Neil Gaiman's "Sunbird" even though I normally love his writing, or Theodora Goss's "Pip and the Fairies," even though it is appearing in every anthology in the universe and nominated for a Nebula, besides.
Next on my list is Horton's anthology, which has 19 stories, including four of the same stories in Strahan's. Weirdly, out of those four, two are the stories I didn't care for, leading me to believe that I must have missed something when I read those. Still, since reading tastes are subjective, I'm not beating myself up about it. If you read either of these anthologies, feel free to let me know which stories were your favorites and which stories you thought were meh.