I started this week reading China Mieville’s The City & The City, which was the sixth and last of my bid to read all the fiction finalists for the Hugo Awards before today, which is the final date for voting to occur. As with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl, which I had just finished reading last week, I found The City & The City a great read—so I foresee a difficult decision ahead today!

But as a soon as I put The City & The City down, I still had five of the six novella finalists to read. I had read John Scalzi’s The God Engines early on, but that still left me with the rest of the list:

• “Act One”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s 3/09)
• “Palimpsest”, Charles Stross (Wireless; Ace, Orbit)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)
• “Vishnu at the Cat Circus”, Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days; Pyr, Gollancz)
• The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, Kage Baker (Subterranean)

And yes, I have gotten through them all, as well as all the short stories and novelettes earlier on. So now I have to think about the hard part, which is actually voting …

But as soon as that’s done I’m going to do some serious relaxing. Translated, that means curling up on the sofa and kicking back with another of Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels. I’ll have to check, but I think I’m up to Number 6 in the series, Definitely Dead.