I'm so pleased Ancillary Justice got nominated. It's such a weird, smart, surprising book. I liked the plot, and the themes, and found the characters both sympathetic and occasionally alienating. And I loved the way the pronoun use challenged my cultural expectations of gender.

Oh, I loved this book too! The plot could have been stronger at the end, but only because the rest of the book was so good, I was expecting a payoff to match.

Has anyone here read Jo Walton's Farthing? I'm about 2/3 through and enjoying it, though I don't think it's as strong or as absorbing as Among Others. But I'm starting to wonder, is absolutely *everyone* in this book gay or bisexual? David, Hugh, Mark Normanby, Tibs, probably Inspector Carmichael, and now Lady Eversley and Sukey? I mean, it's starting to strain credulity just the tiniest bit.

I really liked the Farthing books. Some of what you mention will become clearer.

Speaking of good books, I just finished The Last Policeman and its sequel, Countdown City, by Ben Winters, and they are so good I feel like grabbing strangers by the lapels and urging them to read them.

The Last Policeman is a pre-apocalyptic police procedural. I believe Mr. Winters dominates this particular genre. It is six months before an asteroid will hit the earth, and civilization is crumbling. Suicide is rampant. Every day people walk away from their lives to pursue things they always wanted to do (He makes "bucket list" a verb.) or try to prepare for doomsday. In the face of this, our hero, newly minted police detective Hank Palace, doggedly investigates an apparent suicide that he thinks could be murder. In Countdown City, he takes on what everyone thinks is a fool's errand: looking for a friend's missing husband. While both books are tightly plotted mysteries, they're also meditations on civilization and values. They are, as one reviewer said, "oddly uplifting," largely because of the characters who follow their own moral compasses regardless of the gales around them. They are also written in lovely spare prose that makes every word count.

Those books are on my list because they sound right up my alley.

I am reading this article on Salon about a romance novel "canon". [link] The slide show of the canon describes a book as A "Regency romance with beautifully broken people and some seriously steamy sex." I thought Regencies, by their nature, had less explicit sex? Has that changed?

Also, it reminded me that I loved Jennifer Crusie's books so much I wish I could go back in time and read them again for the first time.

Oh, that looks interesting. Thanks for the link.

Anything set in the Regency period can be called a Regency, and it's remained the most popular era by far for historicals. Julia Quinn, Sabrina Jeffries, a whole bunch of authors are firmly situated somewhere between 1800 and 1820.

No one publishes "real" Regencies anymore, which were modeled after Georgette Heyer's -- they were shorter, and all about Pride and Prejudice-like banter between the hero and the heroine, and never ever featured sex. They were some of my favorite books to edit -- I had some fantastic Regency authors whose books really sparkled with all that wit and playfulness. They are mourned, but there's not a big enough market for them anymore.

Although I guess some self-pubbed authors might be doing them. I never looked.

No one publishes "real" Regencies anymore, which were modeled after Georgette Heyer's -- they were shorter, and all about Pride and Prejudice-like banter between the hero and the heroine, and never ever featured sex.

That's what I was used to calling a Regency! That's why I was so shocked by the steamy sex comment. Of course, I think I learned this when I was a young teenager looking for prurient reading material-- the Regencies never delivered! I did like Georgette Heyer, though.

I think the gothics and the medical romances might have been the first ones to get really sexy, but I could be wrong.

I wish I had some of the books I had edited -- they'd make such great, fun one-evening reads. And a lot of those authors either stopped writing or turned to mystery and other things, because they very specifically didn't want to write graphic sex.

A free Kindle ebook today that seems to be based on C,F,M - gone Terribly Real...

[link]

I "bought" it pretty much just based off of that.

Speaking of Regency romance, I just finished Mary Robinette Kowal's Glamour in Glass and really enjoyed it! The first book was a little too romance-focused for me (it was basically Pride and Prejudice, after all), but I like that the rest of the series seems to be focused on what happens after the traditional Happily Ever After: a married couple has adventures! With magic! And, on-topic, the sex scenes are not steamy but cheekily implied.