After Ancient Enchantresses and Year’s Best Fantasy 2, I continued my short fiction adventures with Year’s Best SF volumes 3 and 5. As I’m not usually a science fiction reader, this was also a genre exploration. In today’s post, I discuss each volume separately, then rate them together, because they’re about equal on the awesomeness scale.

My freshman year was a rocky one, some reasons for which I’ll get to in a moment. At the time, my Mom babysat my oldest niece, who took a nap every day from 3-6 P.M. Even then, the transition to waking was unpleasant. I have never met such a hardcore napper.

That year I had a nasty cold for months but went to school anyway. If I didn’t, I’d have to take a lower grade in P.E. or stay after and do makeups on the elliptical, which would cause me to miss the bus home. I lived ten miles from my high school, so walking wasn’t an option either. If I wanted to do P.E. makeups, I’d have to get Mom to wake the sleeping dragon baby and come pick me up.

Most of the time, staying home was simply not worth it. I would push on through the week and swear to get more sleep over the weekend. One Friday during lunch I learned that we were going to have the pacer test in P.E. that day, and decided it was time to go home. I’d nearly died doing it the last time, when I was healthy-ish. Doing it with a cold was a recipe for hospitalization, or at least vomit.

Once in the school office and holding the phone, I realized that I couldn’t remember my new home phone number (we'd just started getting our phone service through an MLM). Dangit cold brain! Finally, I remembered my mom’s cell number and she came to get me. It was early enough in the day that baby dragon was not yet sleepy and cranky.

When we got home, my mom gave me a pack of cold medicine. She sent me to bed, telling me the dose was two tablets. I took them and slept for fourteen consecutive hours. Upon waking, I discovered that the label read “New single-tablet dose!” Never listen to your mother. Always read the directions on the medicine.

While I recovered, I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I would read a couple of chapters, then take a nap. I did that over and over again until I finished the books. By the time I was done, I wasn’t sure how much of what I remembered came from the books themselves, and how much was from my own delirious dreams of growing and shrinking.

That was almost nine years ago. On this reread I was pleased to discover that everything I remembered from the books is still there, though not necessarily in the order I thought it was. (I blame the influence of the Disney and Tim Burton film adaptations.)  Now let’s dive down the rabbit hole!

You may have noticed that I’ve been avoiding the final installment of the d’Artagnan Romances. Or maybe not; it’s easy to miss things that never show up. It’s not that I wasn’t looking forward to it—really, I was! But when I added up the story segments, it was almost 80 hours long. Who has 80 hours to devote to a book? How can you keep that much story in your head over the sheer span of time it would take to read such a behemoth tome? Could it even keep a person’s attention for so long?

I debated reading and reviewing it in sections, but since there is no universal agreement on how the story should be divided (there are three, four, and five-volume versions), I concluded that it must not divide well. I wasn't totally right, but we'll get to that later.

So I did what every serious book nerd does: I procrastinated. I tried to start it once but only got a few chapters into the story before I got distracted by something else. It sat untouched on my mp3 player for four months. Finally, our move left me with enough hours of tedious packing, unpacking, and cleaning that I could not only justify listening to such a ridiculously massive book, I actually looked forward to it.