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.

Last week I told you guys about my first dip into non-fairytale fantasy short stories with Ancient Enchantresses. This week I continue with Year’s Best Fantasy 2, an anthology from a totally different editor and publisher.

I had an awkward moment at the end of July. If you follow me on social media, you may remember it.

I was in a local used bookstore perusing sci-fi and fantasy. They were on sale for $1 each or 6 for $5. I was trying to pick up a dozen because I couldn’t cut my pile down to six and I’m a sucker for a deal on used books. Ultimately I rounded out my dozen with four anthologies. I’d thought about these books earlier in my browsing, but my gut reaction was “Nah. I don’t like short stories.”

Then I realized that, aside from classic fairy tales, I couldn’t think of a single fantasy short story. Not one. The bulk of my short story experience was English class. In my mind, short stories were “the boring things in textbooks that teachers make you read and analyze.”

That couldn’t be right, could it? There had to be other short stories out there—these anthologies proved it. And so began my short story reading adventure!