Finished!

This evening is going to be rather busy for me so my thoughts on Stranger in a Strange Land will be up tomorrow (short version: love the first two parts of the book but didn't like it when the protagonist forms a cult; details on that and why its a cult even when he claims it isn't tomorrow). Still I wanted to say that I have finished my project. I have completed reading all fifty-five Hugo winning novels (along with most of the books that preceded them for the ones that were part of a series). I have decided that I will read all of the Nebula winners but I'm letting myself catch up on other reading before I move on. Someone gave me a copy of Dickens's Dombey and Son which I've never read and I'm looking forward to digging into. One of the books reminded me of how little I know about Napoleonic history and I want to fill in the gaps in my knowledge there (I know the basics of the military tactics from war games but none of the context; and that the grognards used margarine). There's several authors who I was not familiar with before reading their Hugo winning work that I'm now following up on. There's a stack of books that have piled up waiting for me to finish my big reading list and I'm looking forward to getting to them all.

In the course of collecting and reading the Hugo winning novels I found stuff that I should have read a long time ago, decided that one of the grand masters of science fiction was absolutely not to my taste, found out that edgy alternative musicians like unicorn and rainbow bookplates, determined that people who use certain library systems have no taste (though I'm grateful to them for the first edition of one rather famous work that had never been read and a beautiful collector's edition of another that had only been read once), discovered a new arch enemy, encouraged the wrath of my mail person, and generally had a good time. I have to recommend it to any science fiction fan.

I'm going to continue the reviewing pace of twice a week but I've been thinking about doing a third one of shorter works (the short fiction or the dramatic presentation) once a week. I wouldn't bother trying to stay in order for those simply because there's a lot of the short fiction, the novellas in particular but there are others, that have never been collected and will be difficult to obtain. Still, I'm going to be reviewing these award winners for a long time to come.