Cat Eldridge -- Best Literature Picks of 2007

I never feel that I've done all that much reading until I spend an afternoon looking around our home library seeing what I kept from the various books I thought you were possibly interesting. Now I am very fussy about what I read and will very often give up on a book after fifty pages or so if it doesn't catch my interest. These books did.

It was a very fine year for fantasy novels... Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales. Two volumes of amazing storytelling. The Borderkind, book two of Christopher Golden's stunning The Mythhunters series. Patricia McKillip's Solstice Wood novel and her Harrowing the Dragon collection -- both truly magical. Ellen Kushner's The Privilege of the Sword. Mannerpunk with hot chocolate to boot -- delicious! The most impressive read? Guy Gavriel Kay's Ysabel which is similar to Jane Yolen's The Wild Hunt in that we have a Summer Queen, similar to but not the same as Yolen's Summer Queen. A must read for anyone interested in a good read.

It wasn't too shaky for science fiction novels either -- Kage Baker's Sons of Heaven was the conclusion to her Company series. Oh, there were other great SF novels including the latest in Asher's Polity series, Hilldiggers, and Charles Stross Halting State, but Sons of Heaven is simply a novel that successfully concludes a series in a most satisfactory manner. The best SF novella? Neal Asher's prequel Prador Moon novella. (Well, it's a novella by the standards of the Polity series that it's a part of at a slim 220 pages!) Hilldiggers should be reviewed shortly.

Best Traditional Mystery with absolutely no ghosts at all-- Christopher Fowler's latest Bryant & May mystery, White Corridor. By far, the best in that series so far!

Best Traditional Mystery with ghosts-- Deborah Grabien's New-Slain Knight. If her new rock and roll mystery series, The Kinkaid Chronicles, is half as good as this series is (and I know it is!), readers are in for a grand time for many years to come.

Best Traditional Mystery (A Retro Reading Experience) -- I read Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe series for the first time. Every damn word.

Best Mystery Set in a Fantasy Setting -- Simon Green's The Unnatural Inquirer. Not the full-blown novel in the Nightside series that all fans (including me) of this series but a really good raed none-the-less.

Best Graphic Novel -- G. Willow Wilson's Cairo, far better than the second volume of Absolute Sandman (which had its moments but not nearly as many as the first volume did). Djinns in modern Cairo!

Best Single Author Collection -- Elizabeth Hand's Saffron and Brimstone. As Elizabeth Vail says, '...because it was a near-perfect mixture of otherworldly language, out-of-this-world plots, and very worldly and realistic themes.'

Best Anthology -- YBFH No. 20. Still the gold standard for annual anthologies. 'Nuff said.

Best Revisiting of a classic work was Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn -- The Lost Version.