My book blog

An anthology from Ken Liu, a Hugo award winner as both a writer and a translator. His first anthology, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, has some interesting stories, and for some reason the library in my University has the English version of this book, plus short stories are pretty easy to read even for non-native speakers. so I just picked it up.

Author: N. K. Jemisin

Author: N. K. Jemisin

I’ve heard this book for a very long time. It pretty much appears on every single book recommendation thread on Reddit, and the 3-Hugo-in-a-row phenomenon is also very intriguing. However, there is no Chinese translation, and after the misery of Oathbringer, I just lost all of my faith in reading long novels in English (I still read novellas and short stories from time to time tho).

Books that I did not finish.

View the tier list here

I’ve read some Hugo Award for Best Short Story winners, and only like 1 is good, others are either mediocre or just straight-up trash.

To be fair, I didn’t really read the winners of Hugo Award for longer stories, because most of them don’t have Chinese translations, and reading them raw would just take me so much time. Short stories, on the other hand, are really really short, like I could finish most of them in 30-40 minutes, sometimes less, and book publishers often just post them for free on their websites, like a blog post, so reading them is really a fast and convenient way to absorb some Hugo Awardees.

Unfortunately, although reading short stories in a quiet room with some chill music on really gives me some precious peaceful time, most of the stories are very bad, or at least don’t deserve the award. The following is what I’ve read:

See my personal book wiki entry for more.

I finished the prequel, Words of Radiance at 2018 January. At that time, Oathbringer had just been published (2017 November), and I knew I would have to wait perhaps a year or more if I decided to wait for the Chinese translation. I was also pretty confident about my English skills at that time, so, I decided to just buy the original version online.

I thought I would finish before the translation was out.

I was wrong.

Author: Philip K. Dick

It’s not a long story, but it still took me quite some time to finish, because I have no idea what Philip K. Dick is trying to say, especially toward the end of the book.

author: Amal El-Mohtar

year: 2016

2016 Nebula Award for Best Short Story
2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story
2017 Locus Award for Best Short Story

full text

Hugo Award for Best Short Story (2014) LMFAO

You can read this piece of absolute garbage here.

author: John Chu