Down These Strange Streets (ed. by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois)

Lots of weird short stories. Some good ones, some....not so good. Some of my favorite authors disappointed me, but I found a few new potential authors to check out. Best in the book is the last one, set in Alaska during World War II. Some other intriguing concepts, but as I read the book over the course of 3 months at lunch times at work, several of them have slipped my mind.

One of Our Thursdays is Missing, by Jasper Fforde

My first purchased book on my Nook, and well worth it. The story is a bit weird; took awhile to figure out just what was going on, and I think I need to read the end again. I'm not actually sure how the story worked out. I think that's more to do with the format and other things going on while I was reading it (on vacation) than the book itself.

Blonde Roots, by Bernardine Evaristo

What if Europeans had been enslaved by Africans? Hmmm....

Somewhere in the City, by Marcia Muller

A wonderful mixture of stories, not all of which are based on Sharon McCone. There are a couple of supernatural tales, one or two historical stories, and a lot of background around the collective in which McCone works. Nice.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon (on CD)

A clever book that is ostensibly about solving the murder of a heroin addict living in the same SRO hotel in which the main character--a Sitka policeman--lives.

The set-up of the story is, however, that Sitka and environs was set aside in the 40s as a settlement for European Jews when it became apparent that Hitler was going to target them. As a result of this, fewer Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and Israel never became a country in 1948. The settlement is set to 'expire' just weeks after the murder in question, and the U.S. government wants all cases solved or dispatched to the cold case files before they take over.

The problem with this case is that the victim turns out not to be some faceless nobody, but the son of the most powerful rabbi in the area, a man once thought to be the Messiah.

And then the fun begins. It's a good book. A bit weird to hear what (to me) sounds like New York accents coming from Alaskans, but the man who did the reading did an outstanding job with voices and accents. One of the best I've listened to, actually.