What Do We Have Here?

Cool, no?

Last week was my birthday and my wife (also a photographer/graphic designer) surprised me with a short stack of custom designed bookmarks based on the logo which she previously fashioned for me. They've even got my website and e-mail address on the back if I ever need to pass along a business card in the book blogging world. For whatever reason, I have trouble keeping track of my bookmarks. Possibly something to do with the thousand or so books I have cluttering up our apartment.

These reach the elusive PhoenixYeti Level of Awesomesaucity so I just might have to hold a contest or two in the near future so I can send a few of these little guys into the wild. I think I might have an extra signed 1st edition of The Wise Man's Fear somewhere around here... but no one would be interested in that, right?

More on that later... In the mean time, what good are new bookmarks without new (or, in this case, old) books to put them in?

How about a pile of classic science fiction short story collections? In pitch perfect, The Price Is Right style, Jennifer rounded out my geek gift showcase not with a new DeLorean, but by providing approximately 5,000 pages of genre goodness for me to bookmark to my heart's content.  If you're counting (from top to bottom), the books pictured are the 17th, 12th, 9th, 16th, and 11th editions of Gardner Dozois's seminal Year's Best Science Fiction series. Each year, Dozois pulls together the stories he feels best represent the science fiction genre and republishes them in one massive collection. For context (and to make Dozois feel old in the off chance he's reading this), he's been doing it for longer than I've been alive. I've made it my latest project to pull together the complete set so the 19% jump was more than appreciated.

At this point, I'm not sure which part of the gift I'm excited about more. All I know is life could be worse.

Thanks kid!