The Incomparable, number 729, August 24.

Welcome back, everybody, to The Incomparable.

I'm your host, Jason Snell.

We have reached the end of the road for the book club.

The book club, I mean, the book club will continue, but the book club's journey through the,

uh, Hugo and Nebula Award shortlist is complete. This is the episode where we will, uh, rank

and release the now that the Hugo and Nebula awards have all been bestowed, by the way, we have

no control over that now. Um, but we will release our choices for the best books, the best consensus novels of this cycle.

That's one of the things that this episode is about.

Some of us will also talk about some Hugo nominated short fiction that we liked.

And then we'll do a little round of what we don't like to call what are we reading because it's inaccurate because we're doing a podcast.

Instead, you could probably call it something like, what have we read recently that we think we should mention on a podcast?

Less catchy. Less catchy, but more accurate.

And that's important.

Let me introduce the people who took this journey and read these many, many books.

It begins with Scott McNulty, as it so often does.

Hello, Scott.

Hello, Jason.

When you said the book club had reached its conclusion, I thought, what a way to find out the final episode of the book club. But I'm glad.

Just this cycle. It's a cyclical thing. I mean, I assume all of us had that moment where we read the last nominee and then feel this amazing rush of freedom to read anything we want.

I burrow back into the ground like a cicada and wait 15 years for the next book club episode. Just have to wait until February for the

next. Eric Anson also here. Hello. Hello. Yeah. After I finished reading that, I have read so

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