I thought RENT was pretty good; I never saw the show, so I don't have either the original-cast-squee response or the adaptation-yuck response, for what that's worth.

I never like committing to a "best", but really good books I've read this year include JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL (Susannah Clarke), BLOODCHILD (Octavia E. Butler, short stories), archy & mehitabel (Don Marquis, poems), LOOKING FOR JAKE (China Mieville, short stories), METAMAGICAL THEMAS (Doug Hofstadter, cognitive science), IDENTITY CRISIS (Brad Meltzer, comics) and THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (Mikhail Bulgakov). In order, I guess they're pseudohistorical fantasy (Tad Williams meets Jane Austen), political science fiction, magic realism (the poems are written by a cockroach, who can't type in upper case because he can't hold down the shift key; in one of them, he talks to a mummy), horrific fantasy or fantastic horror, nonfiction interlarded with silly fictional thought-experiments, superheroic deconstructionism, and revisionist Biblical fantasy with witches and cats and vampires. Have I ever mentioned I'm not a great fan of genres?


mjw