It’s a holiday weekend following an unreasonably long and busy week, so my links are a bit fewer this week – but they’re choice!

The Living Dead 2has its own website with interviews of authors, reviews of the anthology, and lots of other great stuff. Check it out if you like zombies – or even if you just like good stories. The original The Living Dead was an excellent collection (reviewed here) and I’m looking forward to reading this new one.

SF Signal’s Mind Meld for this week asks what the next big trend in science fiction, fantasy and horror is. It’s a good thing they didn’t ask me, because I probably would have told them it was Jeff VanderMeer’s Squidpunk or something equally silly. Instead, they’ve gotten some serious SF/F/H talent to give some really thoughtful answers. It makes for some good reading, and once again, your list of books to read is likely to grow. (Does anyone still wonder why I have 12,000 books and counting? There is so much wonderful stuff out there. I sure hope you don’t die before you’ve read all your books, because otherwise I’ll go to my grave feeling very disappointed that I didn’t get to read this or that or the other.)

Adventures in Reading has a full listing of all the World Fantasy Award nominees. I’m disappointed that Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest isn’t among the nominated works, but I’m pleased to see that Caitlin Kiernan’s The Red Tree is there. I named both of those novels the best of 2009. I confess I’d be a bit disappointed if China Mieville’s The City & The Citywon the award because …

It just tied for the Hugo with Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl. Mieville is having quite the year with that book – it’s won almost everything there is to win. Of particular note in this list of winners is that, for the first time in a very long time, Locus did not win in the category of best semi-prozine. Instead, that honor went to an online magazine, Clarkesworld. An interesting development for on-line magazines.

Believe it or not, some science fiction movies get it right. This is an excellent list, and I agree with the judgments rendered here.

If you’re anything like me, you have a compact edition of The Oxford English Dictionary sitting somewhere around your home, printed in a font so tiny that it can’t be read with the naked eye, but must be viewed with the magnifying glass that accompanied it when you purchased it. (Okay, probably there aren’t too many of you out there who are like me in this regard. I am an unrepentant nerd.) The full version of the Dictionary takes up 20 volumes. So the editors have pretty much decided that next time the dictionary will only be published in an online version. A brave new world indeed.

William Gibson, who invented the term cyberpunk, muses about Google.

Since I’ve already confessed that I’m a nerd, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that the misuse of the apostrophe drives me mad. You don’t need it for plural’s, and its often misused despite it’s clear rules of usage. Now there’s the Apostrophe Song, which should help people get it right. What do you think are the chances?

And finally, a dose of the sublime: E.B. White’s essay, “Once More to the Lake,” first published in 1941. If you’ve never read his essay collection, One Man's Meat, you are missing something special. Give it a try.

Happy Labor Day! May we all spend the day honoring those who bus our tables, pick up our garbage, grow our food, take care of our pets, write the books we love, and, last but not least, spend the Sunday of a holiday weekend writing blog posts for our enjoyment with the hope of no reward but an occasional comment from a happy reader.