What are you reading in 2024?

[Mercurius]

A few scattered thoughts:

For Robert Charles Wilson, try the Spn trilogy, Darwinia, and Burning Paradise. I think his stuff hangs together best in those. (I also love Nysteeium, but it depends on how much you’d like some Gnosticism with your cross time.)

I read Spin shortly after it came out and really liked it, but never got to the 2nd and 3rd books. I'd re-read it and the next two if I didn't have so many other books to read. I've got a copy of Mysterium and it is on my to-read list (love gnostic stuff).

Skip Norstrilia for now. Cordwainer Smith’s short stories - look for Scanners Live In Vain, The Game of Rat and Srsgon, Golden the Ship Was Oh! Oh! Oh!, and like that. The Instrumentality of Man collection is best if you can lay hands on it.

Bookpilled, is that you? He said the same thing, essentially. I've had my eye out fo Instrumentality of Man, but copies are expensive and rare. I do have a couple other short story collections, which include some of the same stories.

I found the Black Easter sequel disappointing. But some others don’t. Give it a try, for sure.

Yeah, I've heard it isn't quite as good. I almost read it right after Black Easter, but wanted to try some other flavors.

After I finish the Silverberg book, the top of my to-read list includes:

Ice by Ana Kavan
Electric Forest by Tanith Lee (or possibly Don't Drink the Sun)
Camp Concentration or 334 by Thomas Disch
Beyond Apollo by Barry Malzberg
What Entropy Means to Me by George Alec Effinger
Knight of the Swords by Michael Moorcock

Tons of others, too, but those are the ones queued up.

I definitely want to read more of Blish, Silverberg, and Wilson, along with dozens of others, but am trying to read some of the authors that I haven't read yet.

 

[Mercurius]

If "Lord Valentine's Castle" was him trying to cash in, may more writers cash in half so productively.

I read it back in the 90s, I think, and liked it, but don't remember it very much except that it involved a lot of traveling. But I didn't mean to slight him, just going on something John Clute (I think) said, that after a hiatus after that prodigious "golden era" of 1967-76, he came back in the 80s with more commercial fare, starting with Lord Valentine's Castle.

 

[Nellisir]

All in all, none of them are in obvious danger of jumping onto my Detectives/Mysteries favorites list. Although I think it was enough to make me check out his short stories. I will also have to try some other hard boiled ones like Chandler. Tying back to the first sentence of this post, Tey's The Franchise Affair might head my list, and Ms. Pym Disposes is in the conversation for making it (and I'll probably start a third read through the Wolfe corpus itself sometime soon).

I much prefer Chandler to Hammett. I've said it before (and recently), that his plots are haphazard at best, but read him for the words themselves.

"The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox's left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other." Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

 

[Eyes of Nine]

an old Three Investigators novel.

I loved those as a kid - maybe I should try to get a bunch of them and breeze through them for nostalgia's sake...

 

[Clint_L]

My school is having a reading challenge, where you have from September until April 15th to "read through the alphabet." Must be novel, graphic novels, or comparable non-fiction. Students are doing it as teams, but a few of us teachers decided to solo it. So far I've read:

A
Azzarello, Brian, Before Watchmen (graphic novel)
Ashton, Edward, Antimatter Blues (novel)
Abercrombie, Joe, The Blade Itself (novel)
Abercrombie, Joe, Before They Are Hanged (novel)
Adichie, Chiamando Ngozi, Americanah (novel)
B
Baldree, Thomas, Legends and Lattes (novel)
Baldree, Thomas, Bookshops and Bonedust (novel)
Bagieu, Penelope, Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World (graphic novel; biography)
Brubaker, Ed, Friday: The First Day of Christmas (graphic novel)
Brubaker, Ed, Friday: On a Cold Winter's Night (graphic novel)
C
Crouch, Blake, Upgrade (novel)
Cronin, Justin, The Passage (novel)
Cronin, Justin, The Twelve (novel)
Cronin, Justin, City of Mirrors (novel)
D
Deconnick, Kelly Sue, Bitch Planet: Book Two (graphic novel)
E
Elroy, James, LA Confidential (novel)
F
Fahdy, Huma, Hude F Are You? (graphic novel)
Faulkner, William, Light in August (novel)
G
Gibson, William, Neuromancer (novel)
H
Hearne, Kevin and Delilah S. Dawson, Kill the Farm Boy (novel)
I
Itani, Frances, Requiem (novel)
J
Jemison, NK, The 5th Season (novel)
K
Klune, TJ, In the Lives of Puppets (novel)
King, Stephen, The Outsider (novel)
King, Maxwell, The Good Neighbour: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers (biography)
Kurtzman, Harvey et al, Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (graphic novel plus essays)
L
Leckie, Anne, Translation State (novel)
LaValle, Victor, Lone Women (novel)
M
Martine, Arkady, A Memory Called Empire (novel)
Martine, Arkady, A Desolation Called Peace (novel)
N
Naylor, Ray, The Mountain in the Sea (novel)
O
Ortiz, Victoria, Dissenter on the Bench (biography)
Orlando, Carissa, The September House (novel)
P
Powers, Richard, The Overstory (novel)
Panetta, Kevin, Bloom (graphic novel)
Pearse, Sarah, The Sanatorium (novel)
Q
Quinn, Kate, The Diamond Eye (biographical novel)
R
Reynolds, Jason, Long Way Down (poetry)
S
Scalzi, John, Starter Villain (novel)
St. John Mandel, Elizabeth, Station 11 (novel)
T
Tchaikovsky, Adrian, Bear Head (novel)
Tchaikovsky, Adrian, Ogres (novel)
U
Urquart, Jane, Changing Heaven (novel)
V
Vaughn, Brian, Pride of Baghdad (graphic novel)
W
Wenzel, David, and Kurt Busiek, A Wizard's Tale (graphic novel)
Walen, Tillie, Clementine (graphic novel)
Wells, Martha, System Collapse (novel)
X
Xinran, The Good Women of China (short stories/biographies)
Y
Yancey, Rick, The Fifth Wave (novel)
Young, Neil, Waging Heavy Peace (autobiography)
Z
Zoboi, Ibi and Yusuf Salaam, Punching the Air (poetry)

 

[Autumnal]

That’s very fun, @Clint_L

 

[Clint_L]

My favourites thus far have been Americanah, Legends and Lattes, Neuromancer (but that's a re-read), Translation State, Lone Women, A Desolation Called Peace, The September House, both Friday books, The Overstory, Station 11, Bitch Planet, and System Collapse.

Americanah is probably the best book thus far on my list, aside from Neuromancer. Though I am loving the Friday series by Brubaker and can't wait to see where it goes.

Also, The September House has really stuck with me. It's a pretty interesting take on a haunted house story.

 

[Clint_L]

Also, I'm only just discovering the Abercrombie series. I don't generally read a ton of fantasy, but I'm enjoying it quite a lot - I'm about to read the third book (I assume it's a trilogy? I dunno - it seems like there's an awful lot of plot left to resolve!). It's like a hard "R" Lord of the Rings.

In retrospect, my least favourite was the Cronin series. The first one was okay; kind of like a lesser cross between The Stand and I Am Legend. The second book was just good enough that I felt like I should finish out the series - in for a penny, in for a pound - but the third book was offensively awful. It actually made me mad. And the whole series was something like 2000 pages.

The Sanatorium was a super cringey murder-mystery thriller with every genre cliche you can imagine. Stay away.

 

[Autumnal]

I’ve got several of those in my queue, so I’m glad to hear you liked them.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

I loved those as a kid - maybe I should try to get a bunch of them and breeze through them for nostalgia's sake...

I had eight or ten of the Three Investigators books myself as a kid (a tiny fraction of the whole apparently, and there are even more in German thanks to being hot over there). Re-read a handful of them myself after a thrift store find, they held up okay for me. Not as much fun to revisit as the original Tom Swift Jr. run was, but not bad for what they are. Mind you, I was reading them around the same time I got introduced to Nero Wolfe, so they were never, ever going to be on my "best detective stories" list even back in grade school.

May just be nostalgia speaking but there's something charmingly naive about the Swift technobabble and absurd "science" and general optimism about technology making the world better, especially living in here 2024. I suppose a gritty modern reboot would have Tom trying to find a means of cleaning Thomasite micro-plastics out of our bodies and our environment, but I could do without. None of the other reboot attempts captured anything like the same feel as the original, for better or worse.

Usual cautions to anyone considering reading them about old kids' books being terrible about diversity or cultural sensitivity, of course. Three Investigators is further skewed by the lead characters being boys who are to young to drive - hypothetically 13 at some point in the books - so there's a noticeable lack of female characters, possibly to avoid catching cooties. At least Tom and Bud are no longer minors and Sandy and Phyllis do occasionally get to contribute to the plot a bit, however rarely.