What are you reading in 2024?

overgeeked

B/X Known World
I've gotta say, as much as I want to like VanderMeer, I ... just can't. His prose rubs me as emotionally dead and moves me to heights of apathy. At least, his fiction--I've read some of his essays, like about observing the wild things around where he lives, and they were really good.
I've tried VanderMeer a few times but just can't. He and his wife are pretty good anthologists and put together good collections, but their intros to those collections are laughably bad most times. I still remember their attempt at defining science fiction. "It takes place in the future." That's it. That's their definition. He also mocks Lovecraft (which is fair enough, the racist old scum deserves it), his fiction and ideas...while building his career on Lovecraft pastiches like Annihilation.
 

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prabe

Tension, apprension, and dissension have begun
Supporter
I've tried VanderMeer a few times but just can't. He and his wife are pretty good anthologists and put together good collections, but their intros to those collections are laughably bad most times. I still remember their attempt at defining science fiction. "It takes place in the future." That's it. That's their definition. He also mocks Lovecraft (which is fair enough, the racist old scum deserves it), his fiction and ideas...while building his career on Lovecraft pastiches like Annihilation.
Annihilation didn't strike me as particularly Lovecraftian in other than the broadest terms, and Hummingbird Salamander really wasn't at all. It's plausible some of his earlier stuff reeked more strongly of Aitch Pee, but I haven't read it and I'm not interested.
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
Annihilation I thought the narrative voice--that removed, aloof first-person POV, where it's hard to care about the narrator or the events of the novel because it doesn't seem as though the narrator does--was the single creepiest thing about the novel: The events barely seemed to register on her, so they barely registered on me. (I am not going to be reading anything further by VanderMeer, three tries is enough for me to know his writing doesn't work for me.)
I wonder if that tone influenced the movie, where the survivors (if that's the right word) of Area X come back with little to no emotional affect.
 

Autumnal

Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
Jeff VanderMeer is Olaf Stapledon with false whiskers. I will not be taking questions at this time.

(From me that’s praise, but not from everyone.)
 

Queer Venger

Dungeon Master is my Daddy
re-reading Moorcock's
IMG_2510.jpeg
great fantasy saga that inspired GRRM & Witcher series...
Going to re-read them all.
 



prabe

Tension, apprension, and dissension have begun
Supporter
I wonder if that tone influenced the movie, where the survivors (if that's the right word) of Area X come back with little to no emotional affect.
It's possible. I would have expected that narrative tone/voice to be practically impossible to catch in a film--though I remember in the book the narrator's husband returning and being kinda emotionally deadened, that might not have been just or purely an attempt to capture the tone.
 

Agreed! I've really started abandoning books in the last decade. Or at least series.
When I'm not feeling a book, I tend to start skimming pages. I rarely will just outright put a book down, unless I know it's just a matter of me not being in the mood for it right then.

re-reading Moorcock'sView attachment 383702 great fantasy saga that inspired GRRM & Witcher series...
Going to re-read them all.

Elric's tales are so darn good. I really need to get to the stuff Moorcock wrote after Fortress of the Pearl.
 

Richards

Legend
I'm running low on books to read - my library was in the process of moving to a new building, so there were no book sales to be had for a long time while they got everything sorted out, so I'm down to books that don't particularly thrill me. But faced with flying on a plane all day today, I tried a Doctor Who novel, Sometime Never..., by Justin Richards (uh, no relation). It featured the Eighth Doctor and two companions I've never heard of, and while the bits with the Doctor were interesting, the plot itself wasn't all that thrilling, dealing with assembling a crystalized skeleton that I was disappointed didn't have anything to to do with the Fendahl. And there was a villain, Sabbath, who's apparently some sort of repeat enemy to the Eighth Doctor, but as this is the first book with the Eighth Doctor I've read it meant nothing to me.

Now I have a choice to make: read a novel that's #3 in a five-book series (as it turns out), or borrow a novel I bought for my son written by the lead singer of a band he likes. I might give that one a try - at least it'll be something different.

Johnathan
 

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