An excellent example would be the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series, which consists I would say mostly of plot-irrelevant exposition from the titular book-within-a-book
What are you reading in 2024?
- Thread starter Nellisir
- Start date
Vael
Legend
So this is apparently the year for me reading books about people waking up on spaceships with no memory. In that I've now read two (any suggestions for a third?). The first was Project Hail Mary, which I loved and brought up earlier, but I just finished The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer, a far queerer novel than PHM, and also went in a much weirder direction. I did enjoy it a lot, and was quite pleasantly surprised by it.
On the non-fiction front, I'm reading through Tasting History by Max Miller. It's a collection of recipes (modernized and such) from human history and is an interesting read. I do recommend his Youtube channel, there's several interesting videos there.
On the non-fiction front, I'm reading through Tasting History by Max Miller. It's a collection of recipes (modernized and such) from human history and is an interesting read. I do recommend his Youtube channel, there's several interesting videos there.
overgeeked
B/X Known World
My wife and I love his channel. I got that cookbook for her as a birthday present when it came out. We still haven’t made anything from it. We should fix that.
Greg Bear has a novel, Hull Zero Three, that fits your qualifications. I recommend it only as a story about someone waking up on a spaceship with no memory - I didn't particularly enjoy it.
Johnathan
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Just finished Vandermeer's Absolution.
The three parts aren't even in quality -- I get what he was trying to do in the third segment, but the point of view character's internal monologue is so annoying, it's distracting -- but overall, it's very good.
The first three Southern Reach novels -- Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance -- make up, more or less, a single narrative about government agents entering into a restricted area of the Gulf Coast that is undergoing some sort of mysterious transformation. The next book then zooms back to show the government agency behind the expeditions. And then third shows the consequences of the past two novels as the area begins to spread. The third novel ends with the threat of Area X potentially consuming the world, although that doesn't seem to have happened yet in the fourth book.
The fourth book jumps back in time before the first novel and then after the third, but mostly serves to examine a single mysterious figure in and around Area X, although it took a little while for me to realize that was what the book was largely about. And the book ends a little ambiguously, with me thinking we're going to see the origin of the figure but stopping just short of that.
It's impressive that after years away, Vandermeer doesn't make the mistake the back half of Lost did, IMO, with explaining too much of the mysteries. Yes, readers now have a better idea of what's happening in Area X -- maybe -- but even then, the details and the why are, at best, conjecture. And the figure featured throughout Absolution is basically yet another character caught up in all of this, rather than a man behind the curtain capable of explaining everything, even if he wanted to.
Even more than the earlier books and the movie, this very much feels like climate change as a horror story, although "horror" is probably a bit too strong a word here. There's a seemingly inevitable doom, an idea that the modern human world will eventually be overwritten and -- especially in the second and fourth books -- human arrogance that they can somehow fix all of it, even as the reader knows that simply will not happen.
This isn't an essential book for anyone who liked the previous novels, but is more like a small dessert after the first three books.
The three parts aren't even in quality -- I get what he was trying to do in the third segment, but the point of view character's internal monologue is so annoying, it's distracting -- but overall, it's very good.
The first three Southern Reach novels -- Annihilation, Authority and Acceptance -- make up, more or less, a single narrative about government agents entering into a restricted area of the Gulf Coast that is undergoing some sort of mysterious transformation. The next book then zooms back to show the government agency behind the expeditions. And then third shows the consequences of the past two novels as the area begins to spread. The third novel ends with the threat of Area X potentially consuming the world, although that doesn't seem to have happened yet in the fourth book.
The fourth book jumps back in time before the first novel and then after the third, but mostly serves to examine a single mysterious figure in and around Area X, although it took a little while for me to realize that was what the book was largely about. And the book ends a little ambiguously, with me thinking we're going to see the origin of the figure but stopping just short of that.
It's impressive that after years away, Vandermeer doesn't make the mistake the back half of Lost did, IMO, with explaining too much of the mysteries. Yes, readers now have a better idea of what's happening in Area X -- maybe -- but even then, the details and the why are, at best, conjecture. And the figure featured throughout Absolution is basically yet another character caught up in all of this, rather than a man behind the curtain capable of explaining everything, even if he wanted to.
Even more than the earlier books and the movie, this very much feels like climate change as a horror story, although "horror" is probably a bit too strong a word here. There's a seemingly inevitable doom, an idea that the modern human world will eventually be overwritten and -- especially in the second and fourth books -- human arrogance that they can somehow fix all of it, even as the reader knows that simply will not happen.
This isn't an essential book for anyone who liked the previous novels, but is more like a small dessert after the first three books.
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overgeeked
B/X Known World
I just finished Aliens: Nightmare Asylum. The second in a trilogy of Aliens tie-in novels adapted from graphic novels. Again it was a pretty good, fast-paced story with a lot of visual storytelling. I’ll definitely finish out the trilogy at some point, just not sure if it’s next on the list.
ETA: Just realized I forgot to mention to plot. Wilks and Billie are on the run and come across a military installation where the seemingly genius and utterly paranoid CO actually “tames” some aliens. It goes much better, much worse, and much weirder than that might suggest.
ETA: Just realized I forgot to mention to plot. Wilks and Billie are on the run and come across a military installation where the seemingly genius and utterly paranoid CO actually “tames” some aliens. It goes much better, much worse, and much weirder than that might suggest.
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Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Wilks and Billie are Hicks and Newt, after the Aliens comic book was retconned after the release of Alien3, right?
overgeeked
B/X Known World
Yes, exactly.
Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Ah, this is the one with General Spears as the bad guy, right? I remember that one got rather unhinged in places, like his getting turned on while stroking his fingers across one of the unhatched xenomorph eggs. A good way to show that he was deranged, I suppose.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Imagine being a studio exec and feeling that the two most popular new characters from Aliens absolutely had to be removed from the franchise going forward.
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