What are you reading in 2024?

I've had How to Sell a Haunted House pop up on recommendations a couple times, but I can't make up my mind if it'd interest me or not.
I've seen some reviews of other Hendrix novels--and I worked at an audiobook that recorded Horrorstör--and I was expecting more zaniness than there was in How to Sell a Haunted House. It's not a bad book, just more conventional and less ... tongue in cheek, I guess, than I was expecting. Hope that helps.
 

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It's a book that's wasted on teenagers, IMO. It's a much better read in middle age, when the themes hit very hard.
I read it in college, in a context that didn't feel so much like the goose being made into pate foie gras, which probably has a lot to do with why i enjoyed it then. I think there are some novels that change a lot if you (re)read them at different ages, and I agree Gatsby is one.
Man, I love this. Hard to discuss without spoiling the hell out of it, but it's a great fun read, and lightning quick compared to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which demands a lot more of readers than this does. (Probably related to Clarke's battle with chronic fatigue syndrome.) I will say that, if you are a big fan of classic 20th century fantasy written by famous Brits, Piranesi has some fun Easter eggs waiting for you.
Yeah, it's really hard to talk about what Clarke's doing in Piranesi without spoiling it. I don't think referencing the unreliable narrator is too bad. OTOH, I apparently missed every single one of those Easter eggs. :LOL: (That subset of Fantasy isn't really my jam, though.)
 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke: Another remarkably complex short-ish novel, this one playing all sort of unreliable narrator games while weaving themes of identity and reality, a novel that kinda kept reassembling itself as I read it (that's not snark).
This might be one of my favorite books of all time.
 

I read it in college, in a context that didn't feel so much like the goose being made into pate foie gras, which probably has a lot to do with why i enjoyed it then. I think there are some novels that change a lot if you (re)read them at different ages, and I agree Gatsby is one.

Yeah, it's really hard to talk about what Clarke's doing in Piranesi without spoiling it. I don't think referencing the unreliable narrator is too bad. OTOH, I apparently missed every single one of those Easter eggs. :LOL: (That subset of Fantasy isn't really my jam, though.)
There are some very direct and strong allusions to Narnia, basically to the point of making an identification of the normal world of the book being the same as the normal world of the Narnia stories, through the framing in Magician's Nephew (she did the same thing in Strange & Mr. Norrel, in the opposite direction chronologically and more subtly). She is a huge, huge C. S. Lewis fan.
 

There are some very direct and strong allusions to Narnia, basically to the point of making an identification of the normal world of the book being the same as the normal world of the Narnia stories, through the framing in Magician's Nephew (she did the same thing in Strange & Mr. Norrel, in the opposite direction chronologically and more subtly). She is a huge, huge C. S. Lewis fan.
I am not particularly a Lewis fan, so I missed that--though I think I did pick up on some similarities in the worlds between the books. Of course, it's been more than a decade since I've read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, so I might have hallucinated it ... :LOL:
 

I'm returning to Strange & Norrell later this year, via the audibook. Super-excited. I'm going to try and arrange a time to listen to it while driving alone on long car trips for work, so I can really just soak in it.
 

I'm returning to Strange & Norrell later this year, via the audibook. Super-excited. I'm going to try and arrange a time to listen to it while driving alone on long car trips for work, so I can really just soak in it.
I spent too much time recording audiobooks to be able to listen to them for pleasure. I vaguely envy people who can, sometimes, but--as you might have picked up on--I read really quickly.
 

I'm starting off 2024 with Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad, which was a holiday gift to me. I'm about halfway through. I'm not a big fan of Homer, but this is the most lively and compelling translation I've come across.
I finished up the Iliad last week and I’m now reading a collection, the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (stories published in 2022). It’s a spectacular series that started in 2015. Every volume has a few stories that knock my socks off.
 

I've had How to Sell a Haunted House pop up on recommendations a couple times, but I can't make up my mind if it'd interest me or not.
I do not hear the music, when it comes to Hendrix. But plenty of others do. It could just be me.

I finished up the Iliad last week and I’m now reading a collection, the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (stories published in 2022). It’s a spectacular series that started in 2015. Every volume has a few stories that knock my socks off.
Who’s the editor(s) on that one?
 

I do not hear the music, when it comes to Hendrix. But plenty of others do. It could just be me.


Who’s the editor(s) on that one?
The series editor is John Joseph Adams. He selects 80 contenders and passes them on to a different guest editor each year to narrow it down to the best 20. This year the guest editor is R.F. Kuang, whose work I don’t know.
 

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