What are you reading in 2025?

[Parmandur]

Been working my way through the Appendix N anthology edited by Peter Bebergal. I don't know what it is, but something about Michael Moorcock's prose is absolutely soporifuc fir me: trying to get through any Elric story puts me right out. Has been that way anytime I try to read him.

Unlike the electric shock of reading Howard or Lieber.

 

[prabe]

Bradbury's writing has this strangely beautiful heartbreak. It at once captures what it's like to be a kid, aching to be an adult but also fearful of leaving childhood behind, and being an adult desperately recalling your lost childhood. All of it done with a simple description of an autumn wind blowing leaves across a small town.

I recently reread Something Wicked This Way Comes and I was surprised how important Charles Halloway (Will's dad) was in/to the novel. Also, it hit a lot harder than when I read it in high school or college or thereabouts, possibly because I was still young enough then to look down on Jim and Will.

King has a misanthropic streak in his writing. It's this synergy between the everyday and supernatural terrors.

There's that, and there's also the attitude the sociologist (I'm pretty sure it's the old guy, and I'm pretty sure he's a sociologist) expresses in The Stand (paraphrasing, probably): Man might have been created in God's image, but human societies seem to have been made in the image of His opposite number.

 

[prabe]

Been working my way through the Appendix N anthology edited by Peter Bebergal. I don't know what it is, but something about Michael Moorcock's prose is absolutely soporifuc fir me: trying to get through any Elric story puts me right out. Has been that way anytime I try to read him.

Unlike the electric shock of reading Howard or Lieber.

Can't comment on Lieber (much, I've read some Spiders and Snakes stuff, and Conjure Wife ages ago, but I have a handful of Lankhmar books on my shelf) or Moorcock (at all--it's a thing I keep meaning to correct but there's a lot, and finding a starting point is hard, and there's a lot of new stuff I want to read, too) but the little bit of Howard I've read hasn't made me want to read more. Some of that's probably when he was writing, where he was from, and the market/s he was writing for, but I wasn't particularly impressed with the prose or the characters or the story. Also, of course, the problem could be me.

 

[Autumnal]

The best starting point for Moorcock is Elric in publication order.

 

[trappedslider]

There's that, and there's also the attitude the sociologist (I'm pretty sure it's the old guy, and I'm pretty sure he's a sociologist) expresses in The Stand (paraphrasing, probably): Man might have been created in God's image, but human societies seem to have been made in the image of His opposite number.

Glenn Bateman taught Sociology