What are you reading in 2025?

[Nellisir]

There’s good and bad popcorn, and cotton candy, whipped Jello, whatever. Very nearly anything can be done well or badly, and writing really good junk food escapism takes as much work as writing anything else really well, I think.

I did a creative writing major in college and my thesis was a collection of fantasy short stories. Small school with a big ego about its literary reputation (Hint: I refused to read American Psycho even though it was EVERYWHERE on my campus); no teachers who read fantasy. Finally, one said he didn't know about anything about the fantasy genre, but good writing was good writing and he'd do it.

I'm grateful to Roland Merullo every day.

(Also, I just watched some snippets of a video about him - clips of talks he's done, apparently - and you guys. You have NO idea how much thicker that Revere accent is in person, or was back then. "...a feelin' ah bein' whuahm..." Absolutely love it.)

 

[Parmandur]

David Hartwell argued that horror isn’t a genre, but a mode in which you can write any gene. Thus mysteries that are horror and mysteries that aren’t, sf that’s horror and sf that isn’t, and so on. Works for me.

I have in my head that there are genres of setting and genres of story. Hartwell's point, as you describe it, seems like a different way to express that idea. Hartwell was an excellent anthologist, as well as a superb critic (not reviewer, critic) and I'm happy to have somehow had a thought consistent with his.

Genre as we use it is more about marketers categorizing the readership than the text. Some people like the good puzzle of a mystery, some like the goosebumps raising emotions of horror, some like the passiona of romance, and some of us when presented with an absolutely bizarre hypothetical such as "imagine that there is an intergalactic civilization that is built on people snorting the poop of giant sand worms as a psychedelic to allow for FTL travel" respond with "do go on" instead of "what???"

That's why Fantasy and Science Fiction get shelved together, despite there being very different subject matter: the psychological profile of the readership is similar.

 

[Retros_x]

I mean medieval and pretty much every society before it everywhere was pretty terrible for most

I mean that depends whom you ask. The "dark age" is famously misrepresented in modern media. The peasants did not work more than us today (8-9 hours), but had MUCH more holidays, often for multiple weeks outside of hard-demanding timeframes like harvest. They did a lot of merrymaking, they died their clothes colorful, they did wash themselves.

Would I wanted to live back then? Of course not. We achieved so much medical and societal improvements that I don't want to miss. But the picture of "everything was terrible until the capitalist factory owners brought us luck and prosperity" is also not true and a strongly ideologically driven narrative.


@Parmandur I actually started Wheel of Time! I thought I give it a chance, and I do enjoy it. It feels very cozy to me right now in autumn, early winter and it scratches the "epic fantasy" itch that The Way of Kings failed to do for me a few months ago. The prose is not that masterful to me like you claimed, but also not bad as others did. I like the descriptive style that pulls me into the scene. I am still only 200 pages in the first book, but I do enjoy it at the moment!

 

[Alzrius]

I mean that depends whom you ask. The "dark age" is famously misrepresented in modern media. The peasants did not work more than us today (8-9 hours), but had MUCH more holidays, often for multiple weeks outside of hard-demanding timeframes like harvest. They did a lot of merrymaking, they died their clothes colorful, they did wash themselves.

There's an excellent series of essays about the life of medieval peasants by Bret Devereaux over on his blog, which I'm a big fan of.

 

[Parmandur]

@Parmandur I actually started Wheel of Time! I thought I give it a chance, and I do enjoy it. It feels very cozy to me right now in autumn, early winter and it scratches the "epic fantasy" itch that The Way of Kings failed to do for me a few months ago. The prose is not that masterful to me like you claimed, but also not bad as others did. I like the descriptive style that pulls me into the scene. I am still only 200 pages in the first book, but I do enjoy it at the moment!

That first section of Eye of the World is really cozy, hitting a lot of those Hero's Journey tropes in a very in-fashion in the 1980s way.

At this point, you haven't really experienced Jordan's main superpower, viewpoint perspective as everything so far is Rand. What the series is most known for is jumping around from character to character and seeing the world through their eyes, and thst is really where the text shines.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I finished Diamond's Josephine Baker's Secret War. While I knew about Baker's activities as an Allied spy in WW2, I didn't know the specifics. Really fascinating stuff. Also shows just how Americentric what we get taught about WW2 in the states is, how much it leaves out.

Now I'm re-reading William Gibson's Virtual Light. Haven't read it in over 20 years. All I remember is the line about a shaving razor only getting so dull.

I finished reading The Roots of the Mountains, by William Morris, last night. It felt like a bit of a slog, probably because I was reading it every night before falling asleep, and I've had a tendency lately to doze off pretty quickly, so it took me a long time to get through it.

Its influence on JRR Tolkien is apparent from the beginning. It concerns the people of "the Dale", an idyllic mountain valley also called Burgdale, and their dealings and relationships with the people of other nearby mountain valleys, Rose-dale and Silver-dale, which, in context, are both simply referred to as "the Dale". I think this probably influenced the naming of Dale in The Hobbit.

In my experience, William Morris has his moments, and is undeniably influential, but his writing isn't as accessible to modern readers. Whereas Lord Dunsany, also a massive influence on Tolkien, is way more readable.

 

[overgeeked]

David Hartwell argued that horror isn’t a genre, but a mode in which you can write any gene. Thus mysteries that are horror and mysteries that aren’t, sf that’s horror and sf that isn’t, and so on. Works for me.

I think we'd have that conversation before. To me it's that genres are defined by different things. Some are plot based, others setting based, others tone based, etc. You can mix and match them easily when the different genres cover different aspects, such as a Western Romance. It makes intuitive sense what that means. A Romance set in the Old West. It's only when you're blending two genres that focus on the same piece that you need to either explain or figure out what exactly that means in the specific case. Like two plot-based genres or two setting-based genres.

 

[Autumnal]

Also a good take. Very few genres are exclusive, because they’re different kinds of things. They mostly look that way because shelves are mostly two-dimensional. Barring deep shelves with multiple layers of books, books stacked lying down, etc.