What are you reading in 2026?

[prabe]

I have a relatively small stack of library books, and I'm returning a large stack tomorrow. I dunno if we'll walk through and do a browse or not. I also have no idea what book I'm going to read next.

 

[Autumnal]

I had a stressful morning, with a crisis among Mom’s caregivers. Once it settled down, I curled up with an audiobook of Clark Ashton Smith’s stories (The End Of The Story, volume 1 of the 5-volume set from Night Shade Books). The readings are uniformly great and the prose, oh man, the prose is so great. Along with Jack Vance, Smith is one of people many bad writers like Gygax think they’re writing like but aren’t. Smith knows his vocabulary and grammar and is complete command of this, like this:

The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim; and strange winds, blowing from a gulf no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the grey dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orb-like mountains which rise from its pitted and wrinkled plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the watchful gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished, and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.

And

Malygris the magician sat in the topmost room of his tower that was builded on a conical hill above the heart of Susran, capital of Poseidonis. Wrought of a dark stone mined from deep in the earth, perdurable and hard as the fabled adamant, this tower loomed above all others, and flung its shadow far on the roofs and domes of the city, even as the sinister power of Malygris had thrown its darkness on the minds of men.

Now Malygris was old, and all the baleful might of his enchantments, all the dreadful or curious demons under his control, all the fear that he had wrought in the hearts of kings and prelates, were no longer enough to assuage the black ennui of his days.

That’s prose you can get down and roll around in or curl up in and nap like a cat. It’s been very restorative.