Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Snow Crash is good, but IDK. It just isn’t pulling me in the way I expected it to, so it’s taking me too long to get through.
Then I have some Jack Reacher novel on my bedside table waiting to be started, and I was just eyeballing a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories on my shelf.
I’d not heard of it until last week, when folks on r/books were singing its praises in a thread, so figured I’d give it a shot. Yeah, it’s enjoyable. Definitely aimed squarely at the middle of the YA crowd, but it’s an easy read at a time when my brain isn’t letting me really get into any books.
My ‘big read’ this year is Finnegans Wake - which I am (or have been) reading week by week along with the TrueLit sub on reddit. It would be a profoundly different experience to read it without the analysis and discussion going on there, so that is something…
Otherwise, I am reading The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher, which is engaging and entertaining, as was her The Hollow Places which I read immediately before. I am also dipping into a collection of the Para Handy tales by Neil Munro, which are a cosy - if stereotypical and patronising - glimpse into another time and pace of life.
I have just returned from a couple of weeks away during which I finished an anthology of Clarke Ashton Smith short fantasy tales (all about the atmosphere: story and worldbuilding are very much secondary and character scarcely features); Haldor Laxness’s The Atom Station (a sparse look at the clash of modern - written in 1948 - and traditional Icelandic values); and Blackwood’s The Willows (an extrapolation of the original idea of “panic” - as several of this other tales are).
Once you’ve read that, get a copy of Nightwatch. Much the same cast of characters, but it’s widely considered to be Terry’s magnum opus. That book is a damn work of art.
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