made with @nex3's grid generator
- Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories (Samuel R. Delany, 2003)
Not my first Delany and I was already a fan of his but this collection brought me to a new level of appreciation and feels like one I'm going to be pushing on others for years – it overwhelmed me and has deeply shaped my thoughts and desires around SF going forward. I started it in the throes of covid, popped a few Nyquil figuring those would knock me out and instead kept reading until it was 4 AM and I'd finished the opening novella "The Star Pit", and not long thereafter was hungrily searching for critical writing on these stories and the themes of Delany's work to bounce my thoughts off of (one piece that I came across and appreciated was Gerry Canavan's "Far Beyond the Star Pit", on the aforementioned novella and an episode of Deep Space Nine) - The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson, 1959)
It's great! I don't know that I have anything to say in favor of this one that you haven't already heard, it's the most popular work I'm including here if Goodreads is to be believed (probably not the one with the longest cultural tail, more on that later) but it is very much worth checking out. Also how great is that 1959 cover? I don't have a first edition unsurprisingly (most of the cover images I'm using for this post are from the edition I read, but not all) but at the very least I'm grateful that I was able to find a Penguin copy for myself from before they started slapping a big fucking Netflix logo on the front.
- She of the Mountains (Vivek Shraya, 2014)
A wonderful recommendation from @yrgirlkv, its parallel queer coming-of-age story and retellings of Hindu myth compliment and enrich one another extremely well. - The Seventh (Richard Stark, 1966)
I only read two Parker books this year after going through the first five last year but both were bangers (the other being The Jugger, feat. a delightfully Buscemiesque pathetic little man side character). The stadium job teased on the cover, of course, is fun as hell and also wraps up in a single early chapter as setup for the main plot as everything goes to shit afterward. Still gotta track down a copy of the next in the series so I can get back on these. Being able to pick up a tightly written crime story about people shooting one another over suitcases of cash whenever I need one is such an important part of my reading intake.
- Metagaming (Stephanie Boluk & Patrick LeMieux, 2017)
This one loomed for awhile in my head before I'd read it in full, both from what I'd heard on its main thrust from others and from reading Boluk and LeMieux's "What Should We Do with Our Games?" manifesto. Reading the thing itself, I continue to find its central claims compelling & worth engaging with when thinking critically about video games, and I also loved a lot of the close reads, especially the chapter on Metal Gear Solid V and disability in games. And it's available free online which, even having read a physical copy, is great for being able to find and share excerpts. - The Man Who Was Thursday (G.K. Chesterton, 1908)
Didn't really know what I was in for with this one – saw the words "metaphysical thriller" on its wiki page but that could mean a lot of things, and knowing Chesterton had also written the Father Brown mysteries, some TV adaptations of which I'd seen on PBS with my parents in the past, I expected things to be played straight, only to be met with heightened absurdity. Also once more I have read something and been like "wow Fallen London sure isn't being shy about how much they're cribbing this huh"
- The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969)
I do think this one gets done a bit of a disservice by how much it gets talked about as 'this is the One About Gender' which is there but by no means the whole of what is going on in the book or even its most compelling stuff. Starts off slow but around the halfway point I could tell I was getting really into it - gotta stick around for that ice trek - The Adventures of Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi, 1883; trans. Geoffrey Brock, 2009)
2022 the year of pinocchio babeyyyy but honestly this is a really great story and I'm glad I read it, I don't think I'd even ever seen an adaptation of Pinocchio before so coming to the original only knowing a shadow of a shadow of a shadow of what its whole deal was was fascinating (even with the assumption that what little I'd previously received of the story would be pretty far off). Pinocchio is an extreme scamp, Brock's translation is great, the jokes still hit, and I still haven't stopped being amused by learning that the story's first serialized run ended on the chapter where Pinocchio gets hanged.
- Fair Play (Tove Jansson, 1982; trans. Thomas Teal, 2007)
Shout out to being gay and watching Fassbinder movies. Does a lot with a little in its vignettes and deeply romantic in a very matter-of-fact way. Thanks to @shipyrds for the rec. Picked it up as a palate cleanser to read in between the unrelentingly grim stories of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and it was perfect for that (except that I then rushed through it and finished it way before that collection, but y'know,) - The Neverending Story (Michael Ende, 1979; trans. Ralph Manheim, 1983) [reread]
A childhood favorite which I took the opportunity to revisit in advance of a bonus episode of @rangedtouch's Homestuck Made This World, I was thrilled by how much it still held up to my memories (while there are aspects of the work that I can be more critical of now than as a kid, they don't significantly impede my enjoyment of the stuff I love about it). It is very funny how some of the stuff from the second half that I remembered as being very subtly communicated now reads to me as extremely obvious in how it's told though. I do recommend doing the research to pick up an edition printed in color (the book uses red and green text as division between events taking place in Fantastica and the real world, but b&w printings use italics instead, and I also spoke to someone who had listened to an audiobook that didn't represent the differentiation at all in its recording).