16. Saga of the Swamp Thing vol 1 (Alan Moore)
Haven't read this for decades it feels like and it's still pretty much peerless in terms of storytelling, mood and art. Brilliant stuff.

17. Foe (Ian Reid)
Not as good as I'm Thinking of Ending Things, but a great read full of what appears now to be his trademark atmosphere of tension and 'offness'. I really enjoyed it and it's meditations on relationships, personality and what makes us human.

18. Doom Patrol vol 2 (Gerard Way)
Excellent art and Way paying tribute to and following up where the legendary Grant Morrison run left off. The world's strangest superheroes try to figure out how what they are for, deal with the return of Mr Nobody and stop the end of all existence from happening at the hands of a cancelled and embittered former comic book hero. Features psychic werewolves, interspecies cat sex and tap dancing.

36.  The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.  He’s a nash tresh, but this particular book of Gaiman’s didn’t really work for me.  To begin with I wasn’t entirely sure what age group the novel was aimed at.  The framing device is a fifty something man returning to his childhood home and reflecting back on something that happened to him when he was seven years old.  But the way the story is told, with very simple prose, it often felt like it was the seven year old telling the story rather than the adult.  Also, I don’t know if I’m only just noticing this now and he writes like this across all his books, or it’s something he did in just this one, but he hardly uses contractions.  It got to the point where I was actively keeping an eye out for one.  I did find one eventually, but in using them so sparingly I thought made the prose a little stilted from time to time, and only compounded the feeling that it was written for a younger audience.

It isn’t written for a younger audience, and Gaiman confirms that in a transcribed interview at the end of the book.  But as he reveals in the acknowledgments, he mined his childhood significantly during the creation of the story.  At one point he thanks his sister for sending ‘memory jogger’ photographs, and laments not getting a picture of the greenhouse sooner, because he would’ve loved to have included it in the story.  This is telling, because the story to me feels baggy and unfocused in its first three quarters.  It’s as if his attention was more on his childhood nostalgia than it was on cooking up a cohesive and engaging story.  I liked the final quarter of the book quite a bit more than what had come before it, but it wasn’t really enough to save it.  I didn’t dislike the book, but ultimately I didn’t really like it all that much either.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugadsky

Read this after watching Stalker. An interesting novella and easy to read - far less ponderous than the Tarkovsky film (which is hardly surprising - the film has a very loose association) with an uplifting ending (if I understand it that is!!).

39.  Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin.  Tehanu is the fourth and final book in Le Guin’s Earthsea quartet.  I’ve read one of these each summer over the last few years and I’m a little bit sad it’s come to an end now.  Great books, all of them.  Tehanu is probably my least favourite of them all, jettisoning the strangeness of the previous stories for something more akin to a domestic drama.  There’s something melancholic, something meditative about it, as old characters from previous tales are drawn together, now old, to consider their lot.  I really, really liked it, and this was the right way to go, I’m certain, but I sure did miss hopping in a little sailboat and charting a course across Le Guin’s wonderfully realised Archipelago.  I highly recommend the entire series.

40.  The Rain Dancers by Greg F. Gifune.  This one is mostly really good.  A couple in their early forties are clearing out the house of the wife’s father, who passed away a couple of years ago, so they can put the place up for sale.  Then a man in his early seventies shows up on a stormy night, claiming to be an old family friend, only the wife doesn’t recognise him at all.  What starts out as a slightly embarrassing situation soon turns weird and then straight onto menacing.  It’s almost like a play, with almost the entire novel taking place in the kitchen of the old, isolated house.  For a good while I was reminded of Iain Reid’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, but personally I think Gifune fumbles the ending.  Still enjoyed it, though.

Loving the rate at which you get through books Raiz, but not as much as I love your avatar. Best on the forum in my humble opinion

Yeah, previous one was fantastic too.

Currently reading La Brava by Elmore Leonard. Read this many years ago, but I can't remember it all that well. I'm really enjoying it. Leonard had such a brilliant way of capturing the way people speak, and the plot twists and turns in many pleasing ways. Going to continue my Discworld project afterwards, with The Light Fantastic!

acemuzzy wrote:

Raiziel wrote:

No comment.

Bad?

Yeah. There’s nothing I can say about this one that I haven’t already said about the other two. It’s my own stupid fault for plodding on with the series. Only one more to go.

21. Use of Weapons (Iain M Banks)
Superb stuff. Effortlessly brilliant from beginning to end and even though the structure would likely have stumped a lesser writer it's so well done here that I didn't even really notice how clever it was until I'd finished it. The only criticism I have is that there aren't more books in the Culture series with even some of these characters in them.

Not yet, I'm working my way through them all. It's Excession next sand State of the Art

43.  The Inverted World by Christopher Priest.  My favourite book of the year so far.  The creativity on display in this science fiction story is absolutely incredible.  It’s about a city forever grinding north on a railroad track that is ceaselessly picked up by the inhabitants once it has been driven over and then laid down again in front of the city.  But it’s why this is happening that truly drives to story onwards, and the why is a doozie.  I love high strangeness in my fiction, and here is a story that has it in spades.  To say any more would be to ruin the mystery.  In fact, if anyone is tempted to give it a whirl I would recommend skipping the introduction, which gives away a not inconsiderable nugget of information about the nature of the world, something I would have preferred to find out during the natural course of the narrative.  I highly, highly recommend this to anyone who likes sci-fi paired with startling originality.

Haven't read it since I was in my early 20s, but it did a number on me

Dark Soldier wrote:

Mad props to Raiz for basically spending every waking hour in a book. I've been reading American Pastoral for about three months.

I’ve been reading Sense and Sensibility for about 5 months.

Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (translated by Ken Liu).

One of the best science fiction stories I have read for a long, long time. Its a rare experience to realise you are reading a classic without knowing anything about it before opening the book. Thought provoking, unusual, relevant, I am woefully unable to do this book justice but if you enjoy true science fiction, it’s frankly a must-read. I need to get cracking on the two sequels now to complete the trilogy.