Books Archive

I am attempting to get back into reading intentionally... I will put some stuff here as I finish it... maybe...

Swords Against Death, Fritz Leiber, 1970

October 2025. This stuff is so great man it is so pleasant to read. This is more stories than the first book, written over huge span of time and again laid out in “world internal chronological order” as is apparently common. Really UNEVEN in some ways, some of them are a little more perfunctory-feeling than others, and some of them are engaging really selfconsciously in later versions of the big picture “fafhrd and the gray mouser project,” but the guys themselves are clear, loud, cartoony throughout.

reading more fritz leiber... some of these fafhrd & the gray mouser stories are from like 1940; incredible stuff and totally altering my sense of the historical development of fantasy fiction!!!! // the unevenly-republished magazine stuff was building the genre in ways as fundamental and enormous as, e.g., lord of the rings // also i had thought the 'conan the barbarian' thing wasn't really psychologized or postmodernized very much until like the 70s, but fritz leiber is basically getting to the bottom of it within a few years of it being a culturallly intelligible type of story. it rocks // some of the most hypnotically beautiful and hilarious dialogue i have ever read in the 'fake old-timey fantasy' mode

BOLO: The Annals of the Dinochrome Brigade, Keith Laumer, 1976

October 2025. Some 60s military sf shorts; didn't finish. Sometimes charming and fun but nothing really hits. One story features his recurring character RETIEF who I gather is a sort of outer-space Jack Reacher who is just so cool and confident and sarcastic and idk i lost interest in reading it as i am losing interest in writing this.

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, Philip K. Dick, 1965

October 2025. The subtitle suggests some relationship to Dr. Strangelove from shortly earlier which is made much of in back-cover copy and wikipedia article etc but I don't think there is anything useful or interesting in that connection and have no idea why it is being made lol. Love that movie though hugely. I hadn't read PKD in years!!! This really pulled me through; really fun and involving pretty quick. There is a preposterous density of grotesque and fascinating ideas with enormous narrative potential that is just only cursorily explored. I imagine that he is writing it front-to-back, and losing interest in the big picture of the thing at multiple times throughout the book, but the framework remains a useful way to just cram a bunch of wild shit in there. Sometimes it is a little frustrating how ideas are not explored, or given the emotional weight they seem to demand, or incorporated deeply into the structure of the whole book, etc. But the raw scatterbrained automatism is I guess the point of a phil dick book. Would work well expanded out into a mid-2000s style HBO prestige drama series.

enjoying DR BLOODMONEY every pkd book I have ever read I am constantly thinking 'phil can u just chill out for one god damn second' and then the book is over

Grendel, John Gardner, 1971

September 2025. Really pretty cool. Kind of a meandering ideas-book that doesn’t even articulate or depend upon the Plot of Beowulf at all (such as it is). This could perhaps be a little abstract or difficult to engage with but it is pretty wild and beautiful moment-to-moment. Love the idea of extrapolating from Beowulf a broad elemental framework with which to think about how the world is constructed… Love that Beowulf himself only shows up very late as a sort of blunt deadline on the train of thought… It is sometimes pretty Funny… The dragon bit is really something… Great LANGUAGE throughout. Constantly pointedly anachronistic on a bunch of different levels, but also it drifts in and out of language that really feels like primary-orality epic poetry, with all of those little epithet-things Beowulf uses as I dimly recall. Interesting to compare to Belmarch, which is embedded more “immersively” in an imagined premodern worldview, but ends up doing some similar things maybe.

Elric of Melniboné, Michael Moorcock, 1972

September 2025. Audiobook. I started this a few years ago but just listened thru the whole thing now. Presented now as first in the series, and first in internal chronology, BUT it is clearly written somewhat later and is a much more composed and self-aware sort of statement on the Elric thing. I dunno it feels like you have to get into a different headspace to read this than the internal-chronologically-later fix-up novels… Like maybe I think Elric works better if all this elaborate melnibone background material is just sort of loosely expressed around the edges. Anyway it’s fun and it’s nice to read something that holds together as a sustained narrative a little more.

The Weird of the White Wolf, Michael Moorcock, 1977

September 2025. 3rd Elric book. Yet more fix-upped little fantasy-adventure stories… one wonders maybe how much of an Epic Quest can be fit in 20,000 words but anyway by god Mike will keep trying. Some bits of this really fun and I kind of like it more than the last one. I have no real conception of publication order as these are put in a world-internal chronological order that seems to feel mostly pretty arbitrary… but anyway it’s “getting better” whatever that means. I like Elric immiserated and going on little journeys with incidental buddies. I like the big gesturing at goofy cosmology… this is not the sort of thing I normally would like in fantasy fiction but idk there’s a swagger and a ridiculous slapdash feeling to it that’s charming. Also it’s all conveyed through the material of moment-to-moment storytelling… like Elric is actually Encountering the incarnate forces of the cosmology of the world. Raid on Imrryr is my favorite one probably.

Belmarch, Christopher Davis, 1964.

September 2025. Nightmare! I thought this was incredible; really puts forth and takes seriously a way of understanding the world that’s as bizarre, symbological, apocalyptic as one could imagine it really seeming to a person in europe 1000 years ago. Constantly technically fascinating I thought; like it is doing things with language that are sometimes very weird, and it’s drifting around the issue of ‘what’s literally real’ really interestingly (though to assume a journalistic ‘reality’ underlying everything does a disservice to it maybe). Whole thing written with beautiful synaesthetic sort of texture. Makes me realize how rare it is to encounter fiction that takes so seriously how differently the world looks to different people in and in different organizing frameworks?? I guess I mostly just fixated on the ‘how it was done’ more than the ‘what happened in it’??? The fever-dream thought-recursion passage at about the midpoint is a highlight.

Swords and Deviltry, Fritz Leiber, 1970.

September 2025. ha wow ok this is really Good... this is so much sharper and more beautifully-written than any comparable thing of its tradition that i've read. Really fun and human; nice rhythm, enormous love of language in a way that never feels overbearing. It doesn't feel really revolutionary 'new wavey-revisionist' to me, it is just extremely beautifully done. Characters are so much more clear, articulated, believable than practically any you ever read in this sort of story. am i wrong?!!? This is I gather a fix-up of 3 shorts-- like the Elric stuff, the Fafrhd & the Gray Mouser stuff is embedded in genre magazine publication and percolates down to us decades later in collections of shorts. Holds together pretty well as a contiguous narrative though. Doesn't seem like much of his stuff is reliably in print or much-acknowledged lately!! sad!!! I read this in like 3 days and would like to read More of it

Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia, Mike Pepi, 2025

August 2025. Audiobook. I at first was thinking it suffers a little from NPR voice but there really is a pretty committed and humane ideological picture here; doesn't get too-often stuck in the weeds of liberal proceduralism although I don't know if I agree that public institutions are THAT sanctified of the horrible pressures of capital. Folds in very of-the-moment critique of LLMs, which I suppose is the sort of thing you can do when you write a book from grounding of real ideological commitment: the AI boom is expressive of the same cynical, dehumanizing pressures the rest of the book is about. Some good anecdotal material about weaponized supposed-objectivity, a favorite thing of mine to complain about. I wonder how much basically-antisocial libertarianism is in my own conception of independent comics and the internet; I want to think about this.

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, Michael Moorcock, 1976

August 2025. I read some of “Death is No Obstacle,” a huge interview with Moorcock with a lot of talk about how he systematized and plowed through writing these pulp stories at incredible rate. Interesting!!! In a way his digestion/postmodernization?? of “fantasy fiction” is kind of opposite Le Guin’s (as contemporaries with whom i am familiar in the same ‘new wave’ tradition I guess): Moorcock is operatic, slapdash, free-associative, and wrestles hugely and recklessly with the ideology of the stuff he inherits— Whereas Le Guin is profoundly more delicate and considered, and works with the ideology of the stuff in a more intentional and precise way?? Something like this. This feels like a sort of continuum I want to think about. Also an interesting angle on my pet issue of “artifacts of serialization being encoded sheepishly in later publication” in the Elric corpus in full. It is hilarious how much of this sequence of novels is composed of fixed-up short stories.

Anyway this is the second Elric book by some reckonings. Fun! Really a bit disjointed, a bunch of contrivance and flimsy melodrama, but I liked reading a lot! Moments of brilliance and unusual atmosphere. There are some occasional big weird ideas I want to see how he follows through on.

Escape from Incel Island, Margaret Killjoy, 2023

August 2025. Audiobook. I liked her 'Country of Ghosts' some years ago; this was a whole lot sillier and more written-at-the-discourse-of-the-moment than that, and I did not like it as much. Gets kind of weird here and there though I liked that about it.

Ada, or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov, 1969

August 2025. Didn’t finish; probably have abandoned it… I like a lot about it but maybe I try some shorter Nabokov thing. Got from library on a whim after learning there’s an invented-setting / alternate history aspect to it. This is interestingly if haltingly conveyed, and provides a neat way for the densely jokey-referential writing to be a little more abstracted, parodic?? And I guess I am slightly interested in how that angle follows through the whole book. But I dunno is my brain broken by GENRE LITERALISM? I am not really interested in personal dramas and interiority as such, without some LOUD, EXPRESSIVE ELEMENTS at play?!? I like the texture of it all but it is a little exhausting for me right now maybe

A Storm of Wings, M. John Harrison, 1980

August 2025. A more-direct-than-I-expected sequel to Pastel City. What do I even think of this thing. I am frequently absolutely blown away by it; I am a little occasionally exhausted by it. FIRSTLY it is a great and charming and often hilarious move to build upon the more straightforward mythic-adventure material of the previous book in a complexifying way, with hugely more irony and a party of adventuring heroes all collapsing under the weight of their various physical and mental afflictions and enormous age.

Texturally it is so constantly intense, confident, overwhelming, ironic. I really don’t see any cracks in the preposterous metatextualizing archaic Voice of the thing but it does feel a little heavy sometimes… and there is a sense, I think, of texture generally beginning to get in the way of things? With this one way more than Pastel City I realized “Oh this is what China Mieville is going for,” though there are ways that Mieville’s approach feels a little more directed, or rigorous, or intelligible as a whole, maybe?

It is interesting to know about Harrison’s grievances with literalism in secondary-world fiction. He approaches the invented-setting stuff with attention to theme and like poetry and texture… But I am sometimes thinking that maybe it would hold together a little better if there WAS more literalism in it; if there was a sense that the place actually made more sense, that Viriconium existed as more of PLACE instead of just a nebulous visual metaphor for the ideas at hand for example. There is a way that this literalism needn’t CONTRADICT what he’s going for but could like support it? Therein is my entire ambition towards writing this sort of thing I guess. Anyway one could imagine a M. John Harrison / Brandon Sanderson continuum maybe lol. Preposterous, grotesque, enormous; really appreciate having read it

The Pastel City, M. John Harrison, 1971

July 2025. wow great! beautiful!! I was mostly only aware of this guy by his writing against ‘worldbuilding’ as a literalistic practice in genre fiction, an angle I think I mostly agree with. But this book at least does not have a terribly heterodox or metatextual approach to such questions really!! I am interested to read the later ones. It’s ‘roadside picnic conan the barbarian’ if I had to nail it down!!! The LANGUAGE is sometimes really spectacularly beautiful I think; he’s confidently and elegantly 'doing the voice' of this sort of thing. The genre innovation here feels at the same time a little ahead-of-its-time, AND a little dated because the way we talk and think about 'scifi technologies' has changed a lot more in 55 years than the way we think and talk about ‘pseudomedieval adventures.’ Does that make sense. ON THE WHOLE it is basically a perfect book to me and I can’t believe I hadn’t read it, or even really heard it described in a way that feels remotely appropriate. It is a virtuosic pulp thing. Really a smart beautiful and laser-focused way to use an invented setting as a thematic, poetic sort of structure. Really not unlike PANZER DRAGOON SAGA. Also worth mentioning that within the first several pages of this book from 1971 a light saber from star wars is presented to the reader. Also also, some of the best names-of-things I have ever ever encountered in secondary-world fiction.

Dawn, Octavia E. Butler, 1987

July 2025. man pretty wild book!!! I begin to see the outlines of of Butler’s FASCINATIONS, between this and a few other things a few years ago. There is a disorienting, overwhelming array of wild and fascinating ideas thrown at you pretty nonstop… BUT exposition is fairly elegant and focus is always on Lilith’s limited experience of her surroundings, which I think is a great move. It’s basically a succession of limited environments Lilith is living and working through in process of integrating remaining humans into a new uncanny sort of life… and I LIKE the weird sense of claustrophobia each of these sections builds up, but it does wear a little thin tonally in my opinion. Like it’s a little drab, a little TOO claustrophobic or something, a little TOO suffused with preposterous creepy ideation. On the whole though it is really full of POWER MOVES; I am really hit by it; I will read the other 2 sometime

Earth Abides, George R. Stewart, 1949

July 2025. I guess obviously I couldn't get out of comparing this to The Stand; at first it feels like a sort of more emotionally restrained, novel-of-ideas angle on the same sort of story, but it becomes something really huge and totally unlike anything I have read. Really affecting. In the first HALF or so, there's an overt focus on the big-picture ecological fallout of practically every human being immediately dying, which is interesting and I thought pretty well-incorporated into a story told on the level of human characters... Though Ish seems often really unusually abstracted, dispassionate in a way that frustrated me!!! But that I also often felt like I Related to more than maybe any point-of-view character I have read!! Also there's tons of little conservative ideas built-into it, about the role of authority and the state, and certain ideas around inherence etc... BUT THEN it sort of changes into a much bigger and more HUMAN story, and all of those social assumptions become the sorts of things it is interested in picking apart and dismantling just as it was doing with the ecological material from the start. Builds into a really affecting structure; works with ideas around generational knowledge and what civilization and literacy and history even ARE in ways that I haven't seen attempted. Feels like it's about aging, or it's about seeing people grow up younger than you in a different world than your own, or it's about how huge and inscrutable the systems we live in are, or it's about dying! I will be thinking about this book forever

The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio de Maria, 1975

June 2025. pretty unsettling; sometimes really funny; the texture of romance-language-translated-into-english always kind of makes everything feel more ironic or something to me. Borges comparison loudly suggests itself but it's a little less uhhh rigorous?? than Borges. Kafka also maybe?? Interesting imagery around violence emerging almost unaccountably out of the generalized malaise of a population... I guess I should know more about the 70s political violence in Turin that this seems to be grown out of... Sometimes this feels really focused, and sometimes it feels like a bunch of practically-disconnected short stories orbiting around ideas of 'collective unconscious,' 'psychogeography,' etc. I think I got something out of it.

Behold, the Man, Michael Moorcock, 1969

June 2025. really compelling... I had only read some Elrics and it's fun to see Moorcock do this. I am totally won-over by a political, pointedly anti-mystical angle on the Jesus story, personally. The big Reveals are a bit dopey and uhh science-fiction-magaziney, and the whole thing ends up being more about identity and myth as such than about the Jesus stuff in particular, BUT I liked it a lot and I want to get really into Moorcock more

The Dragon Masters, Jack Vance, 1963

June 2025. Great! Balances pulpy with otherworldly textures I thought. Detail and sense of place is kind of sparse but it's to its credit that it works extremely well and clearly even so.