I read “The Loop” this week; which was… ok? It showed up in a twitter thread from a horror writer I like, and was on sale, so I gave it a whirl. I note a number of horror novels I’ve read this year have trouble sticking the landing. It seems to be an issue with the genre as a whole, to be honest. I might explore that in a little more detail at some point, but generally the move plot driven the work, the more threads have to be resolved in some fashion or another, and it creates a kind of tension within the narrative– the reader wants to see the threads pulled together in a way that’s satisfying; the author may not actually even care about all the points he’s thrown out. “The Loop” felt fairly sure handed, and it’s my opinion that the story ended up where he intended it to. So the problem’s not all with the book, at least in this case.
I liked the ending of “Blindsight” a great deal, so much so that I’m a little reluctant to pick up the sequel, but I will at some point. Just gotta hope Peter Watts can stick more than one landing.
I’m in a funky place with my reading at the moment; I read “The Loop” because it was an easy, fast paced thing, which leaves me with the slow paced things I am working on. They are:
“Bubble Gum” by Adam Levin– super interested in this one, but have barely read any of it.
“The Other Name”– John Fosse. A depressed northern european with a bunch of religious overtones, written as a gigantic long sentence? This is, as the kids say, extremely my shit.
“Virginia Woolf”– Hermoine Lee. Considered a definitive biography, this is a skull cracker of a book, but I left “The Waves” wanting to know more about the woman behind it. I know the broad strokes of her life, and I read “A Room of One’s Own” about 15000 years ago, but it’s time to dig in.
“Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials” –Reza Negarestani. I go through fits and starts with this; it’s fairly short, but denser than a loaf of lead. I’ll probably just knuckle under here soon.
“Moby Dick”– as always; the wretched sea. Kind of stalled here, as well, but still enjoying when I pick it up.
This is likely entirely too much at once, and I’ll probably drop/resume a couple as I go. So it goes.
The Lithole 