I read a lot of scifi and it’s by far my favourite genre of anything.
I’m on a bit of a reading roll this year so far and have been averaging a book a week, I haven’t been consuming books at this rate since I was a teenager!
I finished Children Of Time last week and managed to get in The Scar (China Mieville) before my copies of Children of Ruin and Children Of Memory arrived, and now I’m about half way through Ruin.
The ‘Children Of’ books are fantastic, we all know this by now, but only read The Scar if you can deal with a vast 800 page anti-epic with an utterly unpleasant anti-hero at its helm.
And the ending, while very fitting thematically, otherwise sucks. There is no catharsis and the anti-hero clearly doesn’t learn anything, despite (again) writing otherwise in their letter.
The world building in The Scar is stunning though (albeit rather puissant…), and the characters, despite being nearly entierly all awful people*, are very well written. Plus there’s a very clearly lifted from The Matrix fight scene at once point which got a giggle out of me when I recognised it.
*Tanner is a good man, and so is Doul, probably. Doul is also quite funny, but the humour of his actions mostly lands in hindsight once you’ve got a better idea of his character/motivations
.
Favourites wise though (the rest of this comment is copied over from a previous one I made elsewhere but I feel might be appreciated here more), I reread Year Of The Flood by Margarete Attwood every summer lately. Toby and her little rituals are very comforting.
YotF was the first one I read of the Oryx And Crake trilogy too, but it doesn’t make for quite as good a username with all those christian connotations.
I’ve read all the books in the correct order several times since then, but I far prefer reading O&C after YotF, it makes Maddaddam feel so much more cathartic and deserved and it really improves the pacing. The slow build up in YotF, leading to all the action and exposition in O&C and then winding down in Maddaddam and the story coming back to Toby, flows so much better as a three book narrative. Also piecing everything together with this order is much more interesting too imo.
I’ve not read the Tyrant Philosophers books yet, thanks for the heads up! At some point I’ll cycle back around to craving the company of depressing as fuck literature, so I’ll put them on that list.
I read a lot of scifi and it’s by far my favourite genre of anything.
I’m on a bit of a reading roll this year so far and have been averaging a book a week, I haven’t been consuming books at this rate since I was a teenager!
I finished Children Of Time last week and managed to get in The Scar (China Mieville) before my copies of Children of Ruin and Children Of Memory arrived, and now I’m about half way through Ruin.
The ‘Children Of’ books are fantastic, we all know this by now, but only read The Scar if you can deal with a vast 800 page anti-epic with an utterly unpleasant anti-hero at its helm. And the ending, while very fitting thematically, otherwise sucks. There is no catharsis and the anti-hero clearly doesn’t learn anything, despite (again) writing otherwise in their letter.
The world building in The Scar is stunning though (albeit rather puissant…), and the characters, despite being nearly entierly all awful people*, are very well written. Plus there’s a very clearly lifted from The Matrix fight scene at once point which got a giggle out of me when I recognised it.
*Tanner is a good man, and so is Doul, probably. Doul is also quite funny, but the humour of his actions mostly lands in hindsight once you’ve got a better idea of his character/motivations
.
Favourites wise though (the rest of this comment is copied over from a previous one I made elsewhere but I feel might be appreciated here more), I reread Year Of The Flood by Margarete Attwood every summer lately. Toby and her little rituals are very comforting.
YotF was the first one I read of the Oryx And Crake trilogy too, but it doesn’t make for quite as good a username with all those christian connotations.
I’ve read all the books in the correct order several times since then, but I far prefer reading O&C after YotF, it makes Maddaddam feel so much more cathartic and deserved and it really improves the pacing. The slow build up in YotF, leading to all the action and exposition in O&C and then winding down in Maddaddam and the story coming back to Toby, flows so much better as a three book narrative. Also piecing everything together with this order is much more interesting too imo.
I really wanted to enjoy China Mieville’s three “Bas Lag” books (including The Scar) but they’re just too gloomy and the characters too morose.
Then I read Tchaikovsky’s “Tyrant Philosophers” series and it felt like he out-Mieville’d Mieville.
Edit- But like, in a really good way
I’ve not read the Tyrant Philosophers books yet, thanks for the heads up! At some point I’ll cycle back around to craving the company of depressing as fuck literature, so I’ll put them on that list.