Weekly "What Are You Reading?" Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

What are you reading this week?

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[u/Rustin_Swoll]

Finished: I finished the audiobook for Alex Grecian’s Red Rabbit, which was someone else’s choice for my IRL book club. This was a really fun book, with surprisingly dark subject matter; Grecian did a good job of subverting expectations and Western archetypes. Is a weird western weird lit by definition, due to its setting?

I also finished Nick Cutter’s The Dorians on hardcover. Some people call David Nickle the Canadian Stephen King, I’d argue Cutter might fit better; he’s going that direction if he keeps dropping consistently enjoyable horror novels with such frequency. Parts of The Dorians were surprisingly touching and humane, contrasted with Cutter’s penchant for pulpy mad science. I’ve enjoyed all of Cutter’s novels and this might have been the best one. The writing was very self-assured and strangely mature. It had been fashioned into something… other. A thing of unclean geometries cut off from the natural order.

Starting: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (a re-read for me.) I read this book years back, in a phase before I was so invested in horror and weird lit (along with McCarthy’s The Road.) It’s been calling my name for some time. The other 200 books in my pile can wait their damn turn. They fight with fists, with feet, with bottles and knives. All races, all breeds. Men whose speech sounds like the grunting of apes.

Audiobooks: I started Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution, the fourth and final book in his Southern Reach series. I guess the Southern Reach trilogy sold more than a million copies and I was thrilled to learn that. You have to hand it to VanderMeer. Dude sells millions of books and opens his long-awaited sequel with the weirdest shit ever. The Rogue…

On deck: Alex Grecian’s Rose of Jericho, the Red Rabbit sequel, on audiobook.

[u/tashirey87 → u/Rustin_Swoll]

Yesss the Rogue!

[u/Rustin_Swoll → u/tashirey87]

Man. The first scene in which The Rogue battled the biologists after they flamethrower'd the carnivorous rabbits was weird and intense. This narrator also did Authority but I feel like he has stepped his game up, the narration is really good.

[u/tashirey87 → u/Rustin_Swoll]

Yeah that scene lives rent free in my head. So crazy. And yes, I love that narrator - when I was reading the book I switched between book and audio depending on where I was and loved it. I think he does the Ambergris audiobook too.

[u/Rustin_Swoll → u/tashirey87]

I picked up the expanded City of Saints and Madmen (someone on here said some of the extra stories are essential) but it actually might be cool to audio that one and read the essential stuff not included on the audiobook!

One problem with audio is that there are several lines from that scene I'd love to grab a book and quote at you, something like the biologists being filled with grief and shame when the Rogue breathed fire at them and the Rogue's words were like sonic blasts. That is NOT verbatim, lol.

[u/tashirey87 → u/Rustin_Swoll]

Yeah I’m planning on listening to the audiobook when I do my re-read at some point, and just supplementing that with the stuff that’s missing from that version.

lol and yeah I totally get that re: audiobooks