Reading in 2025 so far
Feb. 26th, 2025 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breakinglight11I'm off to a strong start this year with reading books. I'm actually a very fast reader once I get over the initial hump of picking a book to start, and my biggest barrier to book-reading is getting interested enough in any one in particular to open it. So this year I'm trying to make a list of books I'm actually EXCITED to begin-- not just ones I think I'd like to have read, or that I expect I will probably enjoy once I get going --so that as soon as I finish my current one, I've got another to jump to.
I've read eight books in just these first two month of 2025 already, and most of them I enjoyed at least one some level. A few, like The Sixth Deaths of the Saint by Alix Harrow and Circe by Madeline Miller, are among the best works in their genres I've ever read. A few were less amazing, but still engaging page-turners, like Tatiana Schlote-Bonne's Such Lovely Skin and Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. There was at least one disappointment, in Jamison Shea's I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call, since I quite enjoyed the first in the series and found the sequel to kind of run out of steam, but even that wasn't bad.
I'm not loving the current thing I'm working through, Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie. Lots of eliding conversations and moments, as well as obscure motivations, make it weird and a little alienating, but it's not terrible. But I am using it as something to alternate back and forth with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which I've been meaning to get to for years. I love the movie, and the novel is not bad so far, but it's VERY dense and requires a lot of focus to follow the philosophical detours, so I've been taking it in a small bit at a time. I've heard that's intentional on Eco's part, to weed out scrubs who were just expecting a medieval potboiler, but I'm not sure how much I think it's overburdening the novel's real interest. We'll see as I get farther.
I've read eight books in just these first two month of 2025 already, and most of them I enjoyed at least one some level. A few, like The Sixth Deaths of the Saint by Alix Harrow and Circe by Madeline Miller, are among the best works in their genres I've ever read. A few were less amazing, but still engaging page-turners, like Tatiana Schlote-Bonne's Such Lovely Skin and Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. There was at least one disappointment, in Jamison Shea's I Am the Dark That Answers When You Call, since I quite enjoyed the first in the series and found the sequel to kind of run out of steam, but even that wasn't bad.
I'm not loving the current thing I'm working through, Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie. Lots of eliding conversations and moments, as well as obscure motivations, make it weird and a little alienating, but it's not terrible. But I am using it as something to alternate back and forth with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which I've been meaning to get to for years. I love the movie, and the novel is not bad so far, but it's VERY dense and requires a lot of focus to follow the philosophical detours, so I've been taking it in a small bit at a time. I've heard that's intentional on Eco's part, to weed out scrubs who were just expecting a medieval potboiler, but I'm not sure how much I think it's overburdening the novel's real interest. We'll see as I get farther.
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Date: 2025-02-27 01:44 am (UTC)