2025 Reading Challenge

[avecigrec]

12. Spectregraph by James Tynion IV, Christian Ward & Aditya Bidikar


Top notch psychedelic haunted house horror from an absolute master of the genre. The more Tynion the read, the more I'm convinced he's the best there is presently at writing horror graphic novels and comics. Thoroughly enjoyable with some diabolical visuals!

 

[Bull Shannon]

Book 6: Babel-17, by Samuel Delaney
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Delaney’s loomed in my list of to-reads, particularly his dense opus Dhalgren. This is an early novel from him, a Nebula winner considered his first major work. The ideas certainly fall into the category of mid-century progressive sci-fi, where a lot of for-the-time revolutionary ideas come across as a bit retrograde; for example, spaceships in this world must be piloted by three individuals in a throuple. This may be wild to talk of in the 60s but in 2025 I just don’t care about your polycule.

Book 7: The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe
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Once more on my bullshit, reading the 4-volume Book of the New Sun for the third time, segueing into my second full reading of the 12-volume Solar Cycle.

Book 8: The Story of a New Name (Neapolitan Quartet, Book 2), By Elena Ferrante
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Here we are, volume 2 of the Neapolitan Quartet. Ferrante’s prose remains deceptively simple and ultimately exceptional. I’m glad I got a hard copy of this one; there are around a dozen families in the community discussed here, and being able to flip to the character list helped keep things straight.

The book starts a bit slowly, then comes to focus on a specific summer, and the story begins to really hum. It’s a subtly affecting book; I caught myself in a bad mood after reading a passage of struggle for our protagonists. I’m impressed by this saga of two “little” lives, and the expansiveness of experience; it’s deeply meaningful but not overly metaphorical.

Book 9: The Law at Randado, by Elmore Leonard
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I was sick in bed off and on for a week, and wanted something uncomplicated to sink my teeth into. This mid-century tale about a small American West town where the business leaders self-appoint their own judge, jury, and executioner — to circumvent due process and hang cattle rustlers in-town rather than send them to the city — maybe wasn’t as hard a turn from reality as I’d like, but watching the town’s young sheriff deputy hunt down the self-appointed oligarchs was pretty satisfying.

Book 10: Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1), by Marcel Proust

I didn’t think I’d ever try to read Proust. But I dropped into The Strand on a work trip in New York last month, and this “new” (20 years ago) translation jumped out at me. It seemed like the right moment.

This was a pleasure to read, albeit a difficult one. I had to really lock in and focus on what I was reading in order to enjoy it, but when enjoyment came, it was deep. Other times, I’d realize I’d rotely drifted across a page or two; going back would usually reveal those several pages could be distilled into “the morning light in the church was so pretty.”

It’s interesting to read something so verbose and feel it really hum, and exalt in the verbosity. There’s another book I’m struggling through which may appear here, and my exact issue with it is how it uses three paragraphs where a sentence will do; I found myself asking: what’s the difference here? Why does Proust get away with it, thrive at it?

This is extremely on-brand for me, but I correctly guessed midway through this book that Gene Wolfe must be a fan. Proust opens Swann’s Way with the narrator’s musings on the nature of memory, and this notion of a space only existing when/as you are aware of it. It begins with waking, sitting up in bed and rewinding your memories and your understanding of yourself. Wolfe’s Peace opens with a narrator awoken in bed, reeling through the rooms of the childhood home in which they still reside and subsequently remembering every moment of his life, Dewey Cox style.

Book 11: Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

This one’s been bouncing around the thread (though now a search shows perhaps it was only mentioned in the context of the NYT 100 list?), but it wasn’t even my choice to pick it up; my wife grabbed this and I swooped in and read it first because I wanted something with different prose and page count than Swann’s Way.

I’m still sitting with this one; it’s the story of a quiet, semi-alienated life lived from the tail end of the 19th century through the mid-20th century. The volume is deceptively slim and incident-free, but the cumulative effect is both that of how much can change in a lifetime (Grainier’s born in the 1880s, and dies in the late 1960s), and how much living occurs under the surface of a quiet life. My first Denis Johnson book, certainly not the last.