In October I read almost all of Jeff Vandermeer's novels.
I read the Ambergris trilogy:
- The City Of Saints and Madmen (re-read) - still an incredibly good evocation of place and environment. The city Vandermeer creates in these loosely connected stories is such a full on experience. You can feel the menacing dampness and the uneasy sense that the mushrooms have more control than anyone realizes.
- Shriek (first read) - probably my least favorite of his novels, this felt like an extended character introduction that wasn't really needed for the series. Non of the characters really had a goal other than revealing more information about the city.
- Finch (first read) - now we get a detective story in the fungus-city. Duncan Shriek (from the second book) gets a role that makes sense here, so I guess that made the second book worth it, but this was still a much better book. Finch (the detective) actually has a goal that's not "look at this weird city!" A good finish to the series.
I read the Southern Reach trilogy (and the newly published fourth book) and enjoyed this more than I remembered, these are better books than I had previously given them credit for.
- Annihilation (re-read)
- Authority (re-read)
- Acceptance (re-read)
- Absolution (first read) - still in the middle of this.
I didn't re-read the Borne series, but I think those books are still my favorite Vandermeer.
Lastly, I read his stand alone book from 2021 that I bought but never actually read before
- Hummingbird Salamander (first read) - more detective, less fungus. I feel like this book was missing Vandermeer's strength, which is overwhelming the reader with environment (the city in Ambergris, Area X in the Southern Reach novels, the Lab in the Borne series...) and that just wasn't here. He still writes a good thriller with environmental themes, but this didn't get me as much as the others.
It's always fun to just plow through a bunch of novels on a theme, and I've found a particular joy in re-reading a bunch of novels and series this year.
What did you read this month?
Last month Dread Pirate recommended Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. It was quite a trip. Really dense, thickly layered, history and narrative and identity all in one.
The cover blurb calls it "Gravity's Rainbow for the Korean War" and it has that digressive quality, but it's definitely not Pynchon (it doesn't have that psychosexual aspect in the same way).
I'll add my rec to Pirate's. I enjoyed it a lot, the digressions were wonderful and surprising, I wonder how this would be as a re-read when you know they're coming.
I ran with Michael Mammay's military sci-fi series, reading Planetside, then Spaceside, and finally Colonyside, but while looking forward to reading Darkside on our week away found out that isn't available as an ebook from the library. Dang.