Tag Archives: books with fungi as a plot device

First Monday Book Day

First Monday Book Day: Vandermeer Appreciation Month

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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?