Roberto Bolaño has been most influential in my life, I first read him as a teenager and many trips, career decisions and lifestyle choices during my early 20s were directly influenced by two of his books: The Savage Detectives and Last Evenings on Earth.
He's been my favorite author for a long time and certainly the writer I've read and re-read most often, but I think I've outgrown him a bit during the past year. I'm glad he's been part of my life for so long though, and I look forward to finding my next favorite author.
Definitely read The Anatomy of Story if you’re a writer/interested in writing as a craft. It is by far the best guide on plot structure I have ever read and even though it focuses mainly on Hollywood plots it can be adapted to any story form. I use it as a starting point for everything I write, highly recommend it!
I know I should, I’ve gotten a couple of chapters in, but I just started the First Law trilogy and it’s so good. Definitely after that though, definitely…
I have a habit of checking out reviews on Goodreads. I don’t take it too seriously, but the UI is less busy than Amazon and reviews are often a little more chaotic, random, and personal. I like that. I use it to track the books I read, which aren’t many but it’s simple enough. From my own sample, Goodreads rarely form my decision on which books to buy, but it’s up there in my mental algorithm mixed with a bunch of other stuff.
As an FYI, this is a very old thing that people are doing. There’s actually a term for it (beyond just “corporate censorship”). It’s bowdlerization or expurgation. And, on some level, I understand why people of a certain ethos would be opposed to it. Beyond the obvious reactionary agenda of being “anti-woke,” there are concerns here over artistic or authorial autonomy and the fear of a slippery slope in which previous cultural attitudes are historically white washed. And I think it’s good to acknowledge the past honestly. Not to celebrate those old attitudes, of course, but to let it stand as it is, scars and all, as a cultural artifact of a very different time. Editing the content of the original work to hide what is and was reduces it from that status of cultural artifact to just pure entertainment. That said, content warning wouldn’t really rob much from the book, unless you believe every book should be a complete and total surprise to the reader. I can’t comment too much on the beliefs of the author of this article, but their opposition to much of what they’re complaining about comes more from a place of “the woke mob is ruining books” rather than anything I would say is a more complete or salient examination of how we collectively relate to the art of the past.
Since there’s a case to be made either way, it would be nice if the publishers could offer two editions and let the reader choose. This might be too expensive in the case of printed books, but for e-books it seems like it should be feasible.
Sure. These things are products to be purchased, after all. Regardless of how you feel about the content of the books themselves, I’d be extraordinarily annoyed if a company could just edit on a whim the content I had paid for and expected to have in perpetuity. That said, you should never realistically buy anything from an online publisher that doesn’t let you save a static text copy of the book as a PDF or other file offline. More generally, if you want to buy a book, the best thing to do is to buy from a used bookstore, if you’re able. Not like Amazon needs any more money.
So, I’m going to ignore more recent, much smaller instances of surprise to talk about The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer., which ran me the fuck over with surprise in 2022-ish.
This book is marketed as gay YA romance. The cover, the blurb, everything makes it look like a light romance novel set in space, with maybe some space plot to go with the romance.
IT IS NOT THAT.
It’s a mindfucky, philosophical, emotionally wringing rollercoaster of a scifi horror/thriller. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar. It’s got that same sort of “small humans isolated in the sheer, terrifying vastness of space” vibe. But more horror, more tragedy, and sometimes incredibly upsetting.
There is gay romance there too, and it’s an important part of the book (in the way that romance can be important in any literature without that making it romance genre per se), but advertising this book as straightforwardly gay romance is like advertising Interstellar as a family man movie while just ignoring all the epic space shots and the dramatic score and so on. It just boggles the mind that they did this.
Anyway, this book does have some flaws I can nitpick on a technical level in retrospect, but the thing is: I just don’t care about them. This book wrung me out and haunted me for weeks after reading it (like, it kept popping into my head in the middle of doing completely unrelated things), yet it also left me feeling hopeful and more at peace with the inevitability of death.
I thought it was just gonna be a fun romance to escape into for a bit, and instead it’s one of the few novels that has genuinely changed the way I see real life in a noticeable way. I still think about it sometimes, now over a year later. It’s one of the best scifi books I’ve read in recent memory, along with the likes of the Murderbot books by Martha Wells and Exhalation by Ted Chiang (though these three are all very different than one another, and they are among my favorites for different reasons).
Going on like this about a book of course runs the risk that anyone who takes this recommendation and doesn’t like it as much as I did might feel disappointed and over-hyped, but a) I can at least promise I mean all of this earnestly and b) it seems hard to get anyone to read a book advertised as gay YA romance unless they are already people who would be down for reading some gay YA romance.
The thought that this book may eventually end up lost to time because of its marketing pains me. Although I guess I can imagine why they did it, even though it’s inaccurate for the contents; the queer YA romance readership is huge and this book seems to have done well with them, even though the goodreads reviews are as a result amusingly chock full of accounts like mine here.
Okay, turns out I’ve had this book on my list for a while and I couldn’t exactly remember why I had it in there until your description jogged my memory! Sounds like I need to read this one soon!
I recently finished up Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it! I got the impression, for whatever reason, that it was overhyped. But I enjoyed seeing how the characters developed and seeing the ebbs and flows of their relationships, which I thought was well done and believable. There was a lot more depth there than I was expecting. I also thought it was going to be more of a traditional love story and was (pleasantly) surprised that it wasn’t!
Another surprise for me was The Silmarillion. I’m a fan of LotR, but I still expected it to be a bit of a slog. But, wow, I tore through that book so quickly! Loved the stories and lore and mythology and everything, incredible!
I actually split between reading and listening to the audiobook. It was long either way! I didn’t care for it as much as I thought I would. The first part took me a while to get into, I loved the second part, but after
I remember where I was driving when I listened to the first part, the narrator was excellent and made the whole tree section a surprisingly engrossing listen.
I agree about where the story started to falter, too. There was a lot of build-up to that point and it felt like it kinda meandered to the end afterwards.
Upgrade by Blake Crouch put his work on my radar. The premise sounded intriguing and I couldn’t put the book down. It led me to Dark Matter, Recursion, Pines, and Abandon, of which only Abandon I opted to quit reading. He went from essentially nobody to me to “Ooo, there’s a new book coming out!” in the span of this year.
My other surprising hit was getting back into reading comic books and diving into Radiant Black and the associated Massive-Verse stories. It felt like a blend of superhero and Power Rangers style storytelling and parts of it felt very unique and interesting to me (how they handle the main character and where the power of Radiant Black is in the comics releasing now is really cool, trying to avoid spoilers!). It also comes across as a more realistic version of the stories that superhero/PR tell where there’s social media and dialogue that comes across as real speech. I think of it akin to Star Trek vs. The Orville, both great but I see the path of how we get from here to the type of world The Orville embodies but the people on Star Trek don’t feel exactly like real people by today’s standard and it seems that much farther out.
My favorite book was The Winners by Fredrik Backman! It felt like a decent conclusion to the trilogy and I really loved living with all the characters again. My second favorite fiction would probably be The Dark Tower, I’m glad to finally have that series wrapped up! I avoided most major spoilers too so it was a satisfying conclusion.
My favorite nonfiction would be I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy narrates her audiobook and that added a lot to the already tragic story.
I’ve been plowing through Three Body Problem series by Cixin Liu recently and it’s been really great. I’m on the home stretch of the last book and so excited to finish it.
All about space exploration, first contact, invasion, advancement and philosophy. A really great thinking book and leaves me with lots of uncomfortable feelings to ponder over. The pacing of the book took a little bit to get used to but it does well to help grapple with the time and space scale it is working with.
I’ve read the first and parts of the second book and I think it has one of the best antagonistic characters. I didn’t put it on this list because I was looking more for stories, that explore new worlds and places. Its definitely on the list of books I want to finish at some point. Idk what it is, but it needs to be the right time and place for me to be able to appreciate books like those.
Not sure if it tickles your fancy, but if you’re in the mood for a humorous space adventure with an elaborate story and serious undertones, give Ben Yahtzee Croshaw’s Will Save The Galaxy For Food a try.
Also, I haven’t seen Adrift and the Outer Earth Trilogy by Rob Boffard being mentioned here. Especially the former managed to instill a sense of dread in me while the story unfolded. The latter is a rather long read, though the first book (Tracer) is self-contained.
ETA: a somewhat different style, but if you like futuristic worlds / galaxies with tons of intricate details, try The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. Her world (universe, in fact) is incredibly rich in detail and diversity. Each alien race she introduces has its own complex backstory, values, language and culture.
The other books in the series didn’t grip me like this one - they add a lot of background, and in that she’s a genius, but for my taste the story was somewhat lacking.
Ditto on the Becky Chambers series. I actually liked the second book the most narratively, and if the OP likes Murderbot, they may really enjoy similar themes around artificial intelligence. I also really liked the final installment. It’s a familiar setup with strangers locked in a room together, but I found it very meditative. Also, it wraps up one series character’s journey to a decision that I found very profound.
I’ll add “Will Save The Galaxy For Food” to my list, thanks! I’ve actually read Angry Planet a while ago and enjoyed it. A story that is really cozy and easy to read, that helped me through difficult times. In case you haven’t read the Murderbot Diaries, I’d highly recommend those. Despite the name, it’s also very nice to read.
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