Again with the month delay.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - I'd read this before, but it had been years and years. The writing itself is quite dynamic, Huxley could weave three or four plot threads together, dashing between them paragraph by paragraph, carrying the reader along deftly. I could picture Bernard Marx skulking the depths of Reddit, his character was possibly the most prescient part of the book. The old "Shakespeare is the pinnacle of English literature" chestnut gets taken out and shaken around more than is to my taste.
Sword & Citadel by Gene Wolfe - These are the second two books in the Book of the New Sun tetralogy of which I read the first two, oh, a couple years ago. I really think they're meant to be read back to back though, there are so many references to characters and events of those first books. Apparently Wolfe wrote them that way, too.
Reading about this book, there are many discussions about how a clever or attentive reader will pick up on Severian's status as an unreliable narrator, and also how the archaic vocabulary will send them scrambling for a dictionary. Well joke's on them because I'm not that kind of reader at all and when I hit a logical inconsistency or a word I don't know I just chalk it up to not paying the right kind of attention and plow ahead.
Anyway I kept thinking the strangeness of the encounters and the episodic, tightly contained nature of the chapters made this feel like it would make a great anime.
I think I originally heard about this series from an artist whose RSS I used to follow did some fan art. Here it all is on Art Station - I still think it's pretty great.
Apparently there is a "coda" fifth book, which I ordered.
Into The Odd by Chris McDowall - Hooray for Kickstarters you forgot about that turn into little presents from your past self. A clean little fantasy RPG that I've run a couple of times as a one-shot. The production values on this edition are quite nice - paper is heavy, binding feels solid, color and bleed are crisp. It does seem to be missing a chapter about the city of Bastion for all the references it makes to its being "the only city that matters". Also the main example dungeon didn't seem to have a consistent theme, but maybe it would become apparent in play. The Arcanas are cool. I'd still run this if the opportunity came up.
Oglaf Books One, Two, and Three by Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne - My wife got me these for my birthday. I follow the comic on RSS so am up-to-date, but it had been a long time since I read the back catalog. Still, just, hilarious on the whole. Sithrakism is the closest I have seen to a believable religion: "God hates you and will torture you forever when you die, so stay alive as long as you can!". We use the punchline from this one in day-to-day conversations still. Reading them back to back I did notice that like 40% of the punchlines are basically "you don't think they're gonna have sex, but then they do", though.
