ah, that’s a good question but I’m not sure how to answer - I just finished China Miéville’s The City and the City which was great (he’s a great writer, I had previously enjoyed October), weird lit in general is good but I’m not a fan of VanderMeer.

Other recent reads:

• Bunny, by Mona Awad, which was strangely impactful and sticks in my mind but isn’t a book I would recommend necessarily, nor did I particularly enjoy or think was well written (or maybe I just didn’t enjoy the style?)
• Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, which was very well written and was all-consuming but not enjoyable necessarily - I loved this book, I hated this book, this book was like rotting in the best way.
• Little Fish by Casey Plett, a trans novel - I’ll read pretty much any trans novel, but this one was good, sometimes I felt like I needed to read Casey Plett like I needed to breathe oxygen, it’s really hard to describe that feeling but her writing captures a lot of mundane trans moments that made me feel less monstrous in my existence
• Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, which was a wonderful book (rather short, though)
• The Gate to Women’s Country by Sheri S. Tepper, I admittedly only read this book for personal reasons related to my past - Tepper’s perspective comes across as horribly homophobic, transphobic, and eugenicist … but for someone like me who grew up with strongly opinionated (even if problematic) women in their lives, this book helped me revisit and process some of that past.
• Post Office by Charles Bukowski, the misogyny aside, I enjoyed reading the entirety of a book complaining about bureaucracy while sitting for several hours waiting for an opening at the DMV to renew my driver’s license.

Books on my list to read sometime:

• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
• I need to finish reading The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien
• was thinking about trying out China Miéville’s Embassytown once The City and the City has aged in my mind to the point where his voice becomes a novelty again and it’s like reading him for the first time
• I keep hearing Han Kang’s The Vegetarian coming up in relationship to Bunny so I thought I might try it out sometime, but I might need more time away from Bunny first
• likewise with more time passed I want to read anything else Ottessa Moshfegh has written
• I started reading Samantha Harvey’s Orbital - that might actually make a decent audiobook read, I just didn’t ever feel particularly motivated to stick with it to the end.
• I keep starting and stopping Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built, probably another good audiobook option I should revisit
• I started an audiobook of Orlando by Virginia Wolf, and while I have aspirations to stick with these things, it feels like the book has to come at the right time and this just isn’t the right time

In particular audiobooks I’m looking to listen to during recovery:

• The Outsider by Stephen King
• Fairy Tale by Stephen King
• Replay by Ken Grimwood
• Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman
• Jodi Taylor’s St Mary’s Chronicles
• A Gentleman in Moscow by Armor Towles
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë