The Overstory by Richard Powers

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Exile's Return by Malcolm Cowley

The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Uncanny Avengers by Rick Remender

Also, I read Gail Simone's reboot of Red Sonja. Didn't much care for it.

Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Stephenson is such an insufferable fucking chud. All his heroes, without fail, are Rick and Morty-type, self-aggrandizing testaments to the importance of a liberal education.

It's a fucking wonder that Stephenson didn't become a tech CEO life coach, or TED Talk bloviator, or Wired hagiographer of this century's guilded morons.

Actually, that last one is exactly what he became.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer

Surely the horniest and most 70s of scifi novels.

All pulp novels consist of fifty percent rape or intimation of rape. Then thirty percent manly violence. Then speculative plot.

The Catch by Alison Fairbrother

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol

One of those books that I would have lied about reading since I knew how fundamental it was to the reputation I cultivate (and that no one besides me really cares about). Dead Souls deserves its reputation.

I wonder whether I would have considered the satire too broad as a contemporary reader, whether it feels sharp and relevant only by virtue of the 177 years that separate us. Regardless, very few things manage to remain hilarious for so long, and this does. 

I want to say this was written back when people were still deciding what a novel is and so permitted a wider range of forms all cohabitating within a single volume, but that's not really true, is it? Jane Austen had been dead for a few decades when this was written. On the other hand, it was Russia and so lagged behind. 

I am also reading Middlemarch, which is set in a similar year (although written in 1871). Comparing the two books' characters, the Russians are about 1000x more direct and forceful, even allowing that this is satire.

If Dead Souls were written today, Chichikov would be a more overtly ominous figure, his inner life and motives remaining inscrutable. Or at least, that's probably how Dostoevsky or Cormac McCarthy would do it. But here we get pretty routine glimpses into what's going on in there, except they're so trite and unexceptional that he comes off as a fabricated shell more than a man.

From a Guardian review:

Chichikov himself is also of course, a dead soul, a man self-designed to be unremarkable, agreeable and acceptable, a smiling confidence-trickster whose plots, as Nabokov points out, are neither very clever nor very coherent.

Easy for the modern reader to misread this as a very dry condemnation of serfdom. Nope! Just a rolicking, absurdist satire of provincial backwardness and corruption.

THREE WEEKS LATER

Oh man oh man if ever there was a cautionary tale about stopping reading after part one! Dead Souls degenerates so much that it scarcely feels like the same book, which makes one wonder whether its early brilliance was altogether accidental. What evidence also for satire being safer, dare I say easier, than straightforward literature, that is if Gogol even intended Dead Souls early parts as satire. God knows what the man intended. In any case, the second half of the book is a bizarre, shallow Slavophillic screed against Westernizers and a paean to the noble, industrious Russian brute. Gogol's essential conservatism emerges from beneath the cloak of sardonicism that disguised it for most of part one. His characters become even more types, as they were in part one, but leaden and wearisome rather than vicious and delightful. The book becomes a tract.

I see you, old enemy. I will spend my life tilting at your eternal, vile countenance.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

The post-apocalyptic future sure has no women.

Zerchi is an evil piece of shit. Scene where state intervenes in his religious abuse of woman and child was gratifying. My slide toward fanaticism.

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

aka "Cuck Tales"

Present day Americans' scolding censure of these characters is the purest, tritest provincialism. Focusing on the "rot," the hypocrisy and comeuppance, the moral turpitude of infidelity for fuck's sake, betrays a simplemindedness bordering on incompetence. You should not be allowed outside.

Ashburnham is Dowell's id, his erotic avatar.

Doleful sybarite