Dear Life by Alice Munro

I remember reading this years ago, but apparently never recorded it.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Neonomicon by Alan Moore

Don't be that writer where, as soon as women are introduced as main characters in a grimdark world of men, the reader thinks, "oh, well of course she's going to be raped." With Neonomicon, that's what Alan Moore has become. Then he has Merril Brears blandly announce herself as a recovering sex addict, making her eventual Moorian rape all the more inevitable. Moore writes her as a sex addict and a rape victim and very little else.

The opening story, "The Courtyard," which Moore published years earlier, is quite good and stands on its own as a horrifying and eerie tribute to H. P. Lovecraft. It's the later Neonomicon that goes badly wrong. First, Moore involves Lovecraft himself as a metatextual element, and the characters stand around talking about just how weird it is that their case resembles various Lovecraft stories. Actually, it's more accurate to say that Lovecraft's stories exist in Neonomicon as nearly literal histories, which creates weird tensions in the text. Early pages play Moore's usual game of references to The King in Yellow, Ambrose Bierce, etc., until the agents themselves notice that nearly everything they're investigating refers to Lovecraft or his influences, which seems at odds with Neonomicon's conclusion that Lovecraft merely documented supernatural forces already at play. Like, if the cosmic horror came first, why would modern devotees scrupulously reference Lovecraft and co., rather than the forces themselves? Does Cthulhu give a shit about Lovecraft? Also, why does Lovecraft chronicle  so literally what for him would be recent events and call them stories? Sure, you can invent explanations, but you're probably excusing writing that doesn't deserve it.

Much worse is the dayslong, multi-issue rape of Agent Brears, which reads like Alan Moore's private stash of fetish porn, complete with Brears arguably gradually getting into it. It basically is the plot of the second half of the book. 

There's nothing wrong with depicting extreme violence so long as the causes and consequences are treated seriously. But Neonomicon ends with an airy, banal chat between Brears and another character who carved two women into "tulips" while they were still alive. These two people, who are supposed to have had their minds rearranged to perceive cosmic, inhuman reality to the point of psychosis, talk like neighbors discussing the price of gasoline. 

And if Sax is on board with the Cthulhu/Deep Ones mythos, why would he carve a swastika into his forehead? Aren't swastikas the only thing that keeps Deep Ones at bay?

The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin

Also, several Lovecraft short stories on my phone at Deathfest 2016 while taking a little breather from bands. Good atmosphere, very silly, super racist.

Providence Act 1 by Alan Moore

Tales from Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Michael Moorcock

One of the many reasons I dislike air travel is because it reduces geography—former arbiter of cultural and political identity, of the literal shape of history—to a curiosity, and travel itself—properly a pilgrimage across physical and social barriers, which being passed are in part assumed—to a convenience. It decontextualizes the deep old god of place into an arbitrary novelty. The effect is much more pronounced than with land transit, which is still beholden to geography to varying extents. At least, you're forced to watch it pass by.

Of course, you can always opt to take the long way round, but air travel makes the choice an affectation.

Part of the appeal of fantasy is that it returns to worlds still governed by geography, where journeys are difficult ventures into unknown territory that transform travelers along the way. Elric truly does not know what lies beyond the nearest pile of scree, has no choice but to scramble up it, and arrives at the top understanding the place and its locales better than if he had teleported a shortcut. It's not that we want to do it ourselves, but magical, pre-Industrial worlds are a vicarious reminder that something is missing: geographic rootedness/limitation/context.