Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling

Posted 9 March 2026

This is a collection of stories by Pu Songling, written from the 1640s to the 1710s. The version I have is abridged, with 103 out of the original 497 stories translated by John Minford. Some of the previous translations into English were heavily censored, with the one by Herbert Giles called out in particular for catering heavily to Victorian Era sensibilities. So, if you're going to pick up a copy of this book, pay close attention which translation of it you're getting.

Some of these stories are ghost stories, and some aren't. Some read like moral fables, with the narrator giving his own comments at the end. My initial instinct is to broadly categorize these stories under the "weird fiction" label – though, to be honest, I think they may only be "weird" when compared to Western fairy stories and folk tales.

One of the stories, "Nie Xiaoqian", felt really similar to a movie, A Chinese Ghost Story, that I'd watched years ago. As it turns out, A Chinese Ghost Story is based on "Nie Xiaoqian", and the only reason I didn't make the connection immediately is because the movie is in Cantonese and the character's name in Cantonese is Nip Siusin.

There is no Antimemetics Division by qntm

Posted 2 March 2026

This is something I probably would have heard of earlier if I'd bothered to keep up with the SCP Foundation past 2011 or so. It was originally published online as part of the SCP Foundation "wiki" and was later rewritten, with SCP references expunged, for traditional publication in 2025. That is the version I read.

The first part of the book feels more like a connection of short stories than the first part of a novel. I'm wondering if that's because it really was a series of short stories put together. The second part of the novel does feel more like a traditional narrative, though that's probably because it's deep into the plot at that point.

This book was one that I didn't want to put down while reading. Even if isn’t technically set in the world of the SCP Foundation, it was a nice way to return to something I was a fan of as a teenager.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Posted 23 February 2026

This is a book I'd vaguely heard about through the years, but didn't pick up until last December. I knew it was the inspiration for the Stalker series of video games and also learned recently that it was one of the inspirations for the Southern Reach series.

It was much less scientific than I expected, and there isn't all that much time spent in the zone. Instead, much of the book focuses on how the zone affects the people around it, from mutations in their children, to personal health, to the local economy. It's small-picture, focused on the working class, rather than big-picture, focused on the aftermath of aliens visiting Earth.

The edition I have comes with an afterword discussing how difficult it was to get the book published in the Soviet Union. Evidently it was too vulgar and hopeless for the censors.

The Southern Reach series by Jeff VanderMeer

Posted 16 February 2026

I picked up Annihilation, the first book of the Southern Reach series, at the end of November last year. It took less than a week to read, with me staying up late a few nights in a row so I could keep reading. I haven't been that engrossed in a book in almost a decade and a half. I genuinely felt like a kid again.

I finished the rest of the series in the first week of February. While I got through the first three books fairly quickly, it took me around two weeks to read Absolution. I definitely think I was less invested in it than in the trilogy; I thought that Acceptance wrapped things up nicely. Absolution didn't quite feel like filler, but I think I would have been equally as satisfied with the series if it didn't exist.

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Posted 27 June 2025

This book had been on my TBR list for quite a while, and this past month I finally got around to reading it...two years after I picked it up at a local used bookstore. The version I have was translated by Mirra Ginsburg.

I will admit now that I've (somehow) never read a single dystopian science fiction novel – not even the ones that were inspired by We, like 1984. I have absolutely nothing to compare it to and honestly wasn't sure of what to expect. I didn't even look at the synopsis on the back of the book before I started reading.

The book is written as a series of journal entries. The protagonist is the lead architect of a spaceship that will be visiting other planets, and his journal is to be an introduction to life in the One State. There's plenty of explanation of how the One State and the people in it function.

If I was to summarize We in a single sentence, I would say "A man meets a woman, falls in love, and straight up loses his mind over it". There's a massive amount of context missing, of course, but I don't want to go too much into spoiler territory here.

One thing that stuck with me is that a character points out that "there is no final [revolution]; revolutions are infinite". It is definitely something to keep in mind.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

Posted 11 June 2025

This is a fairly short novel (around 60,000 words, I believe) and took me around two weeks to finish, reading 1-3 chapters per day. It's pretty easy to read, except for the parts that are deliberately designed to be confusing. I'm not sure I fully grasped exactly which events were caused by Babel-17 and which weren't.