The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Posted 13 April 2026

The Haunting of Hill House is Shirley Jackson's fifth novel, preceding We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Neither one is a sequel or prequel to the other, but they're very similar books. Both feature unreliable narrators and a house that's as much of a character as any of the humans.

This is a haunted house story, but the house itself is not haunted by something; there are no ghosts or spirits present. The house itself is the being who does the haunting, and this is most obviously seen with Eleanor, the protagonist – though there are brief mentions of the house's influence on previous residents and visitors.

Eleanor starts out as an unreliable narrator and this only gets worse the longer she stays in Hill House. She starts off disconnected from the other characters, inventing details about her life to make herself seem more interesting than she actually is – and it ends up all for nothing. Eleanor is so thoroughly unremarkable that she doesn't make a single impact on anyone's life. By the later chapters, I was genuinely wondering if Eleanor had ever existed at all – that maybe she was a lonely ghost haunting Hill House who was simply imagining that she mattered to other people. But that wasn't the case. She was simply too boring for any of the other characters to really pay any attention to her.

We have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Posted 6 April 2026

I've been wanting to read this book for a while, and I was finally able to find a copy at the used bookstore in early March.

Despite that, I actually had no idea what We Have Always Lived in the Castle was about; all I knew was that it was horror and had a character named Merricat. She's in fact the protagonist, and not the most reliable of narrators. She's also the source of most of the horror in the book, most of which is directed at her sister Constance.

Later I learned that Constance and Merricat were in part based on Shirley Jackson's own daughters. Given the events of the book, I have to wonder just how far that resemblance goes.

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Posted 30 March 2026

I'm not really sure what I expected with this one. I know it was one of the first, if not the first, cyberpunk novel. A lot of what was new and exciting got copied and remixed over the decades (and I have read and watched plenty of books, movies, and shows that were inspired by Neuromancer, directly and indirectly), so I can't say anything in particular stood out to me as unique.

The one real problem I had with this book is that I had a hard time following the events of the story. I don't know if that was a me thing or a problem with Gibson's writing; it was his first novel. Either way, I don't have any particular interest in reading the other books in the Sprawl series. Maybe I'll try some of his more recent books in the future.

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.

While I do like that the reader is largely dropped into the world with minimal explanation, I do wish there had been a bit more focus on things like the Transport culture and the discorporate people. The novel introduces a bunch of interesting things, but it's too short to really explore anything other than Babel-17 in depth.