Currently reading The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowell and the book I finished before it was Knellers Happy Campers by Edgar Kenet which is a short story that was adapted into a movie in like 06 called Wristcutters about a guy who kills himself and goes to an afterlife for all the people who committed suicide. I learned it was based on the short story so I found it for cheap and read it
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I'm reading through the first two Hawk and Fisher omnibuses. Pretty decent fantasy setting focused on a married city guard duo (the eponymous Hawk and Fisher). I'm enjoying them for what they are. It's got all the standard fantasy fare you expect, and the two lead characters are enjoyable.
Which is good, because the last two books I read before that are horrible. The first was House of Leaves, which I first started trying to read about a decade ago, but hated so much that I put it down halfway through. About a year ago I started fresh with it, hoping something about my feelings would have changed, but if anything I just hated it even more. I did force myself to finish it (it took almost the full year), because I have a longstanding personal rule about finishing every physical book I start. As a comparison, the combined Hawk and Fisher omnibuses are about as big as House of Leaves, but I got through 1 and a half of those in less than two months.
The other book was The Atrocity Archives, which I thought had a very interesting premise. Imagine the SCP foundation without the recent idiocy of the past few years, but the view of the government agency in the setting is less, "What the fuck is this?" and more, "You found a dimension-hopping quasit that reversed gravity in your kitchen and turned your dog inside out? Fill out form TFR-72a and wait in line, your number will get called." But the book itself is so entranced with its own made-up pseudoscience jargon it uses to "explain" the roots of the events ("A quasit uses Neo-Darwinian thermodynamics to reverse the root of the gravitational constant, which is how it reversed gravity" and shit like that) and that just makes everything in it a slog. Great premise, I just couldn't stand the execution. I'll force myself to finish it one of these days.
Oh man, House of Leaves Every time someone recommended it to me and described it all I could think was the book must be the most pretentious piece of garbage written. Just nothing I have heard made the book sound good. I never have given it a read because, like you, I have to finish every book I start. And I don't want to commit to something I am most certainly going to hate.
Pretentious is the best thing I could say about it if I was being polite.
If I was speaking straight, I would say it reads like the author is getting off on intentionally being "unique" and all you end up reading is what pseudo-artistic rambling spunk ends up on the page after he's done masturbating.