I’m a big reader, but for some reason I haven’t been reading much while on lockdown. A typical year I read 150-180 books but this year it looks like I’ll be finishing 35. I just started Octavia Butler’s Kindred tonight.
I’m looking forward to the newly released Ray Bradbury compilation Killer, Come Back to Me. It’s a collection of his crime fiction. I’ll be honest, I didn’t even know he wrote crime fiction, but it’s one of my favorite genres in recent years.
As with most Lem I’ve read, it’s playfully written. His writing is so bizarre in its ability to (often) make little sense in the micro, and PROFOUND sense in the macro. He is a wordsmith in a tier all his own, as if Kierkegaard wrote fiction. He is at many times prophetic, and always insightful into the baser motivations and proclivities of man. Truly a remarkable brain.
The Futurological Congress is still my favorite of his, though.
Working my way through the short stories of JG Ballard: sort of the Toque Cheese and Bacon of writers in that you love him or hate him, I’ve never met anyone who thought he was just OK!
@SHbickel - He’s a tricky one as his first few novels are definitely very science fiction, a bit later on he gets a little more based in reality with disaster fiction, and his later stories are just…weird (not in a bad way!) Personally, I really liked The Drought and The Drowned World from his earlier works, my two favourites are High Rise and Concrete Island. Vermillion Sands is a collection of short stories all based in the same place but not necessarily connected (if memory serves), definitely worth reading. And of course his short stories which are a bit hit and miss but more hit than miss!