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Friday Fun Thread for January 20, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A couple of Fridays ago there was a comment thread on what the best series you watched in 2022 was/were. In honor of @EdenicFaithful's weekly Sunday reading question, what were your best reads of 2022? What did you enjoy or find interesting? Anything of note you didn't finish?

For me:

God Emperor of Dune. Such a good book. Well, Idk how to qualify it in terms of goodness. Such a unique book. How many have a near-omnipotent, centuries old, giant worm-man with voices in his head as the main character? My favorite bit: Leto is so wrapped up in his own ancient internal monologue about the voices of his ancestors inside him and the future he can see that he almost misses getting a gun that he knows is going to be pulled on him pulled on him.

I read a bit of horror later in the year. Ghost Story by Peter Straub would probably be my favorite of the bunch. It loses some steam near the end, but I think that's a flaw intrinsic to the horror genre. Or maybe that's all the Stephen King I've read talking. Speaking of, Revival would be my runner-up. It's the only post-car accident King I've read that's not The Dark Tower, and I wasn't disappointed. He maybe could have used a little trimming in the second quarter of the book to shorten the gap between the inciting incident and the next big plot movement, but other than that I think he even stuck the landing.

Books I did not finish:

I didn't read a lot of books this year. Sometime around March I attempted to do what I thought of as a "liberal arts" read: reading world history, art history, music history, philosophy history, and literature concurrently, going through sections that aligned with the same time period. A bit ambitious. Couple of problems with it, besides coming up with the "curriculum" on my own based on what we already had in our home library: I started with human pre-history, which kept me hopping between just a couple of books at first; a couple, particularly the philosophy book, were Western focus, whereas I wanted to be more comprehensive; the literature portion (the first volume of Norton's world lit anthology) covered a lot I had already read; for world history, I picked a book that's like the notes to a world history encyclopedia - very dense and dry, and I wasn't trying to skip any of it; finally, the sections just didn't line up that well for jumping between things and keeping it "fresh". My goal was to get to 0 AD. I barely got to the Greeks. After a couple months or so of spending my bedtime reading time on this, I was worn out and needed a narrative I could start and finish without interruption and moved on to a fiction splurge. I'd like to go back and read some more of the individual books on their own. Except that encyclopedic notes one. It's literally organized in a ABC, 123 subnote style. Very dense and dry. Overall, and interesting experiment.

I read for the first time in 2022 the Three Body problem trilogy as well as the fanfiction Redemption of Time, the Inhibitors trilogy, the Hyperion Cantos, and the first two Ian Banks' Culture novels. I've also been very slowly working through my omnibus of the Princes of Amber series (serial?), which is enjoyable but a bit too pulpy for my taste.

Me and my close circle of friends also started a book club to help motivate us to cover works of literature and quality fiction that our schooling or upbringing had never shown us, so we read King Lear, and Child of God by the inimitable Cormac McCarthy amongst others. I was the one to tap out ultimately however, Frankenstein broke me. I cannot possibly envision a realistic future where I can power past the first 50 pages or so, it's some of the most eye-strainingly tedious writing I've ever slogged through, and I read most of Galt's screed in Atlas Shrugged. Maybe I just got filtered.

ETA: I also did a substantial bit of rereading but that was mostly retreading things I've read many times before, primarily Blindsight twice last year, once in January and again in September. I also read Worm for the 10th time.

Fuck, I loved blindsight so much. What did you think of Three Body Problem?

I also read Three Body for the first time recently. I would say that overall the series is good, but there's a distinct downward trend in quality over the three books. The first book is top tier stuff that could stand alongside any of the classics, the second book is quite good though not as good, and the third book is decent but not particularly great. And, amusingly enough, the third book itself starts out stronger and gets weaker (the ending is really bad imo).

Worth reading if you haven't read them, but I doubt I'll be going back and rereading the trilogy any time soon if ever.