{"id":7046,"date":"2017-08-29T08:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-08-29T13:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=7046"},"modified":"2017-09-01T11:07:30","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T16:07:30","slug":"book-reading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=7046","title":{"rendered":"Book-reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read another novel last weekend. That makes two weekends in a row in which I have read an entire novel. What is happening to me?<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The most recent was Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation<\/em>, which is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. I fully intend to read the next two over the next two weekends. I don’t remember the context, exactly, but I purchased the trilogy because Matt Peckham said something about it on the now-defunct GameLife podcast that clearly affected me on some level.<\/p>\n

As a strange twist, I have previously read another book by VanderMeer:\u00a0Monstrous Creatures: Explorations of Fantasy through Essays.\u00a0<\/i>Which is not a novel, but rather a collection of essays about cryptids and other fantastical animals. This is a twist because my choices of literature are so impulsive that I haven’t ever felt the need to explore a particular writer’s greater oeuvre.<\/p>\n

Although, to be fair, a significant portion of the books I’ve read in the past decade have come in trilogies. So there’s that.<\/p>\n

Back to Annihilation<\/em>! It was just excellent<\/em>. I don’t want to say too much about it because the mystery and suspense are key tenets of the novel, but it was wholly unlike anything I’ve read before. I highly recommend checking it out, and I feel certain that the next two Southern Reach books will be equally, if not more, enjoyable.<\/p>\n

I think that the only thing that I had a problem with is that I had a very hard time picturing the events in my head. This issue lies not with the writing, which is perfectly good at building a scene and describing events, but rather with my brain, which has a certain lack of focus. It makes reading a bit of a chore, as my mind will often drift off and I’ll find myself having to re-read up to an entire page. But as far as visualization goes, I often found myself wishing for a film adaptation, simply because I would love to actually see this world (although parts of it will be literally impossible to recreate on film). I can’t help it, I’m very much a visual kind of guy. Ask anyone who has ever tried to teach me anything without flashcards.<\/p>\n

Oh, guess what, there’s a film adaptation coming out next February. Hooray! I’ve missed out on a lot of movies that I’ve wanted to see over the last couple years, but this will definitely<\/em> be one that I see on opening night.<\/p>\n

As an aside, the fact that this is all lining up so nicely makes me a bit salty, because the\u00a0Five Nights at Freddy’s<\/em> movie has apparently gone through the film version of development hell and has got me wondering if it’ll ever be real. Oh well. Win some, lose some.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read another novel last weekend. That makes two weekends in a row in which I have read an entire novel. What is happening to me? The most recent was Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, which is the first book in the Southern Reach Trilogy. I fully intend to read the next two over the next two … Continue reading Book-reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,30,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-reading","category-spooky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7046"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7059,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7046\/revisions\/7059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}