Book # 84 - The Stranger by Albert Camus

Just now as I was about to enter on Goodreads that I'd read The Stranger it showed that I already read it. I have no memory of that.... and never once while reading it did I think "this seems familiar".  Sure it is a very short book but still... I'm pretty sure I already owned the book way before we started this project, so it makes sense that I would have read it before. Anyway, I enjoyed it. A

Progress Report

 A little over six years ago I tracked my progress on these various readings as such:

My progress on each of the lists:
Best Novels 1-100: 50 read
Best Novels 101-200: 4 read
Best Mysteries 1-101: 18 read
Best Science Fiction 1-50: 16 read
Best Horror 1-50: 14 read

The updated numbers are:

Best Novels 1-100: 94 read
Best Novels 101-200: 8 read
Best Mysteries 1-101: 37 read
Best Science Fiction 1-50: 30 read
Best Horror 1-50: 27 read

Book # 74 - As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

 I think this book may have put me in a weird headspace for the few days it took to read. Anyway, I'm glad I read it. After reading three Faulkner titles for this project I feel like I definitely appreciate his work even though it is difficult to get through sometimes for a variety of reasons. For such a short book, As I Lay Dying sure has a lot to unpack and think about. A 

Star Wars: The Rising Storm by Cavan Scott

I guess Star Wars: The Rising Storm was okay. The first 250 pages or so were nothing special - just a ton of new characters with weird Star Wars names that needed to be memorized. The ending though set up the next book nicely. So B-.

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

Hummingbird Salamander started out well enough and got me hooked... but by the end I just didn't really care. C+

Book # 61 - Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

Well I didn't think Nostromo would be my kind of book and I was right about that. I wouldn't say that it was bad but it also wasn't very enjoyable and I probably didn't get much out of it. The only thing that really kind of interests me about it is finding the parallels between the book and the movie Alien (in which the name of the ship is Nostromo). Hint... transporting valuable metals (or alien creatures) for a large company may not be beneficial to the health of the workers involved. B-

Horror Book # 21 The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

 

Even though this collection had considerable overlap with the previous Lovecraft collection I read, I still enjoyed it. Maybe not as much though... I'm starting to see that he's basically telling variations of the same few stories over and over. And yeah, I see now that some of the stories are problematic in other ways.