I just finished reading This is How You Lose the Time War by by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. A tale of Red and Blue. Wow, I felt like a kid again devouring it.
I read tons of fiction along with comics as a tot. In my teens, caught up with Stephen King and the like. Come 20s, it's been nonfiction and nonfiction only. (I wanted to understand why I couldn't focus, why I was depressed, etc) Comics were my only ficion. I became so distanced from novels for 20+ years I didn't know what to read if I wanted to. Nothing sounded interesting. Comics could tell me in one image if I wanted to read it or not. I like sci-fi, fantasy, the occult, romance; I wanted cool stories with cool characters. Hopefully cool women characters! But I was so scared to try 400+ page novels to maybe be disappointed by it.
Then there was the viral tweet by "bigolas dickolas wolfwood" recommending this book. I remember someone in the thread mention they read it in 2 hours. Sounded perfect, since I was scared of a long novel. I bought it. Then I didn't read it for several more years.
It took me several mornings instead of 2 hours but by the second half I spent much of the mornings reading to see what happened next.
It has everything I could ever want: cool sci-fi lore, cool women characters, enemies-to-lovers...! My weakness! And a fun letter correspondance concept that reminded me of a childhood book I cannot recall the title, nor can Google.
It's written poetically but easily understood. It doesn't overly explain details, allowing me to think of my own. It wasn't 400 pages! It's wonderful. I won't get into plot details as I went in completely blind too. I highly recommend giving it a read if you've felt lost trying to get back into fiction.
I want to learn to write better, though I study the comics I read, I want to spread out my "mental vocabulary" with novels as well. It's made me excited about stories all over again, Thank you, Red and Blue!
You can stop reading here, I want to yap on.
At the end of the ebook (at least, I just ordered a paperback to own a hardcopy) there's additional book reading club material hosts can use to ask the group to discuss the book. They reminded me of English class questions, is that what book reading clubs are like? It's got me curious for sure. I'm still alone in my city I've moved to years ago and would like to find like-minded people to meet and nerdily discuss these books. Getting a glimpse what a book club can be like feels like a comfortable first step.
The end also gave me a few more recommendations to try, some written by the authors, some general Amazon-suggested books. I'm stoked to give them a try. I'll read El-Mohtar's recommended Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison next. It's another short fantasy tale. (Baby steps!) and after that I'm debating to either start Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) or Crier's War (Nina Varela) after that.
The author notes also mentioned her work published on ReactorMag.com and after doing my first browsing this morning, it's a daily visit now for sure.