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Sax Russel

Sax_Russel@books.theunseen.city

Joined 10 months, 1 week ago

A nonbinary bookish nerd who needs help keeping track of what books they've read.

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Sax Russel's books

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2024 Reading Goal

66% complete! Sax Russel has read 24 of 36 books.

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Jack Vance: The Dying Earth (Paperback, 1979, Pocket) 3 stars

A foundation of the genre

4 stars

I got really sick in the middle of reading this -it honestly doesn't take me a month to read a couple of hundred pages.

Vance's world is a dreamy, fin de siècle where the world is ending not with a bang but with a slow and decadent slide. His characters (with a few remarkable exceptions) are horrible people doing horrible things to other horrible people, speaking the sort of flowery language that make Fritz Lieber seem like he's writing a Norse saga, but somehow it all works and you're immersed in it.

Few writers could pull off dialogue like

“We go in the mental frame of adventure, aggressiveness, zeal. Thus does fear vanish and the ghosts become creatures of mind-weft; thus does our élan burst the under-earth terror.”

or

"Guyal turned away and they continued down the gallery. Past the real expression of man’s brightest dreamings they walked, until the …