Science Fiction-Free September '24 wrap-up

Last week I wrapped up the 2024 installment of my annual Science Fiction-Free September. I'm happy to proclaim this year's moratorium on SF novels (and, more broadly, commercial fiction) a success.

I planned for five novels, plus two extras if time remained. I completed six, plus a handful of plays by Aphra Behn and a few Japanese light novels (in English). So overall, I read 14 individual titles this September, with a number of them being short and light reading. But the main selections were anything but light! I noted last year that I'd chosen some heavy-hitting fiction, and the same is true this year.

My favourite book for the month: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I loved the satire of the idle, pretentious pseudo-intellectual. If Toole had written this novel in the 2020s, might he have made Ignatius a terminally online Redditor? Runner-up: Alan LeMay's The Searchers. Amos Edward's monomaniacal quest for revenge on the Comanche tribe that murdered his brother and sister-in-law and abducted their young daughter is like a Western Moby-Dick.

On the other hand, my least favourite book was Rabbit, Run, by John Updike. It's a beautifully written novel, but Rabbit Angstrom is possibly the nastiest character I've ever encountered in a book. The runner-up is The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway, the newest book on the list. While I can't point to a fatal fault, the story, about a handful of intertwined lives amidst the Seige of Sarajevo in the 1990s, just didn't click with me.

In the middle were Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus"—coincidentally, the two 19th-century nautical novels. Again, there are no specific faults, but neither book was quite what I was expecting.

Of course, I owe the blog at least 250 words about each of these books, and these will be forthcoming once I wrap up the last two installments of the Amber readthrough.

I had just begun Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, my second "extra innings" novel, when the month ended. As it turns out, it's considerably longer than his previous books. I'm enjoying it, but I think I want to set it aside for a while and reset with a few more mass-market selections. Have I mentioned I'm down to the last three Stephen King novels?