What I listened to in 2024

[Anableps]

Something for the off-topic category. I have been listening to some audio podcasts this year - H.P. Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth and some of Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op stories. I had some indirect exposure to Lovecraft in my teens playing a D&D type game based on his writings, but this was the first story of his that I had read or listened to. I liked it. I think that listening to the story instead of reading it increased my enjoyment. I think some people may be put off by his stiff, academic style, but it worked for me.

I had wanted to read Hammett's Red Harvest for a while. I had heard that the story was the model for the movies Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars - a stranger comes into town and plays two gangs off against each other and ends up destroying them. While there were things that I liked about it, I was a little disappointed when I actually read it, as I felt that it was disjointed. I liked his characterization of the Continental Op, and even though the story is told from the first person point of view, the motives for the Ops actions are not clear, even to himself. The manipulation is even more complex than the movies as the Op is dealing with more than two gangs. After I read it, I found out that the Red Harvest stories were originally serialized over several years and that affected the continuity. He later merged all the Red Harvest into a single novel. I think that is why I felt that the action felt that it didn't flow well at times. The standalone Continental Op short stories that I have read were more tightly written.

Are there any famous or popular works that you have not read when it seems that everyone else has? In my case, The Handmaiden's Tale and the Harry Potter stories would qualify. The Handmaiden's Tale came out after I left school and so it wasn't required reading, and by the time the Harry Potter books came out I just wasn't in the mood for a bunch of school stories.

[JH]

I'm fairly well-read in the science fiction, fantasy and horror genres; outside those, not so much. Regarding Lovecraft, I read an anthology of his stories about 10 or 20 years ago with great expectations, given how highly he is regarded. But his prose style was so bad (IMO) and OTT that I found him almost unreadable. Give me M.R, James any day.