What Are We Reading in August 2022?

Dusty, where are you?

I have started reading Lady of Caladan - ok so far. I also plan on reading some Star Trek books for a Star Trek reading challenge on WWE.

The schedule for this month looks like The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Locklands, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, and Time Travelers Never Die.

My plans:
The Bridge of Lost Desire
Utopia Avenue
Consider Phlebas

Just finished The Lake of the Long Sun. I'm enjoying this series. Now taking a genre break with some political history before picking some old Clifford Simak out of the TBR pile - Cosmic Engineers.

I am about three hundred pages from the end of Perhaps the Stars and thus from the end of all Terra Ignota.

>5 RobertDay:
I thought the Long Sun was a more accessible and exciting read than the kaleidoscopic New Sun, on the whole. The Short Sun combines the virtues of both prior series.

I’m about a third of the way through Stand on Zanzibar. I seem to be having trouble finding sustained periods of reading the last few weeks.

Sorry people,not to be around. Bad back makes sitting at a computer a bit difficult at times. And could be a touch of brain fog,because how often do I not post a new monthly thread? :0)
Dusty's TBR for August
SF/Fantasy
V E Schwab - A Conjuring of Light✔
Adam Tchaikovsky - Children of Time
Arthur C Clarke - Against the Fall of Night
Roger Zelazny - Roadmarks ✔
Paul Cornell - London Falling
Harry Bates - Farewell to the Master
William Sleator - House of Stairs✔
Jodi Taylor - Just One Damn Thing After Another ✔
from other genres
C S Lewis - The Problem of Pain
Lyndon Stacey - No Going Back ✔
Richard Hartmier - Yukon colour of the land✔

Octavia Butler.

Just finished _Kindred_. I didn't care much for _Fledgling_, not a vampire fan. So I skipped to the end of the volume for the short stories.

After that, I'll return to anthologies of the 50s, sixties, and / or seventies.

>9 dustydigger: Considering your recent medical misadventures there is concern.

Fantasy: Into the Narrowdark by Tad Williams
Fiction: Where the Desert Meets the Sea by Werner Sonne

>4 paradoxosalpha: is Utopia Avenue speculative fiction? I've had it sitting on my shelf for a while now and have not been motivated to read it, although I've read quite a few of his books.

>13 vwinsloe:

My Other Reader has read it and recommended it. Based on what she said, I think the speculative element is probably a little less than what is in Bone Clocks or Slade House. But it has character connections to the whole "psychosoteric" horologists/atemporals hyperwork.

>14 paradoxosalpha: Thanks. I'll move it up the pile, but look forward to your review.

>12 seitherin: Enjoy Into the Narrowdark! I'm 2/3 of the way done with The Library Book, which is quite good. Part history, part biography.

>11 Shrike58: Oh there's always something wrong with me! :0)
Apart from arthritis I have thyroid issues and pernicious anaemia. The arthritis causes bone pain,the anaemia and PA cause lethargy and brain fog among a host of other things,and my diabetes accounts for anything else. So situation normal,all messed up.lol.But as long its not some lethal thing I'm pretty happySomedays are better than others.
I think today will be a fairly good one,should get a bit reading done. On the ''foggy'' days all I manage to read is fluff or comfort rereads.Today is at least a step up from that. I am rereading Roadmarks both for a challenge I am doing,and because its all confused and nonliear anyway,brain fog cant affect it much lol. I think this must be about my 5th read of this book,a really fun dazzling romp. Every time I read it I recognize more cultural references. If I survive another 10 years and another couple of rereads I might really grasp it all.
All the reviews moan about it being minor Zelazy,too experimental,too incoherent and so on. I just enjoy it as Zelazny high jinks and fun.
I am also reading William Sleator's House of Stairs . Its survived surprisingly well(pub 1974). It was probably an influence on the dystopian teenage fiction to come. Probably seems completely original to its teen audience too,with well delineated characters,based on real people Sleator knew(and including himself!) and is an amiable enough read. Of course adult readers will think of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Wonder if the makers of Labyrinth had read this.Remember David Bowie's wonderful staircases?

Finished The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, which I found to be a step up from the author's Mexican Gothic; while there's nothing that obligates a writer to give the reader a sympathetic character, it doesn't hurt!

Finished The Pillars of Eternity and started All the Colors of Darkness.

>13 vwinsloe: >14 paradoxosalpha: The speculative elements are there, first in the background where you can almost ignore them, but gradually they become more important as the story progresses. It's certainly also possible to interpret those events as delusions or mental illness.
To be honest I found it all felt a bit forced in this one, and I think the book may have been better without it. Nowhere near Mitchell's best, but it reads quickly, has good humour and interesting characters, so overall it's good fun.

>17 dustydigger: I read Roadmarks ages ago, unfortunately my copy was destroyed in a flood. Might have to get a new one.

>16 Karlstar: I was enjoying Into the Narrowdark until Amazon messed up my Fire tablet with their latest update. I've spent the better part of this week trying to get Amazon support to do something about the crap they keep sending to my tablet that basically shuts it down. I keep asking if I should just do a factory reset and they keep telling me it isn't necessary. I just need to calm down and do the reset on my own. If that doesn't fix things, whoever answers the support line is going to get an ear full.

>20 igorken: Thanks. I found each book of his to be less interesting since Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but I'll read it, for sure.

I'm reading Mars Nation (Part 1) by Brandon Q. Morris

I bounced hard off my book group read of The Left Handed Booksellers of London - found it self-conscious and charmless. Now into Stephenson's Termination Shock which is more to my liking.

>23 vwinsloe:
I found that too. I was quite disappointed in Slade House.

>22 seitherin: That stinks, any luck? So far my Kindle Fire is working fine.

>27 Karlstar: Not really. But I have calmed down and I've found a work around that lets me read so I'm going to finish Into the Narrowdark before I take the drastic step of setting my tablet back to factory default and starting over . . . again. I managed to read three whole pages yesterday.

>28 seitherin: Good luck, I hope you can finish it, it was very good.

Anyone watching The Sandman?

>29 Karlstar:

Just watched the first episode today. It was pretty good.

>29 Karlstar: Judging by my Facebook feed, you mean "Anyone not watching The Sandman?".

>31 anglemark: Not watching until we get the box set…

We don’t have Netflix

>29 Karlstar: The Sandman has been released on Netflix!? Where have I been? I thought it wasn’t being released until the fall. Guess I know what is playing on my tv tonight! 😀

>29 Karlstar: I'm saving the show until all the episodes are out. Looking forward to it even tho I haven't read any of the graphic novels/comics.

>34 seitherin: All the episodes dropped on Friday in the US.

>31 anglemark: True. I rarely watch TV, and I've already watched a few episodes. I watched the first episode cautiously on Friday, then on Saturday I ended up watching one three more.

I started my last Philip Dick Library of America collection, VALIS and Later Novels, with A Maze of Death.

>33 Neil_Luvs_Books: We've been pacing ourselves, 3 the first night, 3 the second, 2 tonight. Good stuff.

>37 Karlstar: >35 karenb: >33 Neil_Luvs_Books: Good TV but I can't understand how it cost $15M per episode.

>35 karenb: Thanks for the info.

>38 justifiedsinner: Oof, that's a lot.

We watched up to the end of episode 3 of The Sandman tonight. We are greatly enjoying it so far.

I haven't written in this group for a long time but I have a question that I'll bet some of you can answer. I just finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's Ghost from the Grand Banks which deals with two competing bids to raise the Titanic for the centenary of its sinking. I'm pretty sure I haven't read this book before although I did read lots of Clarke's ouevre when I was young. Since this book was written in 1990 I couldn't have read it then and for most of the 90s I didn't have the money or the time to read new books. My question involves one of the characters who developed a program to remove evidence of people smoking from old films and thus made his fortune. I know I've read something that involved this same technology but I have no idea if it was something else Clarke wrote or if it was in another sf writer's output.

As for the book itself it was mildly interesting for the oceanography aspects but there is a whole lot about the Mandelbrot Set that just seems really unnecessary. Although my science degree was in mathematics it was before the Mandelbrot equation was developed so I had never heard about it before and it was interesting to me but seemed out of place in the bigger story.

>42 gypsysmom: I wonder if the Mandelbrot stuff could be attributed to the publishing of Chaos: Making a new science by James Gleick (1987). I remember a lot of references to it showing up in fiction of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

>43 karenb: That's certainly possible but Clarke doesn't refer to that book in his Sources and Acknowledgments.

Mandelbrot's own book The Fractal Geometry of Nature came out in 1977, and is the sort of thing that would have caught Clarke's interest, I think. Gleick's work was a later popularization.

Connie Willis' Remake had removing smoking as a job someone had to do, but as I recall there wasn't much technology support.

>46 ChrisRiesbeck: I think that is probably it because I had an inkling it might have been Connie Willis. Thank you. I can rest easy now.

>45 paradoxosalpha: That is the first book Clarke mentions in the Mandelmemo part of his Sources and Acknowledgments. He describes it as "highly technical, and much is inaccessible even to those with delusions of mathematical ability. Nevertheless, a good deal of the text is informative and witty, so it is well worth skimming." Incidentally Clarke said the book came out in 1982; Wikipedia says it is a revised and enlarged edition of his 1977 book Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension which in turn was a revised, enlarged and translated version of his French book Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension.

Clarke mentioned two other books The Beauty of Fractals by H-O Peitgen and P. H. Richter and The Armchair Universe by A. K. Dewdney also with the latter being more accessible to the general reader.

I've been busy with a convention last weekend, but have been catching up on LTER reading, finally finished Night Rain and Neon. Not bad.

Also reading Rachel Burge's The Twisted Tree. Finished the first book last month - Norse mythology meets modern day, and wasn't bad. But the second is dragging. The writing style is all first person and other characters only seem to exist as part of the lead's worldview. Very passive, and all the I, I, I is getting tedious.

I've also started The Jack Vance Treasury. Finished The Dragon Masters - which I hadn't read in years! Much better writing although the gender roles are very much of their time.

I also read ElizaBeth Gilligan's Silken Magic trilogy. The first 2 I've owned for many years and enjoyed reading, the third I cam across recently. I thought it a great read when I first read it, but I now see some issues - and I rather suspect if the trilogy were to be released now it may well get called out for cultural appropriation. Still, a nice historical fantasy where the Kingdom of the Two Sicilys remains an independent monarchy run under Neoplatonic principles rather than becoming part of the Spanish hegemony.

>49 Maddz: I enjoyed the first two Silken magic books when I read them. I need to reread them before I pick up the third book. It looked for a while as though the author wasn't going to finish the series, so I was glad to see Sovereign silk appear.

I'm currently reading The second rebel, sequel to The first sister. This is an interesting series, although quite dark.

I am reading Uprooted. I never enjoyed the Temeraire books, but I was persuaded to read Spinning silver, which I loved, so here I am now, backtracking to Uprooted.

I've started the first book in my Library of America Wrinkle in Time Quartet edition, A Wrinkle in Time. I have fond memories of these books from childhood but have not read them since.

Last Call was every bit as good this second time around. No one does Urban Fantasy/Secret History quite like Tim Powers. Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather will both be up for re-read soon.

Began Sea of Tranquility last night. It's already making me want to re-read The Glass Hotel.

Also reading Signal Moon. A short story about naval wireless operators connecting through time. Very good so far.

>26 pgmcc: Fully agree that he hasn't hit the highs of Cloud Atlas or The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet or even the excitement and promise of his earlier books. For me The Bone Clocks was his most disappointing work, though still enjoyable. It does seem his more recent novels have been influenced by his screenwriting career, whether deliberate or not. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see Horologists tv or movie projects, though I'm not at all sure I'd watch them.

>53 ScoLgo:. Do you know if Signal Moon is available anywhere other than Kindle?

>55 vwinsloe: I believe kindle format or audio are the only options. It's free for Prime members, ($1.99 to buy). I liked this short story a lot and plan to read more Kate Quinn in future.

Finished a reread of Zelazny's Roadmarks Such a fun romp. Am proceeding through V E Schwab's A Conjuring of Light.It started out as a very YA sort of thing,but became starker and darker than the two earlier books. Quite long though,i never feel I am getting near the end. 630 pages is a bit too long IMO STILL got 200 pages to go.......sigh.......

Started in on VALIS.

>58 Stevil2001:

My reflex is jealousy. I guess I'm due for a re-read after some thirty-odd years.

>56 ScoLgo:. Thanks. I haven't read any Kate Quinn yet, and I thought this might be a good starting point.

Knocked off A Prayer for the Crown-Shy; more of a charming road trip with a large dollop of philosophy on top. If you liked the first novella you'll certainly enjoy this one.

After wading through a history of GCHQ, back to genre with Cosmic Engineers. Three chapters in and it's showing its age badly.

>62 RobertDay: "it's showing its age badly." Alas.

Just getting into Invisible things by Mat Johnson. Near future, expedition to Jupiter, possible explanation for "alien abductions", funny bits. What's not to like?

I am back to the Foreigner universe with Precursor (the 4th). It is different from the first 3 so we shall see how that works.

>63 karenb: Indeed. It was a toss-up between that or a re-read of Way Station. I plumped for Cosmic Engineers because it's the earliest Simak I've got and my copy is a rather nice, clean 1967 Paperback Library edition. So it goes.

>57 dustydigger: Schwab's "Shades of Magic" is suffering from a common series ailment: increasing gigantism syndrome. I suppose it could be because the plots thicken & thicken, but I always suspect that another factor is that editors are less able to rein the author in as a series becomes successful. The situation always reminds me of the dinosaurs or later mammals like ground sloths, evolving to be bigger & bigger. Two good examples of the literary equivalent are the Harry Potter books and the Song of Ice & Fire series.

>65 RobertDay: My copy is the Gnome Press original hardcover. Sounds like I should let it remain on the shelf to be admired for being a nice 1ed and not take it down to read.

Knocked off Time Travelers Never Die, a so-so adventure story which I only read because my book group picked it. I've only read one book by McDevitt a long time ago and have never really been a fan.

>66 rshart3: I completely agree with you. As authors become successful, editors seem to have less influence, unfortunately.

I'm making good progress on The Bridge of Lost Desire, but I got detoured again and read The Sandman: Overture (review posted).

I finally finished The Crooked Mask. I find her writing style banal; it's all first person, it's short sentences which makes for an incredibly choppy read, and it took an entire book to cover 2 or 3 days of action... The story did not make up for the poor writing style.

Now onto Best of British Science Fiction 2021.

>57 dustydigger: Thanks for the reminder, I recently came across a picture of my water damaged (ruined) copy of Roadmarks and was thinking I needed to find a new copy. I lost almost all my my Zelazny's in that incident.

Currently reading Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod, it is probably a bad sign that I couldn't remember the title.

For the past two evenings my bed-time reading has been Vast, by Linda Nagata. Blurbs and descriptions promised me a standalone hard SF novel about nanotechnology and a light-speed chase, and so far it's been exactly that (well, 0.4 c, but I'll allow it).

>73 Petroglyph: Going by publication order, Vast is actually book 4 in The Nanotech Succession, (series touchstones don't seem to be working properly so no link - sorry). It's been a long time since I read these but I seem to recall that each book does mostly stand on its own. If you end up liking Vast, you might want to check out The Bohr Maker as well.

Hi everybody! I'm about to embark on a re-reading of Dying of the Light by George R.R. Martin, the first novel of a writer who went on to achieve moderate success in a different (but related) genre.

I first read this over 40 years ago (I'm old!) and the only thing I remember about the story is...oh wait, that would be a spoiler! A little of it came back to me while reading Lisa Tuttle's rather gratuitous introduction.

The other thing I remember is that I thoroughly enjoyed the novel and felt I had discovered an exciting and important new writer!

>62 RobertDay: Really? I loved Cosmic Engineers. I'm probably showing my age too!

I am starting the second VALIS book, The Divine Invasion.

>74 ScoLgo:

Yes, I was aware Vast is a later installment in the series, but picked it up regardless, precisely because the blurb claimed the book would serve as a self-contained read. I should have made that clearer.

I'll consider The Bohr Maker if I feel like spending more time in this universe!

Read Nancy Baker's Kiss of the Vampire series. I used to own them in print some 30 years ago and recently picked up the ebooks. I have to say I think I prefer them now to back when I first read them in the 90s.

Although at first glance they read a bit like Interview with the Vampire, they are very different. Vampires in Baker's world are vanishingly rare - we meet only 3 vampires over the course of the 2 books, and another 2 are mentioned - both are dead. We don't see what the vampire origin myth is - they just are.

They come across as thoughtful, and delve into what it is to be a vampire. Much more to my taste nowadays.

>75 NerdyBookingham:
Did you perhaps get the wrong touchstone for Dying of the Light? Unless George RR Martin is secretly also Derek Landy.....

Another Nancy Baker - A Terrible Beauty. Another of NB's vampire stories, this one new to me. A deeply psychological story - a vampire seeks revenge on the man who stole her work. His son takes his place, and over the course of a winter, she ends up recovering her humanity - literally. Very good.

>76 NerdyBookingham: Ah, but have you read it recently? One character disappears for a whole chapter - he's there, but he says nothing - and another spends large portions of the novel clenching and unclenching his enormous fists. The chapter where our heroes stand up to and defeat the Hellhounds of Space feels to me like the inspiration for the look and feel of Star Trek's episode Arena (even though Fredrick Brown got the credit for it), and I really could not get my head around the way that the citizens of the distant year 6947 still played physical chess, smoked pipes and read newspapers, whilst said Hellhounds relied for much of their offensive power on atomic bombs. In my book, this came off worse than Doc Smith!

Anyway, now started on Caldé of the Long Sun.

>75 NerdyBookingham: You started me down a rabbit hole of assessing which Martin novels I've read, which led to discovering that several were missing from LT. Now that is fixed, I think the only novels I haven't read are Dying of the Light
and Fire and Blood, though that may be another one I read but hasn't made it into LT yet.

>80 rshart3: Thanks, fixed it!

>82 RobertDay: I read it about 7 years ago and quickly, so I only noticed the characters who were there, not the ones who were missing! And inspiring "Star Trek" is no bad thing!

But I'd be lying if I said I don't have a soft spot for old SF.

Next book to read is Penelopeiad by Margaret Atwood. Is this science fiction? Probably not. More on this later.

Knocked off Pirate Utopia, a curiosity for the Bruce Sterling fan. It's apparently a fragment of a longer work that Sterling didn't feel like finishing.

I just read Still forms on Foxfield, sociological SF by Joan Slonczewski. I really wish I could find my copy of A door into ocean as the book by her that I really want to read.

>89 Sakerfalcon: I first read a Door Into Ocean in around 1987 - a Womens Press edition still on my bookshelves - and remember loving the intricate world-building but finding it to be a bit gender-essentialist (women=wise and caring, men=militaristic bullies). Perhaps time for a re-read.

>89 Sakerfalcon: >90 SChant: I really enjoyed A Door Into Ocean. Very reminiscent of the anthropological approach Le Guin often evinced in her writing. I picked up the rest of the books in the series but have not yet managed to make time to read them.

>90 SChant: That's the copy I have ... somewhere!

>91 ScoLgo: I agree - reminiscent of LeGuin's style. I vaguely remember reading several other of her books but they didn't make as much of an impression on me at the time.

>87 MaureenRoy:

I have fond memories of that book. It's a well-done meta-effort that re-interprets the original material without coming across as obnoxious.

>89 Sakerfalcon: A Door into Ocean has been on my TBR list for awhile.
>91 ScoLgo: I didn’t realize that it was part of a larger series. I’ll have to look for those others once I get around to reading Door.

>89 Sakerfalcon: I know I read something at some point by Slonczewski, but it really didn't make an impact on my imagination.

I am listening to Walkaway by Cory Doctorow and reading The Actual Star by Monica Byrne. While having many differences there is also a striking similarity in that both of them propose that in the future people will walk away from material possessions and develop a near Utopian community. I didn't plan my listening and my reading to synchronize this way; it just happened. Usually I like to listen to something that is a completely different genre from what I am reading but I'm enjoying both books and liking the thoughts the similarity engenders.

>95 Neil_Luvs_Books: I have not yet read the other books so have no idea how they relate. I can tell you that A Door Into Ocean definitely stands on its own without any obvious loose ends. In fact, when I finished the book, I had no idea there were more entries in a series. Pretty sure it was the LT listing that showed me that it is the start of a series.

And having finished The Divine Invasion, I'm onto the last VALIS novel, the last Dick Library of America novel, and Dick's last novel full stop, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. It's going pretty quickly; this one is very well written.

>98 ScoLgo: I've read Daughter of Elysium and Brain Plague. Daughter is clearly a sequel in setting and some characters, but in a very different style and structure, less intense, more debate-driven. Plague is less directly connected, and different yet again, begin as bad pulp befittin its title, but improving after the first few chapters. How you like one of her novels probably has no bearing on what you will think of another.

Started Shards of Earth by Adrian Tchaikovsky for my reading group. 100 pages in and it seems like an undemanding space-opera - not bad, but nothing to get particularly excited about.

>101 SChant: Let's talk about group-mind in action! My group made that work our last read of the year.

>102 Shrike58: Haha! My group skews heavily towards the "what's popular on Goodreads" side so despite my curmudgeonly old fart suggestions of various classics or things that I think might be a bit more thought-provoking we tend to read more lightweight stuff. I mostly just go to the meetings for the good beer, now!

Finished up Locklands yesterday evening, Bennett's tale of singularity actuated by magical means. I liked the trilogy in the end, as opposed to how I loved the "Divine Cities" trilogy in the end.

Working my way through The Shadow of What Was Lost.

I finally finished Stand on Zanzibar. Took me a month! It took me about a third of the book to understand what was going on with how John Brunner intersperses his plot narrative with colour chapters to give a sense of what the world and culture are like. Once I figured that it out it became a very interesting read. What impresses me is that this was written in the 1960s yet reads as if it could have been written by a modern day writer of current times. Reading the chapters that tried to recreate what he likely imagined future tv to be like seemed so similar to what my experience is of surfing the net or reading through FB. He got a lot of his future history right. Good story too.

Just One Damned Thing After Another was a fun read,I flew through it. Now working on Paul Cornell's London Falling a quite tough urban fantasy/horror tale. Stark but gripping. Looks like I have two new series to follow.:0)

Greetings! I don't post here much but enjoy following along with everyone. Just popping in to say I've just finished The Constant Rabbit, Jasper Fforde's successfully humorous satire about anti-immigrant fear and prejudice. Fifty-five years after the unexplained Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event has turned England's rabbits and foxes into sentient, human-sized beings with the power of speech, the country's humans are no longer amused and fears of the rabbits breeding humans into irrelevance have soared. Well, humans do have a ridiculously small litter size, at least from the rabbits' point of view. My somewhat more in-depth review, for anyone who cares, is on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

>107 dustydigger: Too bad that Cornell is not too interested in adding more to his series (or so it seems) - I'd love to see more of that one. And St Mary can get a bit silly now and then but the series is fun.

Took a side road from F&SF to visit The Hunchback of Notre Dame, now reading Starfarers.

>109 AnnieMod: My impression was that it's the publisher who wasn't interested.

>108 rocketjk: Great review! I need to read this one.

I've finished reading and posted a review for The Bridge of Lost Desire, thus completing a full series reading project over four volumes. Before going on to repeat that feat with Clarke's 3001, I'm going to detour into some pulp horror (under an sf imprint) in the form of The Adventures of Jules de Grandin.

>111 Stevil2001: Huh? That's even more of a shame then :( Hopefully one day we will see more in the series though.

>114 AnnieMod: Found the blog post where he announced it: https://www.paulcornell.com/2017/10/the-future-of-the-shadow-police/

I actually haven't read these yet, but I've never read a book by Cornell I haven't liked.

>115 Stevil2001: Well, there is still hope (maybe?) :) I will patiently wait (and you should read them :) )

>108 rocketjk: I enjoyed The constant rabbit as well. I don't know anyone of very conservative political leanings who has read it; I wonder if they would enjoy it as much as I did.

>117 karenb: Interesting question.

Finished Shards of Earth. A decent Space Opera. The characterisation and world-building are sketchy but acceptable, but the real problem is sheer bulk. If 150 – 200 pages of extraneous flab had been trimmed off it could have been a really tight and pacy novel. So, a reasonable read with judicious skimming, but I probably won’t be picking up the next doorstopper instalment (why is everything a trilogy these days?).
As a complete contrast I’m also reading Jorges Luis Borges: Collected Fictions. Not all strictly SF&F, but each one an absolute masterclass in choosing the exact words to convey a precise image or idea, and of course many stories contain elements of the surreal/magic-realism.