I've started reading again somewhat recently, these are the books I've finished so far:
Foundation (Issac Asimov): More of a story collection than a novel but very engaging, each of the stories are quite different in tone and theme yet Asimov is brilliant at making them all feel part of the same universe. The only story I didn't particularly get along with was the last one, with Hober Mallow, which felt overly convoluted, but the ones preceding it were all terrific in their own ways. I watched the TV series after reading the book and (despite a few terrific performances) it felt shallow, derivative and desperate in comparison. Wheres the show constantly falls back on action, corny dialogue and meaningless technobabble to convince viewers to stick around, Asimov deals with big concepts in an accessible but never dumbed-down way, keeping his stories interesting through an ability to ground his galactic-level events in strong character writing. The TV series tries to fake intelligence but always falls back on the laziest, stupidest devices to pad out its meandering story; Asimov's writing has all the hallmarks of popular genre writing and is confident enough in the quality of his storytelling for its intelligence to emerge naturally.
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Patricia Highsmith): Grabbed this at an airport despite remembering the Minghella film being a bit dull and pleased with itself. Fortunately the novel is much better, no masterpiece but an easy read and relatively low-stakes character piece. Highsmith has a knack for evoking the insouciant, upper-crust culture into which Ripley inveigles himself and finds a nicely conflicting line for her central character between being sympathetic and deplorable. It's not much more than a solid, atmospheric holiday read, but did the job perfectly well.
The Plague (Albert Camus): It's amazing how a novel from almost eighty years ago can capture so many of the same fears, behaviours and paranoias which occurred decades later in the Covid pandemic. Camus' plague might be fictional but his grasp of human behaviour is astonishingly on-point and he paints an incredibly vivid picture of how the city changes throughout the various stages of the plague, and how the myriad characters react to it for both altruism and cynical self-advancement. The optimistic end-note is a bit out of place, as the book feels more like a chronicle than a judgement until that point (as the narrator says) but the book is a remarkable testament to how well-observed writing can stay relevant for decades and how human nature remains the same even as technology and time advances at pace.
