Roadside Picnic

Have been wanting to read this since falling in love with Tarkovsky' "Stalker" and found it just as gripping as the movie (though the similarities are less pronounced than you may expect). Everything that comes out of Roadside Picnic has such a singular mood (run down, labor oriented, darkly humorous, pessimistic about if technology is improving society), and the book does a great job sketching its world just sharply enough to ground the reader while rarely adding uneeded specificity. Everyone is screwed and scrappy and only seeing half of how they fit into the industrial machine they power.

I don't know enough about Soviet fiction to speak to what histories this book is in conversation with. The analogies that spring to mind feel both too obvious to be interesting and too flat for how ambiguous so much about The Zone and it's impact remain. Will be interested to see what …

I really loved this book, and it's hard for me to put into words why. A lot of it has to do with the atmosphere and the prose. But I also loved how the setting is almost a character itself and loved seeing how all the other characters related to it.

It's interesting to see a story that focuses on how humanity deals with the effects of an alien visit. It's even more interesting to see the lengths people go to in order to make money off of it, even devoting their whole lives to the dangerous lifestyle. (I feel like there's a comment on capitalism in here somewhere.)

There were so many great lines in this book, so many intelligent observations and speculations. The authors did a fantastic job working with ideas and getting them across in both figurative and colloquial language. The voice of the novel was just …