Books I finished reading in June 2024. Another short list this month, but one of them was _long_.
The Rain by Joseph Turkot
Kind of a generic post-apocalyptic story, but told as a first-person narrative and was enjoyable.
Something happened and it started raining and then just never stopped. We're going to set aside even where all the water would have to be coming from to raise the ocean levels as high as described, but fine.
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson is known for his fairly-hard sci-fi. He does a great job of including solid math and physics and then going beyond in a fun way. His work is definitely more challenging to read than much other sci-fi stuff, but that often is because of the richness of his worlds and the accuracy of the science.
I had little information about Anathem before diving in, which I think made it more enjoyable. It's 1000+ pages though, and without the reputation of the author behind it I may have given up after the first couple hundred pages. For a novice author it could easily have been an rambling mess with no coherent story thread, but for Stephenson it tells an interesting story--he just takes his time doing so. He could easily have published it as a trilogy instead but I think that may have made the story inflection points feel more arbitrary.
Anyway, I enjoyed it a lot and it didn't feel like I was slogging through 1000+ pages, it felt like I was walking the path of the story and enjoying the journey.
