Yes, that’s the one.
Great. Definitely the kind of story I like.
Thanks for the suggestion.
The Southern Reach trilogy is awesome! One of my faves. For me, definitely a case where the book(s) far better than the movie. VanderMeer also edited a huge collection of weird short stories, called, appropriately enough, The Weird. Highly recommend it.
@Vincent_Vincent, have you read Algernon Blackwood’s longish short story The Willows? Has elements of folk and weird and even Lovecraftian horror. Another fave. Search for free downloads of it.
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I didn’t realize there was another book! I’ll be checking it out…although I should probably reread the others first, to remember where we left off. 
I’m only about 30 pages in and I can already tell it is one of the best I’ve read lately. (It is already well on its way to make it to my top ten or so.)
. . . . . . . . . . .
Thank you for your supplemental suggestions @JimRac, I will definitely check these out too.
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Really sorry cannot help. (Needed 20 characters)
I would also like to interrupt this conversation to say that I have nothing to add.
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Just finished reading Annihilation.
Pretty cool. I’ll be reading the other books of the series.
I found some of the descriptions vague and hard to grasp – especially near the end … (could very well be that English is not my first language ; although usually it ain’t a problem) –, but for everything else I really liked it.
Thanks again for the suggestion. 
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It’s kind of like that for native English speakers, too. I think it’s intentional, a way of showing the protagonist’s altered mental state as they become part of Area X .
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seek out Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti and Robert Aickman.
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Thanks. I just read The lottery.
It made me think of an old movie I saw a long time ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it was actually inspired by it.
It takes place in a remote village. There is an x number of people in the village and that number never changes. When there is a newcomer they do a draw and hang whoever “won”. (The person is actually happy and honored to be the one hanged. – And the said newcomer, unaware up to this point, with good reason freaks out. lol)
Ah, Shirley Jackson –
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
– the splendid opening of The Haunting of Hill House
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Come September/October, I choose a horror book to read. This year, I selected Koji Suzuki’s Ring. Unfurling more like an addictive detective mystery than a proper horror novel, I’ve ripped through most of this thing in a day and a half. Quite the contrast to last year when I read House of Leaves, which I didn’t finish until after Thanksgiving.
Currently taking a second language course which revealed I do not have a good learning process. It has resulted in me reading a bunch of books on studying for language learning from the old Marilyn Lewis How to Study Foreign Languages (1999), Donald & Kneale’s Study Skills for Language Students (2001), Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel’s Make It Stick (2014), Nation’s Teaching Vocabulary (2008), Dehaene’s How We Learn (2020), Bryfonski and Mackey’s The Art and Science of Language Teaching (2024). Those last two require some reverse engineering as their authors’ focus is on teaching not learning per se.
Oh yes, and the course textbooks. Together with various related texts from dictionaries to grammar books (with an alternative presentation/organisation)
Lewis’s book pre-dates the ubiquitious social media, good forum software, search engines (especially those tailored to the target language), Zoom/Teams/etc video calls. Donald & Kneale’s omits any reference to langauge learning — it’s more a study skills book like Cotterell’s Study Skills Handbook or Bryman’s Social Research Methods, which equally do not mention language learning.
TL;DR in other words no time to read anything else!
May I ask what “second language” you are learning?
저는 한국어를 배워요. (Discourse is broken with the 20 character rule as that sentence has more than the minimum number.)
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@reepicheep Not sure if this is intended, but Discourse splits this string into eleven (if you count the two spaces) graphemes. I doesn’t seem to care if such a grapheme is an “A” or “아”. Both count as one “character”, even if the second is technically composed of two.
Aside from that… 리피치프, 파이팅!
I’ve just started reading Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - confluence of circumstances where a colleague suggested it, and then her name cropped up in some connection with Nano…
So far so good - I like the plain style, but if she mentions ‘Achilles muscles moving under his olive skin’ one more time I might not go very much further.
A.
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Blame Homer. There’s a lot of repetitive description in the original. Believed to be in part to help the audience keep track of who was who, since the epic might have been recited (not read) in several pieces over an extended period.
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