Annihilation is a really great book, and you should read it before the movie adaptation starring Natalie Portman comes out in February. I zoomed through the 195 pages in three sittings; it's not a breezy read, but it's tough to put down. Annihilation is deeply weird and profoundly unsettling in ways that I haven't experienced from a book in a long time, if ever. The closest comparison I can make to the experience of reading this book is watching the first hour or so of Seven, when the depth of John Doe's depraved and elliptical, but chillingly logical, punishments are slowly revealed, mixed with a healthy dose of Lost (I haven't seen Lost, but you know, you pick up plenty of the sense of it by just existing). Now imagine that John Doe is NATURE. /bong hit
An group of five unnamed women -- the biologist (our narrator), the psychologist, the surveyor, the anthropologist, and the linguist -- are making the twelfth expedition into Area X, part of the Southern Reach that experienced an Event thirty years ago, and has been entirely isolated since then. The previous 11 expeditions went to complete shit in entirely different ways, and, spoiler alert, this one doesn't go so smoothly either. It's an amazing book, and I can't wait to read the second and third entries in the trilogy.
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