I loved The City and The City and found that Mieville explained things pretty well. It's an odd concept, so it has to be clear what's going on, and for me, it was. There was a TV miniseries based on it that was pretty good, too.
If for Neomancer you mean Neuromancer, I seem to recall finding it easy enough to follow. A lot of cyberpunk liked to throw jargon at the reader but the point wasn't to be writing typical SF full of infodumps, it was more like writing a noir or hardboiled crime novel as if it came from that cyberpunk world. Things make sense as you go along. And Neuromancer is more accessible to the average reader than, say, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, or Rudy Rucker's phildickian/cyberpunk books based on principles of mathematics.
I am not really a fan of grimdark because i wasn't a goth or emo kid growing up.
What ever happened to lighter, less killjoy and more hopeful type of fantasy stories like those by David Eddings for example ?
I read Eddings's Belgariad, the original five book series, back as it was coming out. I liked the breeziness of it but didn't bother reading anything more by him because ultimately it felt too lightweight and derivative. Fun for a break from more serious stuff but not interesting enough in its own right to keep me reading more. Same experience as I'd had a few years earlier with Terry Brooks's Shannara. Loved the first book the first time I read it in '77, reread it maybe a year later and was less impressed, never read more. On the other hand, not long after that I read Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen Donaldson, the first of the Covenant books, and found it relentlessly grim and depressing, and didn't like it for that reason. Didn't finish the trilogy until several years later and only because so many people loved it so much I thought I must have been missing something. I needn't have bothered. Haven't read any more Donaldson.
Not sure I've read any of the current grimdark stuff because I don't tend to read modern fantasy. Some of Robert E. Howard's original Conan stories could be pretty grim and dark, and likewise some of Moorcock's Elric. Rereading those has been more of interest to me over the last few years than reading anything new in the genre. I've been meaning to get around to rereading Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books, though with my TBR piles that's not happening any time soon. But I like the old-fashioned approach of those three series. Short stories, some (usually) short novels, books you can dip in and out of, rather than an endless series of thousand-page books.
As for what I'm reading, I haven't been reading much serious SF in the last few years. Between my wife's death a couple years ago and the whole Covid thing, teleworking, etc, I just haven't had the concentration for too much more than stuff like Doctor Who and Star Trek books. But I did read and enjoy Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, a different kind of post-apocalyptic novel. I'll start watching the TV version soon. I've also read Simon Stalenhag's illustrated books Tales From the Loop, Things From the Flood, Electric State, and The Labyrinth. Love the art and the stories are good, too. The Tales From the Loop TV series is outstanding.
