Recent reading

[luzula]

Embassytown by China Miéville
For my fannish bookclub. This book was a bit al dente in the beginning--I had to slow down and chew properly, because of the density of the language/worldbuilding. But it paid off. This book is idea-driven science fiction, and its strengths are: great worldbuilding with aliens who feel alien, good writing, good what's-gonna-happen-next plotting. Weaknesses: I didn't connect with the characters much. As discussed in the book club meeting, it's possible to poke holes in the worldbuilding, but we didn't really want to, because it was cool. This is not my favorite Miéville, though--I enjoyed both The City & the City and Railsea more than this one.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
I feel like everyone else has already read this, but yeah, everyone who recced it was right: I really enjoyed it. Yeah. Read it if you haven't already. Great writing, and I felt the emotional impact of it, too.

Comments

[frayadjacent]

It seems like you've read a lot of Miéville -- I've only read Perdido Street Station, which I enjoyed but I dimly recall you didn't care for much. I felt about it a lot like what you say about Embassytown -- slow start, cool worldbuilding, great plotting once it got going, and very idea-driven (I felt that the whole book was about marxist dialectics, which I was studying at the time, so I loved it, but I never wrote about it and now I only vaguely recall why I thought that). But I also didn't connect to the characters that much, and when I started Iron Council (the Miéville book that all my lefty SF-reading RL friends like best) I was like, "ugh, another dude main character" and got like 20 pages in.

As usual, I'm adding this post to my "books to read" memories. :D

[luzula]

It was a long time since I read Perdido Street Station, so I can't quite compare it to the others and have no memory of whether or not it is about marxist dialectics. *g* I remember the woman with a beetle for a head, and something about a soul-sucking monster? Overall I think it was a bit too gritty for me.

I have in fact not read any more of Miéville than the ones I've mentioned. Iron Council is vaguely on my to-read list. In fact the protagonist of Embassytown is female, but really she could be changed to male and I wouldn't notice. It's weird. I just didn't get any sense of what gender she was, which is not necessarily a bad thing, except that I suspect that it's because she felt like a thin character overall, with not much of an actual personality. Anyway, I do recommend both The City & the City and Railsea if you're looking to read more Miéville.

[frayadjacent]

cool, thank you for the recs! :D