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Recent reading
Jun. 19th, 2019 07:04 pmHave been out in the forest for five days, now home for a few days to regroup. Then I'll visit some friends over midsummer, and then it's time for more forest surveys. Forest companies, here I come...
The Invisible Valley by (2018, original in Chinese)
For my fannish book club, my choice. One of the book club participants described this as reading a dense literary book that you had been assigned in high school. My high school experience was not like that, but I do agree that the book was rather dense and not a quick read. The book is about a teenager placed on a rubber farm during the Chinese cultural revolution. He gets a job herding cows and meets a family of poly woodcutters and gets involved with them. Based on the blurb, I had expected there to be more SFF content (there is talk of mysterious serpents waking), but there was not that much. I appreciated the setting—a while ago in book club we read a YA SF book set in China, but the China was terribly pasted on. That is definitely not the case here, and it was interesting to get a picture of life under Maoism. The protagonist is not a committed communist, but neither is he a dissident: he's just trying to get by. Funny, usually I really enjoy nature description, and there's a lot of it in this book, but here I wasn't that into it.
Blackfish City by Sam J Miller (2018)
Also for fannish book club. This, OTOH, was a quick read. I enjoyed it! I had not expected it to be an animal companion story, though. I had questions about the worldbuilding (how can it be cheaper to live on a city entirely constructed out at sea than on land, even with sea level rise? Where do they grow the grains for those noodles?) but if I suppressed that, I liked the rest of it. I did think ( spoilers )
The Invisible Valley by (2018, original in Chinese)
For my fannish book club, my choice. One of the book club participants described this as reading a dense literary book that you had been assigned in high school. My high school experience was not like that, but I do agree that the book was rather dense and not a quick read. The book is about a teenager placed on a rubber farm during the Chinese cultural revolution. He gets a job herding cows and meets a family of poly woodcutters and gets involved with them. Based on the blurb, I had expected there to be more SFF content (there is talk of mysterious serpents waking), but there was not that much. I appreciated the setting—a while ago in book club we read a YA SF book set in China, but the China was terribly pasted on. That is definitely not the case here, and it was interesting to get a picture of life under Maoism. The protagonist is not a committed communist, but neither is he a dissident: he's just trying to get by. Funny, usually I really enjoy nature description, and there's a lot of it in this book, but here I wasn't that into it.
Blackfish City by Sam J Miller (2018)
Also for fannish book club. This, OTOH, was a quick read. I enjoyed it! I had not expected it to be an animal companion story, though. I had questions about the worldbuilding (how can it be cheaper to live on a city entirely constructed out at sea than on land, even with sea level rise? Where do they grow the grains for those noodles?) but if I suppressed that, I liked the rest of it. I did think ( spoilers )
