Recent reading

[luzula]

Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison
For my fannish book club. Everybody including me thought this was a very readable and enjoyable feel-good book! Which I pretty much expected, having read various reviews of it in my reading circle. I'm sure I could quibble about various things, and in general I'm still tired of fantasy monarchies, but whatever. Both the book overall and the main character were so likeable that I just wanted to enjoy it.

Did anyone understand what role the Parliament filled? There was one, right? But it was kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it, and the actual decisions seemed to be made by the emperor and his Witnesses.

Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (original in French, read in Swedish)
For book-club-at-work. Wikipedia says that Balzac is one of the founders of realism as a literary movement, but I thought this read kind of like a soap opera? Exaggerated characters, sudden reveals, situations that seemed engineered for maximum drama. My other reaction to this was: augh, class society, it sucks.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

I've only read The Goblin Emperor the once and it was a few months ago, but I feel like the Parliament was making decisions about stuff -- like, the Emperor had to go through them on the bridge plot. I'm not sure I walked away with a good sense of which things the Emperor could make arbitrary decisions about vs. which were Parliamentary, though.

[luzula]

But that was the Corazhas/Council of Witnesses. That isn't the same as the Parliament, which has a House of Commons and a House of Blood (like the House of Lords in the UK, I guess). This is mentioned in passing in Chapter 5. But we never hear about Maia having anything to do with them.

[desireearmfeldt]

Oh, huh, right; I was getting the names of things mixed up. So it's sort of like having three houses of parliament (or, I guess, they're supposed to be the analogue of the Cabinet).

Maybe the parliament deals with lower-level stuff? Obviously I don't remember whether the book said anything about it. (Perhaps this will be explained in sequels; I have the impression the intent is for there to be sequels. :) )