Recent reading

[luzula]

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer (#1 in the Terra Ignota series)
Oh hey, I seem to be first on my flist to read this? I thought everyone would be all over it. Anyway, this is dense, ambitious SF and I enjoyed it a lot. You need to concentrate to pick up what you need, since it throws you right in, but it's not confusing if you pay attention. It's got some really neat ideas about future society which I would love to discuss with people--I found some of them convincing and some of them a bit less so, but hey, if everybody thought exactly like I do then things would be pretty boring. The world and history really does feel rich and thoughtfully developed, and is perhaps a utopia (I'm not sure; the author says it is). The narrator is rather morally ambiguous, and so are a lot of the other characters.

I bet people will have a lot of fun with what the book does with gender. This future world has gender-neutral pronouns and in general doesn't emphasize gender, but the narrator attempts to tell the story in a 19th-century style. But of course he isn't of the 19th century and so his attempts to gender people in an old-fashioned way are...kind of weird. Like, "this character has a female body, but I will call them he because his boss is male, so it will be easier on the reader if they match!" Me: "...not really?" And also there is an imagined reader in the future arguing with the narrator over these (and other) things. I am looking forward to the next book in this series.

(Note to fannish book-club: this would be great to discuss together!)

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (audiobook)
For book-club-at-work. Maybe it wasn't the right choice to listen to this? Or maybe I just wasn't focused enough--this is the kind of book that is very confusing at the beginning and gradually comes together. It's kind of risky writing something like that, because you risk the reader losing interest and finding something else to read instead. In this case I finished it because it was for a book club, but otherwise I probably wouldn't have. Also, it is way depressing.

ETA: Oh, and also I started to listen to Emma Newman's Planetfall, but it didn't stick. Has anyone read it? Should I have kept on?

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I finished Planetfall and you missed nothing.

I'm aiming for a cognitive remission for Palmer & Faulkner. /it's all about me.

[luzula]

Good to know about Planetfall. Hmm, the internet tells me cognitive remission is something about recovering from depression. Is that what you meant, that you don't have the brain for them now?

[jesse_the_k]

Yes, depression is part of the cause for my current cognition-vacation. Other contributors include the full bowl of pills I take every day, plus whatever it was that broke the musical/mathematical part of my brain in the 80s.

I grew up as a brain-in-a-jar. My current inability to follow complex, allusive prose continues to surprise & annoy me.

Because I inhaled that stuff when I was younger: Lessing! Adrienne Rich (poet)! Joyce! Pynchon! John Brunner, Thomas Disch, Samuel Delany! Palmer sounds like a winner.

whine whine whine.

This is why I appreciate your reading logs and notes so much.

[luzula]

Have you found yourself developing other parts of yourself instead?

And whine ahead if you want to, I would totally be frustrated if that happened to me. I am glad you appreciate my booklog though!

[the_antichris]

I I liked Too Like the Lightning but it felt too much like the first part of a story. The worldbuilding and the stuff she was doing with narrative was really interesting, but I needed the second half.

(I was also constantly bracing for Bad Latin, but that was pretty good apart from one annoying case error that I couldn't chalk up to 'everyone speaks Modern Latin now'. And you can tell she's a Renaissance scholar because she did some fun stuff with neo-Latin and language changes.)

[luzula]

Well, it said it was the first part of a series, so I wasn't really expecting a conclusion?

Heh, I really don't know Latin well enough to judge, but I'm glad you weren't thrown out of the book, anyway.