Recent reading
Dec. 3rd, 2016 05:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaForty Thousand in Gehenna by C J Cherryh
For my fannish book club; my choice. Huh, this was unusual. You start reading and think it's going to be one thing, then it skips in time and becomes something else, and something else again. It is, among other things, about: colonizing a new planet, first contact with aliens, clones, gender, communicating and living with aliens, and anthropology and the question of whether or not to intervene in another culture. Also toward the end it's a take on the dragon-companion trope. The clone thing is different from most clone narratives: this one is about people who are perfectly happy to be brain-programmed clones, who end up giving birth to children who grow up without the brain-programming, and the clones being utterly bewildered when they parent their kids. A lot of the book is more driven by world-building and and the story of cultural change than by characters we connect to, but in the last half of the book I connected more to the characters (there is an anthropologist going native).
Mina drömmars stad by Per-Anders Fogelström (in English as City of My Dreams), audiobook
Recommended by a colleague. I guess this is part of the Swedish literary canon? It's set in 1860's-1880's working-class Stockholm. I liked the characters fine, but I also kind of got the feeling that they were a vehicle for the author to show you the historical setting. Which was fine, there was a lot of stuff I didn't know about the time period, and it was interesting. Will probably listen to more in the series, since I liked the reader.
For my fannish book club; my choice. Huh, this was unusual. You start reading and think it's going to be one thing, then it skips in time and becomes something else, and something else again. It is, among other things, about: colonizing a new planet, first contact with aliens, clones, gender, communicating and living with aliens, and anthropology and the question of whether or not to intervene in another culture. Also toward the end it's a take on the dragon-companion trope. The clone thing is different from most clone narratives: this one is about people who are perfectly happy to be brain-programmed clones, who end up giving birth to children who grow up without the brain-programming, and the clones being utterly bewildered when they parent their kids. A lot of the book is more driven by world-building and and the story of cultural change than by characters we connect to, but in the last half of the book I connected more to the characters (there is an anthropologist going native).
Mina drömmars stad by Per-Anders Fogelström (in English as City of My Dreams), audiobook
Recommended by a colleague. I guess this is part of the Swedish literary canon? It's set in 1860's-1880's working-class Stockholm. I liked the characters fine, but I also kind of got the feeling that they were a vehicle for the author to show you the historical setting. Which was fine, there was a lot of stuff I didn't know about the time period, and it was interesting. Will probably listen to more in the series, since I liked the reader.
