Recent reading
Nov. 1st, 2018 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaI'm behind on my book posts, so...
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (2016, audiobook, #2 of the Wayfarers series)
This has a much more coherent plot than the first one, which felt more like an episodic sci-fi TV series. I enjoyed it a lot! The two alternating stories work well together, and the audiobook reader was good. It's a restful book to read, in the sense that all the main characters are fundamentally decent people. Like, you're just getting worried that someone is getting tattooed while they're on drugs at a party, when the tattoo artist reassures you that of course they would never tattoo anyone without proper consent, but this species sheds their skin often, so the tattoo won't be permanent. Not that there isn't tension in the story (especially Jane's part), but there's still a bedrock of decency and humanity (if you apply that last word to AI:s and aliens as well).
Renskötarkvinnor och livet i de sista rajderna by Lilian Ryd (2013, only in Swedish)
Title means "Reindeer-tending women and life in the last rajds". A "rajd" is not a raid, as you might think, but a train of tame raindeer that carry your things (in the summer) or pull them on sleds (in the winter) while the main reindeer herd migrates between forest and mountains over the year. This kind of Sami nomadic life doesn't exist anymore in Sweden, but ebbed out in the 60's and 70's. Nowadays reindeer are tended with trucks, snowmobiles and helicopters. The book is a series of in-depth interviews with (mostly) women who lived this kind of life. The focus is on the details of everyday life, and it's just a lovely book overall that makes you feel really close to these women. And kind of amazed at the condition that they are in now, in their eighties and nineties, after having lived a large part of their life on foot and on skis. Most of us sure won't age that well.
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers (2016, audiobook, #2 of the Wayfarers series)
This has a much more coherent plot than the first one, which felt more like an episodic sci-fi TV series. I enjoyed it a lot! The two alternating stories work well together, and the audiobook reader was good. It's a restful book to read, in the sense that all the main characters are fundamentally decent people. Like, you're just getting worried that someone is getting tattooed while they're on drugs at a party, when the tattoo artist reassures you that of course they would never tattoo anyone without proper consent, but this species sheds their skin often, so the tattoo won't be permanent. Not that there isn't tension in the story (especially Jane's part), but there's still a bedrock of decency and humanity (if you apply that last word to AI:s and aliens as well).
Renskötarkvinnor och livet i de sista rajderna by Lilian Ryd (2013, only in Swedish)
Title means "Reindeer-tending women and life in the last rajds". A "rajd" is not a raid, as you might think, but a train of tame raindeer that carry your things (in the summer) or pull them on sleds (in the winter) while the main reindeer herd migrates between forest and mountains over the year. This kind of Sami nomadic life doesn't exist anymore in Sweden, but ebbed out in the 60's and 70's. Nowadays reindeer are tended with trucks, snowmobiles and helicopters. The book is a series of in-depth interviews with (mostly) women who lived this kind of life. The focus is on the details of everyday life, and it's just a lovely book overall that makes you feel really close to these women. And kind of amazed at the condition that they are in now, in their eighties and nineties, after having lived a large part of their life on foot and on skis. Most of us sure won't age that well.
