Recent reading

[luzula]

Ooof, I have been really busy (and am still) and I now have a backlog of books to write about:

Lobsters on the Agenda by Naomi Mitchison (1952)
Daily life in a Scottish village, as seen through meetings of various groups, from a choir to a church to a district council. The main character is the district councillor Kate, and together with others she is working to get a village hall, which various religious groups object to. Besides that, there's various other subplots. At times it's almost too mundane, but I love Mitchison's writing and I do like how it all comes together. There's a really lovely conversation at the end where a man proposes to Kate because he thinks that maybe he ought to, and she turns him down, and they both laugh in mutual affection and are relieved that they don't have to get married. Awww.

Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers (audiobook, #3 in the Wayfarers trilogy, 2018)
Maybe I had my expectations set too high by the reviews I've seen, because I did like this a lot but I wasn't blown away by it. It has much less narrative drive than the middle book in the trilogy. For a lot of the book it's curtain-fic set in what's pretty much a utopia, which of course runs into the problem of nothing much happening, though the different strands do come together and there is eventually a plot. Like the other books, it has a lot of heart and I appreciate that, but I think the middle book is better.

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (the revised 2015 version, #1 in the Green Earth trilogy)
About science, politics, and climate change, set in Washington DC. Apparently KSR revised and shortened it because he realized he didn't have to describe that city like he did with settings on Mars. Hee. Anyway, I like this a lot, like I almost always do with KSR's work. It's basically people trying to work within the system to stop climate change.

Arrival and Garh City by Robert Nichols (#1 and #2 in Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai, 1977 and 1978)
This is utopian anthropological SF in the vein of Le Guin's Always Coming Home (there's actually a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to it in ACH). I don't quite know what to make of it, and I find it hard to like. It's fragmentary, like ACH, and that combined with a flat emotionless tone makes it hard for me to connect to it. Also it is obvious that this was not written by Le Guin but by a dude in the '70:s. Exhibit A: the sentence "I was assigned a wife." It's seen through the eyes of four famous male figures from various points in history who are there to visit (any issues with time are basically ignored). I guess there are some interesting elements, but I might skip the next two (they are all really short, though).

Comments

[isis]

Apparently KSR revised and shortened it

Huh. I read it in 2015 and really disliked it! My review:

Meh. Buy a bunch of commas for your dialogue, and don't end your books in the middle (yeah, this is supposed to be the first book of a trilogy, but why not just publish it as one big fat book instead of in bits that don't stand alone?) and I'd like your writing better, Mr. Robinson, because I love what I think is the premise. I just wish it had gone somewhere instead of wandered around aimlessly without commas.

Maybe it's worth rereading the new version.

[luzula]

It is now published as a single book, actually, though since it's still over a thousand pages I'm reading it one part at a time. I can imagine that it benefited from being tightened up.

Have you read any of his other books and have you liked them or not?

[isis]

The first books I remember reading by KSR were the Three Californias books, which I liked a lot (though I only read two of them because that's what my library had) and that led to me reading the Mars Trilogy, which I also liked a lot. I also really loved The Memory of Whiteness, and bits of that stuck in my head long after I'd forgotten what book they were from. (Huh, I ought to read 2312, I guess, because the city of Terminator on Mercury was one of those bits!)

I tried to read The Years of Rice and Salt but got bored early and DNFed. However, later I found out that it's an alternate history with a different New World narrative, which is the sort of thing I really like, so I ought to try it again sometime.

[luzula]

I DNF:ed Galileo's Dream, which I found boring, but I've liked pretty much every other book of his I've read (I have very few memories of The Years of Rice and Salt, though, which is maybe because I read it long ago).

Huh, maybe I should check out The Memory of Whiteness.

[jesse_the_k]

I have a fuzzy memory of searching for the Nichols—in my university’s card catalog drawers, naturally—so I’m glad to hear that failure to find it was not a big loss. “Assigned a wife”! Yeah, no.

I bounced on Chambers’ 1 & 2. Struck me as checklist writing: political, personal, sociological points were brainstormed, then she ticked them off as she wrote.

[luzula]

We had a book club around Always Coming Home a while ago, and one of the members loaned me the Nichols books as being relevant in the same genre. Another utopian book I keep meaning to read is Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright, have you read that? It's a brick though.

[chestnut_pod]

Lobsters on the Agenda sounds like a great one to recommend to my (scholar of 20th century Scotland) grandmother, thank you!

[luzula]

I hope she enjoys it! : )

[skygiants]

I definitely think the middle book of the Wayfarers trilogy is ... most effectively like a book? Record of a Spaceborn Few is not really very like a book, in that, as you say, it does not have a plot, really, like at all. But the worldbuilding experiment that it's doing and the themes that it's exploring are still enough to make it have a punch, for me.

[luzula]

It's not like I disliked it! I think it's just that so many people had been praising it to the skies that I got my expectations up a little too high. : )