![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading Meme
Nov. 6th, 2013 12:33 pmI finally have books to talk about again! Yay!
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie was great. Not perfect - the ending is a touch clunky and abrupt - but really interesting and original, and proper military far future SF, but with a focus on women and characterization. Or, well, it's probably a focus on women. One of the minor conceits of the book is that the native language (and culture) of most of the characters isn't gendered, so everyone is almost always "she" and "her" by default, though some of them are explicitly mentioned to be men and with many it's just unknown.
A lot of the reviews over on Goodreads seem to really sallivate over this gender-angle as somehow mindblowing, which makes me disappointed for SF readers and the human race. Did Ursula K. LeGuin not happen, hello? It's a mildly interesting beat of worldbuilding, and it's fun to read and to puzzle through and think about the narrators perspective, and what she's missing and what she's picking up and why - the mix of language and culture and her own background (as an ancient, once vastly powerful, all-knowing ship's AI now trapped in a human body) but gender isn't really, actually a theme in the book, you know? That removed perspective is fascinating though - watching her watch several cultures, including her native one, and considering how true or how skewed the perspective we get is made the book for me. Also, there's a pretty good villain.
The Abominable, by Dan Simmons - I really enjoyed The Terror, which was also about doomed expeditions trapped in ice in great, great detail, but this one kind of sucked. Simmons is still a competent writer, even when he's going off the deep end, so it's readable, but the ending is absurd, possibly downright bizarre. The super-detailed mountain climbing stuff isn't nearly as interesting as the minituae of 19th c. arctic exploration logistics in the Terror and the characters are pretty boring, which is a shame. Just a waste of an awesome concept.
One Summer: America 1927, by Bill Bryson. Bryson is just fun to read, as always, and he's got an eye for what's interesting and weird and speaks to what I would like to know, in terms of getting a sense of the spirit of a time or place. This is pretty flimsy as a history book, I suppose, but it's solidly entertaining and I learned a lot. It's also kind of a primer on several things I had heard of but did not actually ever have solidly in my head, like who Babe Ruth was. (Let's put it this way - It would have only guessed about fifty/fifty that he was a baseball player.)
Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie was great. Not perfect - the ending is a touch clunky and abrupt - but really interesting and original, and proper military far future SF, but with a focus on women and characterization. Or, well, it's probably a focus on women. One of the minor conceits of the book is that the native language (and culture) of most of the characters isn't gendered, so everyone is almost always "she" and "her" by default, though some of them are explicitly mentioned to be men and with many it's just unknown.
A lot of the reviews over on Goodreads seem to really sallivate over this gender-angle as somehow mindblowing, which makes me disappointed for SF readers and the human race. Did Ursula K. LeGuin not happen, hello? It's a mildly interesting beat of worldbuilding, and it's fun to read and to puzzle through and think about the narrators perspective, and what she's missing and what she's picking up and why - the mix of language and culture and her own background (as an ancient, once vastly powerful, all-knowing ship's AI now trapped in a human body) but gender isn't really, actually a theme in the book, you know? That removed perspective is fascinating though - watching her watch several cultures, including her native one, and considering how true or how skewed the perspective we get is made the book for me. Also, there's a pretty good villain.
The Abominable, by Dan Simmons - I really enjoyed The Terror, which was also about doomed expeditions trapped in ice in great, great detail, but this one kind of sucked. Simmons is still a competent writer, even when he's going off the deep end, so it's readable, but the ending is absurd, possibly downright bizarre. The super-detailed mountain climbing stuff isn't nearly as interesting as the minituae of 19th c. arctic exploration logistics in the Terror and the characters are pretty boring, which is a shame. Just a waste of an awesome concept.
One Summer: America 1927, by Bill Bryson. Bryson is just fun to read, as always, and he's got an eye for what's interesting and weird and speaks to what I would like to know, in terms of getting a sense of the spirit of a time or place. This is pretty flimsy as a history book, I suppose, but it's solidly entertaining and I learned a lot. It's also kind of a primer on several things I had heard of but did not actually ever have solidly in my head, like who Babe Ruth was. (Let's put it this way - It would have only guessed about fifty/fifty that he was a baseball player.)
