Reading Stuff
Jul. 16th, 2021 01:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kitewithfish- I'm still reading Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet and, oh, man, it's a lovely read - I'm really appreciating doing some late in life queer reading that really leans into the concepts of ambiguity and complex relationships. It's deeply enjoyable.
- Started reading Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard based on a glowing Twitter recommendation that compared it to the West Wing but in a fantasy setting. It's, apparently, slightly in a series but seems to stand alone really well, and I'm finding it to be a book that's very much about the experience of a soothing setting and interesting characters with a bedrock solid relationship between that is maybe blossoming into more? It's 900 pages and it was $7 on Amazon by a Canadian author who seems to mostly be making cheese while writing novels.
- Recently read A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine - great book, interesting interstellar view of how civilizations eat their citizens and what it means to be part of a larger whole. Fantastically alien aliens. I didn't enjoy it *quite* as much as my re-read of A Memory Called Empire, the first book in this series, but I think it will hold up to a good re-read.
- I've been on a kick recently for reading books that explore empire and propaganda and systems of oppression via the metaphor of a hive mind. Some of these, like Desolation Called Peace, do this thru comparing several modes of empires that work via technology and biology and we see thru the eyes of several people in different competing cultures. Also excellent books in this vein - Mexican Gothic, Ancillary Justice, Axiom's End, and some elements of the MurderBot series.
- Started reading Hands of the Emperor by Victoria Goddard based on a glowing Twitter recommendation that compared it to the West Wing but in a fantasy setting. It's, apparently, slightly in a series but seems to stand alone really well, and I'm finding it to be a book that's very much about the experience of a soothing setting and interesting characters with a bedrock solid relationship between that is maybe blossoming into more? It's 900 pages and it was $7 on Amazon by a Canadian author who seems to mostly be making cheese while writing novels.
- Recently read A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine - great book, interesting interstellar view of how civilizations eat their citizens and what it means to be part of a larger whole. Fantastically alien aliens. I didn't enjoy it *quite* as much as my re-read of A Memory Called Empire, the first book in this series, but I think it will hold up to a good re-read.
- I've been on a kick recently for reading books that explore empire and propaganda and systems of oppression via the metaphor of a hive mind. Some of these, like Desolation Called Peace, do this thru comparing several modes of empires that work via technology and biology and we see thru the eyes of several people in different competing cultures. Also excellent books in this vein - Mexican Gothic, Ancillary Justice, Axiom's End, and some elements of the MurderBot series.
