Bookish (And Not So Bookish) Thoughts are hosted at Bookishly Boisterous.
1. I am a hoarder. It's not completely new news to me, but I was trying to get rid of more of my boxes of stuff, and...I was just getting so emotional, I couldn't. Intellectually, I know that I don't still need that red wig I used for a Halloween costume ten years ago or an entire box of notebooks from my school years or all the Disney figurines from every birthday cake I've ever had, but I can't throw it away. Not now. Not yet.
2. Finished listening to A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. It chronicles Sidra, formerly Lovelace, an AI illegally downloaded into a humanesque body, and Pepper, formerly Jane23, a refugee born and bred to be a factory slave. Basically, this book was written for me. I'm all about character development, and just enough plot to pull that along. Plus, space. And aliens. The only downside was that I was more into one story than the other (Pepper/Jane's fwiw), so it was kinda like A Song of Ice and Fire where I'm just like, can we skip to Tyrion already? Harder to do with an audiobook. But I've already gone back to read the first book set in the same universe, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. And apparently a third book comes out this year! Expecting great things.
3. Ursula K. Le Guin passed away this week. I'm reflecting on my experiences with her books, and The Dispossessed has to be my favorite, although I read the more popular The Left Hand of Darkness and The Wizard of Earthsea first. Left Hand of Darkness was a dark and confusing book to me at the time (middle-school), although I liked the idea of visiting and exploring strange new worlds, this was one of my first non-Star Trek experiences with that. The idea of a race that changes gender was also new to me at the time, but probably what I liked most about the book--I loved that you didn't have to be stuck with just one gender all the time. The Wizard of Earthsea, I read in high school, and at first, I was, like, okay, whoop-de-doo, here we go with the underdog boy urchin wizard protagonist again, but then we got to the end. And that end blew. my. mind. Then, I read The Tombs of Atuan, which I liked a lot better. And then in grad school, I read The Dispossessed. And just. Everything came together. The good/evil ambiguity. The idea of utopia. The specifics of the thought-experiment in which a utopia without individual possessions is carried out...Le Guin didn't answer any questions. She showed us our good and our bad, and she didn't tell us that we had to be good, right, perfect--if anything, she problematized the idea that good even existed by itself. And while I'm maybe not there yet, I am immensely grateful for her work.
1. I am a hoarder. It's not completely new news to me, but I was trying to get rid of more of my boxes of stuff, and...I was just getting so emotional, I couldn't. Intellectually, I know that I don't still need that red wig I used for a Halloween costume ten years ago or an entire box of notebooks from my school years or all the Disney figurines from every birthday cake I've ever had, but I can't throw it away. Not now. Not yet.
2. Finished listening to A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. It chronicles Sidra, formerly Lovelace, an AI illegally downloaded into a humanesque body, and Pepper, formerly Jane23, a refugee born and bred to be a factory slave. Basically, this book was written for me. I'm all about character development, and just enough plot to pull that along. Plus, space. And aliens. The only downside was that I was more into one story than the other (Pepper/Jane's fwiw), so it was kinda like A Song of Ice and Fire where I'm just like, can we skip to Tyrion already? Harder to do with an audiobook. But I've already gone back to read the first book set in the same universe, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. And apparently a third book comes out this year! Expecting great things.3. Ursula K. Le Guin passed away this week. I'm reflecting on my experiences with her books, and The Dispossessed has to be my favorite, although I read the more popular The Left Hand of Darkness and The Wizard of Earthsea first. Left Hand of Darkness was a dark and confusing book to me at the time (middle-school), although I liked the idea of visiting and exploring strange new worlds, this was one of my first non-Star Trek experiences with that. The idea of a race that changes gender was also new to me at the time, but probably what I liked most about the book--I loved that you didn't have to be stuck with just one gender all the time. The Wizard of Earthsea, I read in high school, and at first, I was, like, okay, whoop-de-doo, here we go with the underdog boy urchin wizard protagonist again, but then we got to the end. And that end blew. my. mind. Then, I read The Tombs of Atuan, which I liked a lot better. And then in grad school, I read The Dispossessed. And just. Everything came together. The good/evil ambiguity. The idea of utopia. The specifics of the thought-experiment in which a utopia without individual possessions is carried out...Le Guin didn't answer any questions. She showed us our good and our bad, and she didn't tell us that we had to be good, right, perfect--if anything, she problematized the idea that good even existed by itself. And while I'm maybe not there yet, I am immensely grateful for her work.
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