Currently Reading:
I've been listening to this audiobook for about three weeks, and I've still got 5 discs left of 17. It's a tome, to say the least. I've got complicated feelings about this Enlightenment-centered future heterotopia (a term I learned from my class on utopian sf in grad school that feels most appropriate; essentially future utopias and dystopias coexist). It feels ostentatiously performative yet satisfyingly intellectual. It's got, at current count: an "18th century" preface, an unreliable narrator, Latin, literal Utopians, Masons, living toys, economic and political intrigue, and shifting gender pronouns and racial/ideological markers. The gender pronouns are the most deliberately performative and distracting element, far more noticeable than the consistent "she's" in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch books or the nonbinary pronouns ("xyr" "they") in Becky Chambers' Galactic Commons books. It doesn't bother me that the narrator is unclear on gender so much as the frequent vacillating on characters' genders composes a LOT of narrative, but it serves the author's point that even though the world is supposed to be beyond gender with the neutral "they" for everyone, gender, or perception of gender, still affects how people in these societies relate to each other.
I'm almost done with the first of the Witcher books, translated from the Polish, which the Witcher video games are based on. The book is everything I love about the game: a series of interconnected short stories with the Witcher facing and defeating a plethora of Eastern European dark fairytale creatures. Even better, although similar in tone and content, most of the stories I've read in the book so far are not exactly the same as the adventures depicted in the game. This book even features some dark, twisted versions of Beauty and the Beast and Snow White. I'm not sure what's so compelling about the fantasy world of the Witcher, perhaps the comforting familiarity of a Western-style fantasy punctuated by unexpected (in the United States of America) creatures like strigas and bruxas, or perhaps the comforting cynicism that, even in fantasy, work is sometimes scarce, government is often unjust, and climate change threatens to obliterate existence. True, adventurous, fun!
And the reason I haven't been posting as often is, I've been putting these books to good use...hope it pays off soon!
Comments