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Mimi is a 'waste girl', a member of the lowest caste on Silicon Isle.
Located …
Of course, considering that he came from a young country that had been founded only about 250 years ago, it was understandable that his own culinary culture had progressed but a few steps beyond tossing the meat over an open fire after skinning the kill.
— Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan
🔥🇺🇸🔥
To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything
Mulan meets …
I love this book for being an alternate history that's not fixated on Hitler. I love it for how carefully it weaves its fantasy into the real history it's anchored in - enough so that as soon as I finished reading it I had to read up on the actual Red Turban rebellion and see how many of the characters were close adaptations. I love it for how much desperate, furious, and yes sometimes joyous life its main characters have. I love it for how viscerally it evokes some incredibly hard times (though be warned, it's a heavy read because of that). I love it for how utterly unsympathetic all the "big people" are.
Around the middle of the book the weight of Fate on both the plot and multiple characters' obsessions started to feel stifling, but the more the narrator complicated that idea the more this stopped being a …
I love this book for being an alternate history that's not fixated on Hitler. I love it for how carefully it weaves its fantasy into the real history it's anchored in - enough so that as soon as I finished reading it I had to read up on the actual Red Turban rebellion and see how many of the characters were close adaptations. I love it for how much desperate, furious, and yes sometimes joyous life its main characters have. I love it for how viscerally it evokes some incredibly hard times (though be warned, it's a heavy read because of that). I love it for how utterly unsympathetic all the "big people" are.
Around the middle of the book the weight of Fate on both the plot and multiple characters' obsessions started to feel stifling, but the more the narrator complicated that idea the more this stopped being a problem.
@compostablespork No worries! I have been finding that threading here takes a bit of time to get used to, because it's in that territory of being similar to but not quite like mastodon's, so sometimes I make wrong assumptions. But anyway, yes I did mean Origin. That first section sounds like rehashing arguments that I'm reasonably familiar with (and you clearly already were too), but it's the added detail I'm interested in because I haven't read anything book length on the subject.
@compostablespork Ooh, I'm very interested to hear what you make of this book. The premise seems both intriguing and fraught.
Content warning section 1 spoilers
@mouse Having finished section 1, I have to say the rest is not as intensely grim as the extremely visceral descriptions of desperate hunger in the very first chapter. Not even the burning of the monastery, though I suppose I'll soon see where Zhu ends up after that.
@mouse Good to know. In fairness, the blurb in the book listing is pretty much what will happen in the first chapter, so I shouldn't have been so blindsided.
To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything
Mulan meets …
CW: the first chapter is super grim. Well written, I think I'm going to like this book, but it's so grim that I do wish I'd had some warning.
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Content warning SFFBookClub
To possess the Mandate of Heaven, the female monk Zhu will do anything
Mulan meets …
Time to start the September #SFFBookClub pick!
@Tak@reading.taks.garden Thank you! There's a complete list at docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UW-L9gSLjk8cNaMviI3veGv7ScQa4eEcA5sFeZd7fJM/edit?usp=sharing but tbh bookwyrm is a much nicer format for it. I might start a companion list of potential future candidates.
Once, Lovelace had eyes and ears everywhere. She was a ship's artificial intelligence system - …
I absolutely adored this book. I realise that part of this is that it was a perfect little escape while I was stuck at home with covid, but I do also think it's really wonderful.
It has some similar strengths to the first in the series, in that it's mostly about the relationships between a few outcast characters that become a chosen family and just happen to be in space. But if anything I think it's better written (I guess Chambers getting into her stride with book 2), and benefits from being a more focussed story of a smaller number of characters. And has some weightier things to say about embodiment, the tension between fitting in and freedom, and loyalty & reciprocity.
I am excited about the rest of the series.
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Once, Lovelace had eyes and ears everywhere. She was a ship's artificial intelligence system - possessing a personality and very …
Nearly twenty years after Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf—and fifty years after the translation that …
I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in …
I guess in two halves. This translation is 97% wonderful, with the other 3% being occasional grating patches. It is the most alive and readable version I've read, and I think the stylistic choices Headley made all make sense, from the repeated exhortations of "bro" to the ways she works to treat the women of the story--especially Grendel's mother, but not only her--better than other translations I've read. Using the techniques of heavy alliteration and kenning compounds with all modern language really brings home how driving they can be, and the originals must have been when their vocabulary was current. Sometimes "bro" and "daddy" felt over-repeated, and then started to grate, but that really is an occasional glitch in a wonderful translation (and I wonder if I'd even have felt that if I'd listened to the poem rather than reading it, or read it more slowly instead of in just 2 sittings).
But even in this best translation yet, the story frustrates me. However much Headley tries to open it up, and pushes back on this reading in the translator's introduction, it's still a story of macho men bragging and proving themselves with violence, in which womens' main role is to be prizes and servers. And Grendel's mother still gets short shrift. She's the character whose violence is the easiest to justify, but her role in the story is still to be an enemy whose defeat we cheer for.
It's amazing to be able to read this snapshot from so long ago, and this translation is now the one that I'd recommend to people. But I'm still so ambivalent about the actual content.
