Reach Out and Touch Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I'm Not Reading Anymore

Immediately after Luo Ji used his cop connections and ultra-top-security clearance to have the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary fake girlfriend sent to his stylish mountaintop lair, The Dark Forest pulled a time jump five years into the future and now they're married with an adorable baby so we can all get back to the part of the plot I didn't care about. I decided that life was too short to read the rest of The Dark Forest. If you have read this book and it turns out that Luo Ji and his perfect wife have a falling out when she discovers he invented her on a dare, or anything like that, let me know and maybe I'll double back in a decade or so.

(There's a whole very sixth-grade Gary Stu secret global security reason why Luo Ji lives in a stylish mountaintop lair and can get whatever he wants; it has to do with aliens who are going to invade Earth in about four centuries and it's been explained at great length at several very important meetings but I still couldn't manage to care even a little bit, so it's for the best that I'm not reading The Dark Forest anymore).

What I've Finished Reading

Ring Shout is a hell of a book and there's not much of it, so give it a try if you like the premise of grossout parasitic demons using the Ku Klux Klan as a vehicle for world conquest (or trying anyway). It fell suddenly flat for me for just a second toward the very end, because there was a kind of Avengers: Endgame supporting character charge and I hadn't, as it turned out, developed any feeling for or interest in the characters involved. The rest of the time, it was a fantastically fast moving, confident and humane splatterfest. Hate and fear are bad, songs and love are good; be careful when fighting ravening fleshbeasts that you don't accidentally get fleshbeastified in turn: this isn't a complex moral universe, but it's a gorgeously and hideously illustrated one.

What I'm Reading Now

VOTING WORKS, or at least it did in this case; the sci-fi book club is NOT moving on to the next Three-Body book and even more exposition for the exposition gods, but will be discussing my own first choice, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's good so far! It diverges a little from my usual Ishiguro pattern of being very slightly bored for two hundred pages and then suddenly overwhelmed with feelings, because I'm already pretty verklempt about this sad robot friend getting bullied by her human friend's human peer group. Don't bully your robot friends, poor little rich kids of the future!

Also reading: Our Environment: How We Use and Control It, an innovative multi-science junior high school textbook from 1931, with a special focus on the mind-boggling complexity of modern life. As a textbook, I don't think it's as good as Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problems of American Culture from the same time period, but it is valuable if you want to contemplate, for example, the eternal problem of sewage, plus I like to imagine an irritable young LM Montgomery heroine having to read this paean to Industrial Man and just getting more and more upset. And at this point in the history of What The Heck Is Light Even, the existence of ether is still the going theory, which was a complete delight to stumble across.

What I Plan to Read Next

I've actually already started My Year Abroad and the latest Most Comfortable Man in London book, but I'm kicking the can down the road as far as saying anything about them goes, so I can post this now before I get distracted again.

Comments

[osprey_archer]

I've been thinking about reading Klara and the Sun and this has tipped me over the edge into putting it on hold. I guess this is just my year for sad robots.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the latest Most Comfortable Man in London book! (Although for most of this book he is the Most Comfortable Man Not in London.) I am a little worried that this is the end of the series, which would mean that I need a new favorite ongoing mystery series to follow.

[evelyn_b]

Ugh, I love it so much. I hope you do, too! Robot sadness is the best sadness, but it's also too much for me and we're barely getting started.

I wouldn't be too surprised if Finch-Lenox closes shop on Team Comfortable - the what was it, three prequels in a row? kind of already felt like a retreat from continuing the story. I will be surprised if whatever he does next is as charming. He hasn't left for America yet; he's just been entertaining/infodumping about Disraeli.

[osprey_archer]

Finch-Lenox's one foray away into contemporary fiction did not give me confidence that his other ventures would ever be as charming as Team Comfortable. Maybe he'll surprise me? Maybe he'll start a new detective series with a new setting, which would give him MANY new things to infodump about.

[evelyn_b]

You never know! Cozier things have happened. As much as he may have grown as a writer since his Serious Oxford Novel days, I think he should probably steer clear of contemporary settings (despite the infinite fact-shoehorning opportunities presented by our Infodumpment Age). Maybe eighteenth century? Or late Cold War?

[osprey_archer]

Well, you KNOW I am here for anything Cold War. But I think eighteenth century might suit Finch-Lenox better.

[landofnowhere]

Your reaction to The Dark Forest is hilarious, and I think you made the right choice! Cixin Liu's ability to write female characters with depth does not improve, and mostly the book is about the alien plot anyway.

[evelyn_b]

Fair! I feel a little bad because I mostly enjoyed the exposition-driven dorkiness of the first book. . . but not enough to care about the plot of the second, apparently. I did think it was cute when Luo Ji described his baby as looking like "a stem cell of beauty," but that's not enough for a whole book.

[landofnowhere]

I also read the series for its exposition-driven dorkiness! Unfortunately the second book isn't as much about that as it is about pessimistic social science. The third book has a few good exposition-driven dorky bits -- my favorite are the three fairy tales told by one character to another, which stand on their own, but the rest I didn't care about.