evelyn_b | Entries tagged with liu cixin

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.

What I've Finished Reading

Bunnicula is an intrinsically hilarious concept if you're about seven years old and have seen a rabbit and heard of vampires. See, there was this bunny and we brought him home because he was so cute and fluffy, but guess what it turned out he was a VAMPIRE BUNNY who SUCKS THE BLOOD of vegetables get it because bunnies aRE vEGETARIANS! GET IT? WooOOOoooOOOO!

The problem with a bunny vampire who sucks vegetables dry is that there's no problem, really. No one's getting hurt. There's no fraught question of vegetable consent to explore. Vegetables aren't rising from the dead to cannibalize one another straight off the vine and then wander the streets with a haunted look in their nonexistent eyes. They do look a little weird with all the juice sucked out of them, but it's all the same to the compost pile. To give this funny concept the incomplete skeleton of a plot, the authors have to invent a semi-genre-savvy cat who immediately suspects that something vampiric is going on, then torments the bunny with garlic garlands and tries to pound a raw steak into its little bunny heart. Finally the humans intervene and the bunny vampire is fully integrated into its new home. The book is narrated by the family dog, a steadier, less genre-savvy character who only asks for something to chew on.

Does it hold up? Yes and no. As an adult reader, I could identify a number of places where I'd fallen over laughing at age eight. Did I actually laugh even once this time around? Not really. But I don't think that's because Bunnicula isn't funny; I think it's because Bunnicula isn't a book for middle-aged people.

The only thing that really raised my present-day eyebrows in this book published in 1979 is the dog's several-times-referenced craving for chocolate cupcakes, which one of the human children happily feeds him. How long has "don't feed chocolate to dogs?" been a mainstream warning? I don't remember if it was around when I was growing up or not.

What I'm Reading Now

Ring Shout has a wild premise (what if the 1920s KKK revival were just a thin cover for a really super grotesque demonic takeover of Earth?) and when you have that kind of premise, total confidence in the premise is everything; P. Djèlí Clark is more than up to the task and Maryse, the narrator, doesn't have time to be too coy or self-conscious or overly pedantic about the fact that she's weilding a magical vengeance sword against hideous hate vampires that feed on the fury of their human hosts until they can replace them completely; there's too much to do and too short a book to do it in.

As of a third of the way through, the only part of The Dark Forest I really like or care about is Luo Ji's imaginary girlfriend. See, he was dating this real woman who was an author, and one day she confessed to him that she could never really love him as much as she loved the fictional heroes of her novels, and he was like, "Wait, what?" so she challenged him to go home and try to really imagine the perfect woman for him, and just really linger on all the hot ego-affirming details. And he does! And then the imaginary perfect woman shows up in his mind and they take a bunch of walks and so on, and he goes back to his regular human girlfriend and tells her all about his weird experience and she's like, "Now you understand why I can never love a non-fictional man." And they both sort of nod wistfully as if this were some kind of meaningful commentary on the nature of fiction and relationships and fictional relationships. Now Luo Ji is trying to get his cop friend to find the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary girlfriend using his vast array of high-tech cop tools. I don't know what he's going to do when he finds her.

If the whole book were Luo Ji's ridiculous fantasy girlfriend adventures (with cop friend), I'd have finished it much faster. But there's also all this tedious alien-contact exposition and it's like a massive fog rolling across my brain every time the characters start in explaining things to each other again, which is why I'm still only a third of the way through.

What I Plan to Read Next

Not the third book in the Three Body trilogy, that's for sure! I'm only still reading this one for the fake girlfriend story.

I Finally Finished Reading About Fictional Thomas Cromwell's Cromwell Problems

. . . and I cried my eyes out.

It's not that Cromwell and his family are particularly loveable or anything like that. It's just a stupidly immersive book about people who used to be alive, and I'm a sucker for that thing where someone is about to get their head chopped off and they see some sky in a puddle or something and you suddenly remember for the millionth time that everyone who ever lived had a childhood and a body.

What I'm Reading Now

I am embarrassed to say that I didn't manage to finish The Dark Forest in time for book club, even though I had over two weeks; first there was the Tom Crom Chronicles to finish, then I just kept picking up other books that happened to be better. I may eventually run out of books that I want to read more than I want to read The Dark Forest, but there's also a real chance that I might not.

The Damnation of Theron Ware is one of a series of "Belt Revivals" - nice crisp paperback reprints of late 19th and early 20th century realist fiction by Belt Publishing. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving book - Harold Frederic's 1896 tale of an earnest young preacher who may or may not be succumbing to the temptations of Higher Criticism is amazingly fresh and very funny - but did Belt Publishing really just copy-paste the Project Gutenberg text without changing any of the ALL CAPS back to italics? All internal evidence points to yes.

The other problem with this book is that the protagonist's name sounds just enough like "Thurston Moore" that I now have two lines of "Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" stuck in my head on a stable loop. It's not a song I've ever had any special fondness for or thought about for years, yet here we are.

Heyyyyyy, Adora

I'm still watching She-Ra Original Flavor. Some of the differences between it and (the objectively much better) New She-Ra are interesting, and some are obviously the result of one being a witty labor of love and the other being a literal toy commercial produced as quickly and cheaply as possible in a time when cheapness went a lot further than it does today.

( You can read more if you want to, but do you really want to? ) Can I recommend this show to fans of the new She-Ra? Absolutely not. Am I going to watch all 93 episodes out of sheer inertia? It remains to be seen.

What I Plan to Read Next

Maybe The Dark Forest, maybe not.

Hello again, Dreamwidth! I didn't mean to stay away so long but one thing led to another. In any case

I Finished Some Books

A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear (by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling) is the book I bought - way back in November - to distract myself from election results, and it did fantastically well, except that I started it on Tuesday afternoon and was finished reading by Wednesday evening and then I had to find another book. It's about the Free Town Project (in which dedicated friends of freedom took over the government of a small New Hampshire town in order to turn it into a tax-free paradise) and its fraught relationship with the local bears. It doesn't offer that much insight into the libertarians in question, who are an eccentric fringe of a fringe of a movement that prides itself on being nothing but fringe, but the bear story is nuanced and disturbing.

For most of the time I was reading it, I honestly couldn't tell if I liked The Three-Body Problem or not. The prose style (in translation) veers from "regular ordinary Tor mediocrity" to catastrophic crashes from the metaphor closet and back again. I thought it was at its worst when it was contemplating man's inhumanity to man and at its best when cardboard characters got together to explain the conceit of the book to each other.

I put off starting A Suitable Boy for years because. . . I'm not sure why? It looks very large on a shelf, and I guess I developed this vague mental picture where the "suitable boy" of the title was a canny young domestic servant who takes up residence in a rich family's home and observes their increasingly desperate dysfunction while his own family falls apart back home. Why did I think that? I have no idea. It's nothing like that. The suitable boy is not a servant, but a suitor for student/sweetheart Lata Mehra, because her older sister has just gotten married and now it's her turn. It hits the ground running with a gorgeously fluffy wedding-and-character-establishment setpiece that gave me absolute confidence in Vikram Seth for any number of pages (this one has about 1500). Was the confidence totally justified in every particular? Maybe not; some parts of this banquet are definitely more satisfying than others. I loved every member of the Mehra family with my whole heart and was overjoyed at every appearance of the wonderful, insufferable Chatterjees and their vicious dog Cuddles. The titular boy is also a sugar-frosted, cinnamon-dusted delight. I didn't manage to care very much about the many self-inflicted trials of Maan Kapoor, alas.

At home, we've started watching the BBC miniseries version, which is very pretty, but lacks the leisureliness of the book (it would need a full-sized series to be as satisfyingly slow). It's already spending way too much time on Meenakshi Mehra (nee Chatterjee), a boring Bad Woman with nothing to do all day but be bad and break her mother-in-law's heart. It's fun to see favorite characters show up onscreen for the first time, though. My favorite introductions so far have been Dr Kishen Chand Seth, Lata's cantankerous grandfather, who comes in lopping the heads of innocent flowers with his cane, and the dread Cuddles. We have decided that Cuddles deserves his own spinoff series, which can obviously be called An Unsuitable Dog.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm trying to finish Mary Beard's SPQR before we give it to my father-in-law for Christmas. I don't think I'll make it. It's good, though.

What I'm Getting in the Mail

Word has been out for a while now that I'm willing to part with money in exchange for print media, so I've been getting a tremendous number of subscription offers over the past few years - some for absolutely nonsensical amounts like "three years for $11!" More recently, I moved onto the list of "people who want free address labels." I can't complain about either of these things; I am a fiend for print and I will use those ugly address labels, thank you. Recently, however, things have escalated. Marketingland has concluded that I am 80 years old and hankering to buy novelty home decor, technologically enhanced bedding, themed porcelain dolls, commemorative coins, Baby's First tablets, and all manner of absolute trash from a never-ending series of catalogs. Do I want this? Mostly not. Am I enjoying it anyway? For now.

(Also, has anyone read Harper's lately? How are they doing? I don't have a good example to hand right now, but every time they send me a subscription appeal, I think, "Harper's, are you okay?" They underline more phrases than a Republican PAC panic flier).

What's Next for Wednesday?

I'm not sure! I asked for Wolf Hall for Christmas, but might get something else entirely. In any case, I'm going to try to get back on the Wednesday Reading train for real soon.