Reading roundup: Worldcon prep and follow-up edition

[hamsterwoman]

So I haven't done a proper reading post in almost two months, since before Worldcon, and am finally almost caught up. Unlike how I normally do these, I wrote these up out of order, because I was hurrying through the Hugos, and am posting them a little bit out of order, too -- book #59 was The Will To Battle, which wouldn't fit in this post, so will

Comments

[hamsterwoman]

I don't DISlike Breq or anything -- I just had a harder time connecting to her than a number of the other characters, and even the rest of them I didn't connect to particularly well -- for example, as compared to a character in Leckie's Provenance, which I also read this past year. And it's a bit odd, because I tend to like those AI/emotionally aloof characters, too, normally -- I have a list of favorite robots!

IDK if it's the setting, or if Breq's POV (while fascinating) is too complex for me to really glom onto, or what. But I appreciate her as a POV character very much without loving her.

I gave up trying to gender people after the first book, which was very freeing.

The thing for me was, I wasn't trying to gender them! Like, the brother, Uran, he was revealed to be male and from a culture that had a distinction between genders, so he was always male in my head after that, because, well, that's what he would think of himself as. And Seivarden was revealed to be biologically male and also kept ACTING like a dude, so I kept thinking of him as male (though obviously it's not a distinction that would have any meaning for HIM). But then there were characters -- more in book 2 than here in the last one -- where we weren't given any info about their biological gender at all, but whenever I saw them referred to as "she" by Breq, I'd do a double-take and be like, "Who is she talking about??" Captain Hetnys of the Sword of Atagaris was one very persistent example, and to a somewhat lesser degree Tisarwat. And then, the family drama in book 2 kept me flipping back and forth, mentally, for what genders I thought Raughad and Fossyf were (before finally settling on female). But, yeah, none of this was really intentional on my part, my brain just kept stumbling on the female pronouns for some characters.