Book Meme Thursday! Because I have some answers for a change!
What are you currently reading?
I just started Karen Healey's When We Wake, which I've been meaning to get around to for a fortnight or so. I feel like everyone knows what this is book is about already but if not - protagonist Tegan, a teenager, is killed in Australia in 2027 and wakes up, having been cryogenically preserved and then resucitated, in Australia in 2128. That's more or less all I know so far, although being set in Australia and in the future it has some unsurprising environmental themes handled with reasonable deftness. It's fairly gripping; although the setting is less to my taste than Guardian of the Dead and The Shattering, I feel like you can really see a development in her writing since then.
What did you recently finish reading?
I just finished two re-reads. First Gaelyn Gordon's Prudence M Muggeridge, Damp Rat, which is a wonderful New Zealand children's book. The titular Prudence is being raised in complete isolation from society (other than her brothers and the staff) in New Zealand at an indeterminate point in the future by her unbelievably wealthy and rather dotty grandmother, who has peculiar ideas about childrearing. She runs away. It's awesome. So was Gaelyn Gordon, by the way, whose works were rather seminal in my childhood, particularly Prudence and a novel called Tripswitch. She wrote fantasy that portrayed poverty and a multicultural New Zealand very well and very understatedly.
The other one was Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, a novel I wholeheartedly adore (I guess I don't really re-read novels that I hate). Another near-ish future book, this novel is set in a future post-socialist revolution and Chinese political takeover (sort of) in the USA. Which makes it sound horribly racist but it's not at all. It's a little bit like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (EXCEPT BETTER) in that it's a study in close, deeply immersive first person of several different people whose stories connect a little. Its titular protagonist, Zhang, is an engineer, a gay man living in post-revolution New York. He is closeted in multiple ways, because he is also bi-racial but passes as Chinese due to in utero genetic manipulation. Other protagonists are Maxine, a tough ex-Army Martian colonist with a military background who meets a younger refugee and his daughter - I love Maxine because she's a Ripley-esque gender reversal of your standard ex-military gruff noble science fiction protagonist; also, she keeps goats and bees - Angel, who flies silk kites in races in New York for the pleasure of spectators, and several other characters who have smaller chapters. It's a wonderfully rich, populated world and it's so easy to get completely immersed in each character's story, completely personal.
There's a line early in the book which goes something like government is big; we are small, we slip through the cracks. My flatmate remarked that she was surprised when the big political reveal at the end of the book turned out to be "things don't happen for a reason, things happen because of how the world is at any given time"; but in a way I think that's not really a message for the reader but a message for the protagonists. The messages for the readers are much more diverse and personal, which is why I enjoy this book so much. It's not a book about The Tyranny of Socialism. It's a book about people who are just trying to negotiate the world they live in. Often, they are just as important to their own situation as the government is.
What do you think you’ll read next?
Um ... I promised Lucy that I'd read the last Wheel of Time book, but I picked it up in the bookshop today and read the blurb and realised I had no idea what any of the characters were doing. So I think I might, shamefully, just re-read the Brandon Sanderson-penned WOT books (trusting that I can remember most of the Jordan ones well enough to get by, although probably not enough to pick up all the huge mystery reveals) and then move into A Memory of Light. I'll probably want some fantasy after all this near-future science fiction, anyway.
This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/369692.html, where there are
comments.
I just started Karen Healey's When We Wake, which I've been meaning to get around to for a fortnight or so. I feel like everyone knows what this is book is about already but if not - protagonist Tegan, a teenager, is killed in Australia in 2027 and wakes up, having been cryogenically preserved and then resucitated, in Australia in 2128. That's more or less all I know so far, although being set in Australia and in the future it has some unsurprising environmental themes handled with reasonable deftness. It's fairly gripping; although the setting is less to my taste than Guardian of the Dead and The Shattering, I feel like you can really see a development in her writing since then.
What did you recently finish reading?
I just finished two re-reads. First Gaelyn Gordon's Prudence M Muggeridge, Damp Rat, which is a wonderful New Zealand children's book. The titular Prudence is being raised in complete isolation from society (other than her brothers and the staff) in New Zealand at an indeterminate point in the future by her unbelievably wealthy and rather dotty grandmother, who has peculiar ideas about childrearing. She runs away. It's awesome. So was Gaelyn Gordon, by the way, whose works were rather seminal in my childhood, particularly Prudence and a novel called Tripswitch. She wrote fantasy that portrayed poverty and a multicultural New Zealand very well and very understatedly.
The other one was Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, a novel I wholeheartedly adore (I guess I don't really re-read novels that I hate). Another near-ish future book, this novel is set in a future post-socialist revolution and Chinese political takeover (sort of) in the USA. Which makes it sound horribly racist but it's not at all. It's a little bit like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (EXCEPT BETTER) in that it's a study in close, deeply immersive first person of several different people whose stories connect a little. Its titular protagonist, Zhang, is an engineer, a gay man living in post-revolution New York. He is closeted in multiple ways, because he is also bi-racial but passes as Chinese due to in utero genetic manipulation. Other protagonists are Maxine, a tough ex-Army Martian colonist with a military background who meets a younger refugee and his daughter - I love Maxine because she's a Ripley-esque gender reversal of your standard ex-military gruff noble science fiction protagonist; also, she keeps goats and bees - Angel, who flies silk kites in races in New York for the pleasure of spectators, and several other characters who have smaller chapters. It's a wonderfully rich, populated world and it's so easy to get completely immersed in each character's story, completely personal.
There's a line early in the book which goes something like government is big; we are small, we slip through the cracks. My flatmate remarked that she was surprised when the big political reveal at the end of the book turned out to be "things don't happen for a reason, things happen because of how the world is at any given time"; but in a way I think that's not really a message for the reader but a message for the protagonists. The messages for the readers are much more diverse and personal, which is why I enjoy this book so much. It's not a book about The Tyranny of Socialism. It's a book about people who are just trying to negotiate the world they live in. Often, they are just as important to their own situation as the government is.
What do you think you’ll read next?
Um ... I promised Lucy that I'd read the last Wheel of Time book, but I picked it up in the bookshop today and read the blurb and realised I had no idea what any of the characters were doing. So I think I might, shamefully, just re-read the Brandon Sanderson-penned WOT books (trusting that I can remember most of the Jordan ones well enough to get by, although probably not enough to pick up all the huge mystery reveals) and then move into A Memory of Light. I'll probably want some fantasy after all this near-future science fiction, anyway.
This entry is crossposted from http://labellementeuse.dreamwidth.org/369692.html, where there are
comments.