Wednesday reading
What I finished:
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The narrator, Klara is a solar-powered android purchased to be an Artificial Friend (called AF by all the other characters) for a teenage girl named Josie, because that's apparently a totally normal thing to do in the world of this book. Josie is ill with some vague but life-threatening illness that's a side effect of some sort of genetic tinkering that her mother had done in order to make Josie smarter and more talented, which is apparently also a totally normal thing that people do to their children in this world. Klara is extremely intelligent and observant, but also very naive and ignorant about how the world around her works, which I think is something Ishiguro does on purpose when he writes science fiction to disguise the fact that his world building tends to be shaky on the details. He did a similar thing in Never Let Me Go.. What saves if from being annoying is that Ishiguro is such a damn good writer, and so good at characterization. Klara is such a sympathetic and empathetic narrator, and I got very invested not only in her but also in all the other characters, even the asshole ones, because I was seeing them through Klara's eyes and she saw something worthwhile in all of them.
The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu. I really liked Huchu's Library of the Dead and wanted to read more by him, so I picked this up. It's not fantasy, more of a slice-of-life story about Vimbai, a young single mother working as a hairdresser at a salon in Harare, Zimbabwe, who feels threatened when her employer hires Dumi, a young male hairdresser who becomes more popular with customers than Vimbai is. In the US, this might be the kind of petty conflict that sitcom episodes get written about, but Vimbai lives in a country where unemployment is at 90 percent, life expectancy is 37, and inflation is so rapid that no one wants to be paid in advance for anything because the money you get today will be worthless by tomorrow. Job security is literally a life or death issue for her and her daughter, so her initial hostility to Dumi becomes understandable. Still, they manage to become friends, and then something more, and then the book veers into major betrayal and some horrific homophobic violence that's only partially redeemed by a somewhat hopeful ending. I can't really say that any of it was unrealistic or out of character for the people involved, but it was definitely disturbing. . The portrayal of everyday life in Zimbabwe felt very vivid and real, even though I had to stop and look stuff up from time to time.
What I'm reading now:
Still working my way through The Verge. Finished the chapter on Jakob Fugger, which did a good job of laying out how wealthy investors got to control the fate of nations in the 16th century (not too different from the current century, really). Like, Fugger basically got to decide who got to be the Holy Roman Emperor simply by deciding who he would lend money to. Also, Fugger lent a bunch of money to an ambitious priest so that the priest could buy himself an appointment as bishop (which is already pretty shady to start off with), and the bishop raised money to pay off the loan by selling indulgences. Lots and lots of indulgences. So many indulgences that Martin Luther got pissed off and invented Protestantism, which is probably not what Fugger intended. Oops. Anyway, now I'm into the chapter on how warfare changed during this period, focusing on a mercenary dude named Gotz von Berlichingen, who apparently made a lot of historians very happy by writing a memoir late in life. Oh, and he got his hand blown off by a cannon ball in a battle and used an iron prosthetic from then on, which got him nicknamed Gotz of the Iron Hand, which totally sounds like he should be a Game of Thrones character. I love details like that, though I'm still annoyed by Wyman's occasional tendency to novelize the things he's writing about.
What I'm reading next: Dunno. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/667429.html. You may comment there using OpenID.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The narrator, Klara is a solar-powered android purchased to be an Artificial Friend (called AF by all the other characters) for a teenage girl named Josie, because that's apparently a totally normal thing to do in the world of this book. Josie is ill with some vague but life-threatening illness that's a side effect of some sort of genetic tinkering that her mother had done in order to make Josie smarter and more talented, which is apparently also a totally normal thing that people do to their children in this world. Klara is extremely intelligent and observant, but also very naive and ignorant about how the world around her works, which I think is something Ishiguro does on purpose when he writes science fiction to disguise the fact that his world building tends to be shaky on the details. He did a similar thing in Never Let Me Go.. What saves if from being annoying is that Ishiguro is such a damn good writer, and so good at characterization. Klara is such a sympathetic and empathetic narrator, and I got very invested not only in her but also in all the other characters, even the asshole ones, because I was seeing them through Klara's eyes and she saw something worthwhile in all of them.
The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu. I really liked Huchu's Library of the Dead and wanted to read more by him, so I picked this up. It's not fantasy, more of a slice-of-life story about Vimbai, a young single mother working as a hairdresser at a salon in Harare, Zimbabwe, who feels threatened when her employer hires Dumi, a young male hairdresser who becomes more popular with customers than Vimbai is. In the US, this might be the kind of petty conflict that sitcom episodes get written about, but Vimbai lives in a country where unemployment is at 90 percent, life expectancy is 37, and inflation is so rapid that no one wants to be paid in advance for anything because the money you get today will be worthless by tomorrow. Job security is literally a life or death issue for her and her daughter, so her initial hostility to Dumi becomes understandable. Still, they manage to become friends, and then something more, and then the book veers into major betrayal and some horrific homophobic violence that's only partially redeemed by a somewhat hopeful ending. I can't really say that any of it was unrealistic or out of character for the people involved, but it was definitely disturbing. . The portrayal of everyday life in Zimbabwe felt very vivid and real, even though I had to stop and look stuff up from time to time.
What I'm reading now:
Still working my way through The Verge. Finished the chapter on Jakob Fugger, which did a good job of laying out how wealthy investors got to control the fate of nations in the 16th century (not too different from the current century, really). Like, Fugger basically got to decide who got to be the Holy Roman Emperor simply by deciding who he would lend money to. Also, Fugger lent a bunch of money to an ambitious priest so that the priest could buy himself an appointment as bishop (which is already pretty shady to start off with), and the bishop raised money to pay off the loan by selling indulgences. Lots and lots of indulgences. So many indulgences that Martin Luther got pissed off and invented Protestantism, which is probably not what Fugger intended. Oops. Anyway, now I'm into the chapter on how warfare changed during this period, focusing on a mercenary dude named Gotz von Berlichingen, who apparently made a lot of historians very happy by writing a memoir late in life. Oh, and he got his hand blown off by a cannon ball in a battle and used an iron prosthetic from then on, which got him nicknamed Gotz of the Iron Hand, which totally sounds like he should be a Game of Thrones character. I love details like that, though I'm still annoyed by Wyman's occasional tendency to novelize the things he's writing about.
What I'm reading next: Dunno. This entry was originally posted at https://marinarusalka.dreamwidth.org/667429.html. You may comment there using OpenID.