Wednesday achieved successful errand-running
What I read
Finally made it to the end, with a considerable amount of skimming and skipping, of Zone of the Interior: there was something very off-putting about the narrative stance, which I think was trying to demonstrate sardonic detachment from the antipsychiatric cultists he was mixed up with (and really, everybody else in sight) to an extent that although one supposes that the No-Not-Really-RD-Laing figure must have had quite a lot of charisma and there must have been something going on in the dynamics it's all a bit tell not show. Also, masses of period sexism, which once or twice Sigel almost seems wise to, as a general phenomenon within the group, and then goes on to manifest with great toxicity in his personal relations.
Not so much a book one could not put down as one that one found hard to pick up again.
Finally managed to reach down from a high shelf some of my old Le Guin paperbacks: read A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (1994), which I vaguely recollected as being what I thought of at the time as pretty much the beginning of her late style and productivity burst.
And then The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) which, though still beautifully written, has dated in the way things that were pioneering at the time can be dated, because they point the way for things to move in a new direction past them. I suppose one could read it that Genly Ai was seeing the Gethenians as default male because - but no, on reflection, I couldn't help feeling that the Ekumen would have got beyond that kind of assumption unless he was also a time-traveller, and anyway, there's a real pronoun problem with Estraven's narrative. Was thinking about this and that if she'd used singular 'they' there'd probably have been a lot of grammar nitpickery - have feeling it has become more acceptable?
Did Le Guin ever say if the sequence on The Ice was in any way a shoutout to the Mother of Them All's final Polar scenes in Frankenstein?
On the go
Still What Are We Doing Here?, which is not something to gulp down.
Just started, Aliette de Bodard, House of Binding Thorns (2017).
Up next
Not sure. Possibly something frothy and frivolous? This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2738971.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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