Embassytown
My 15th completed book of the year is China Miéville's Embassytown. I should probably hate Mr. Miéville, for being so wildly inventive, and for pulling off things that I've long wished to do. In fact, I will hate him for it, once I get over enjoying the ride.
This is a work of speculative fiction, mostly resembling science fiction this time out. There is FTL space travel, but by some form of extra-dimensional cheating. We learn that there are several modes of this, but the protagonist of this novel is a navigator, and the method seems to be a use of the imagination. The space drive, in other words, is a metaphor for what the book itself does.
Another recursive element is the basic event of the book, which turns an abstract concept of linguistics into life-and-death action. The premise that allows this is that Embassytown is a conclave (humans and other aliens) on a planet where the local sentients, Ariekei, use a unique communication style that the humans refer to as Language. It requires two mouths, and seems also to require two minds. They speak simultaneously, and what has confused the visitors is that they (the visitors) were able to decode Language and understand the Ariekei, but for the longest time the Ariekei wouldn't recognize humans trying to speak to them, even when their speech was pitch-perfect.
I won't spoil the story by explaining how the humans develop ambassadors who can partake of Language; but I will mention that there are characters who are similes. Not like similes, but are actual similes.
The enigmatic element, the conundrum, is that the Ariekei cannot lie, because Language does not use signifiers.
Ariekei technology is also fun, because they build everything out of living tissue.
I loved the symbolic image of the hyperspace markers that so mislead the early explorers of that realm, but it would be a spoiler to explain. A spoiler on at least three levels.
I read this on Spring Break, and it was the perfect vacation book, because it COMPLETELY took me out of my quotidian concerns and put me in a whole nuther place.
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Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes: Further Reflections on Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould
Writing Down the Bones (expanded edition), Natalie Goldberg
Plutarch's Lives, Plutarch
Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, Vol. II, P. H. Sheridan
McSweeney's 45, Hitchcock and Bradbury Fistfight in Heaven
The Best American Essays 2011, Edwidge Canticat, ed.
China in Ten Words, Yu Hua