Reading Wednesday Is Back from a Trip
I have so many mixed reactions to Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer! I can't think of the last time I read a book with worldbuilding so good, so rich, so complex, and so engrossing. I did think the worldbuilding got a little out of hand in the last third-to-quarter of the book, but before then she completely had me. The worldbuilding alone is enough to have me eagerly awaiting the sequel. While many Eurocentric science fiction futures come from medievalist imaginations, and a fair amount come from Renaissance imaginations, Palmer is coming very consciously and visibly from Enlightenment imaginations, which also allows her to naturally include a lot more diversity than the other two invite.
The plot is gripping. I have seen several people call the narrator "unreliable," but I would say more that the narrator unfolds their story very consciously, using not lies or misrepresentations but omissions, many of them cleverly constructed. The whole book is clever, which is something I tend to like but many fine readers tend to dislike. One of the finest readers I know said she didn't like any of the characters, but I did like several of them, or at least felt sympathy with them and cared about what happened to them.
So what are the mixed reactions? Well, first of all, we are given a key piece of information very early in the book which can only be explained magically, and the entire rest of the book is purely science fictional. Perhaps she will come up with some mumbo-jumbo science fiction in the second book to explain the magic, but I would have to be convinced; and I found that jarring.
Secondly, that last third-to-quarter of the book is not only overbuilt by my standards, but it also is extremely talky. It's as if, after sweeping us into the world, she felt compelled to take all of us through her intellectual trajectory in getting there. When I think a book is too much philosophical talk and not enough action, you know it's pretty far over that line for most readers.
Finally, Palmer and I have completely warring ideas about gendered and nongendered pronouns, heteronormativity, and social behavior, enough so that almost every time a character explains the use of a particular pronoun, I bristle. The book is set in a time when pronouns have been ungendered for 300 years, but the narrator uses gendered pronouns throughout, except when reproducing contemporary speech. So that's confusing. And then the narrator explains their pronoun choices, or their assumptions about how a theoretical contemporary reader would interpret their pronoun choices, and every single time I disagreed so much that it threw me out of the book.
So, well worth reading, but also challenging and flawed.
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I followed that up with Jennifer Worth's Call the Midwife, because I've been watching the TV show. This is a lovely personal memoir of being a midwife in London's East End in the 1950s, with lots of sociocultural and medical detail. One thing that made me curious to read it was how much soap opera there is in the TV show: Worth was a lay midwife attached to an order of nuns. In the show, women leave and enter the order, the lay midwives have a lot of romances, failed romances, tragedies, etc. The book has very little about the personal or private lives of any of the nuns or lay midwives, except for a significant focus on the elderly demented nun, Sister Monica Joan, who is also a major character in the TV show. Worth is a lovely writer, she cared deeply about her patients and her colleagues. I'm glad I read it.
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Currently reading, Adnan's Story by Rabia Chaudry. I'm one of the literally more than a million people who are fascinated by the podcast "Undisclosed," which is a spin-off of Season I of "Serial," the most popular podcast in history. You would think I knew too much already to enjoy this book, but you would be wrong.