Gillian > Recent Status Updates

I have GOT to get in the habit of noticing dates/times/places given at the top of the chapter. Multiple decades as a reader and my eyes still skip over them. Then I end up lost and confused about chronologies.
Re this book specifically, I like it! Some great characters, really engaging prose, and what an opening. RR also does a great job with conveying the world of the book.

Listening and cleaning, yay!

Re-listening to this is great, b/c I have only the vaguest memory of the plot but every time something happens I'm like "oh yeah." Don't remember what's next though. Fitting for a book that centers around memory/loss.

Many of KI's books are difficult to summarize, and therefore to remember. Though this is one of his most "plotty" books in terms of events happening one after the other.

Yes, I really am in the middle of EIGHT books right now. And want to finish all of them. Well, probably not Cherryh's Foreigner any time soon, but all of the rest I'm very interested in. I just have zero attention span or focus these days. And to think I used to binge whole long series in a couple days! This is actually a reread, or rather re-listen. KI is so good at revealing info. And writing. Narrator is perfect.

Also, I never think of characters as my "blorbos" but something about Dorothea made me immediately go Blorbo! She's so weird and passionate and trying so hard to live a meaningful life while circumscribed by Regency England provincialism and misogyny, and only having Christianity to look to for inspiration. So humanly petty and judgmental, while genuinely being loving and wanting to do good. Aro and/or Ace? I <3 her.

1 hour in, only 31 left to go!
I picked this somewhat randomly because I heard Kate Reading narrating something else I wasn't interested in, but liked her voice. She's great for this! And I can see why it has stood the test of time to become a classic. GE is incisive, subtly hilarious, but kind and understanding underneath it all. The story so far is rambling scenes, but feels like it's going somewhere with it.

I'm trying to become an audiobook listener so I can do other things while I listen, but the problem is that if I do anything but the simplest of tasks I get distracted and don't pay attention to the words, and then I have to rewind. This is not the fault of THIS book; it happens to me with anything. But I'm intrigued by the story so far, and I like the narrator's reading. Plus I've made progress in my cross-stitch!

"This is a shockingly understaffed clinic. I don’t understand why the syndics don’t request some more postings from the Medical Federation, or else cut down the number of admissions; some of these aides and doctors are working eight hours a day! Of course, there are people in the medical arts who actually want that: the self-sacrifice impulse. Unfortunately it doesn’t lead to maximum efficiency. . . ." 😘ULG

Le Guin is brilliant of course. But it's fascinating to see what in 1974 were her limits of imagination on "society with total gender equality." As well as the *almost* total invisibility of queerness.
(This is a reread but my memory of details is fuzzy.)

Giving up and turning to Octavia Butler, who knows how to write *alien* aliens.

Maybe I'll come back when I'm more in the mood for political intrigue with a vague sci-fi flavor.

I'm still hung up on how un-alien these aliens are in both biology history and culture. Which is fine! It's Star Trek/Wars aliens! A common sci-fi setting for exploring relatively minor cultural differences! I just was for some reason expecting something grander. I'll get over it eventually (or I'll give up on the book). It all feels subtly but distinctly dated. 1994 was another era in SFF. I'll try to love Bren.

The other thing is that all the early focus on people doing science led me to believe this would be a more interested in scientific plausibility than it is. So I'm struggling to get over the aliens being very humanoid, and basically another culture only mildly unintelligible to humans. Not an evolutionary distinct planet.
Again, if I'd only looked at the cover lol.
This story about cultures instead. I'll get there.

It's interesting, it's just not where I thought it was going when I started. That's what I get for not only not reading the synopsis, but not even looking at the cover illustration very closely.
It just that I kept getting invested in characters and then CJC would whisk me forward in time several hundred years. So I still miss Taylor. And don't feel ready for Bren. Though evidence suggests I'll be with him awhile.

I'm confused about this book's approach to science, but I'm enjoying this alien encounter.

Maybe my adhd addled brain will be able concentrate on THIS one.

Outer space! Capitalism! Dune-esque pilots? I know very little about this book other than that I've seen Cherryh recommended by people whose taste I'm inclined to trust.

Reading this makes me feel like I'm on drugs. Something about the way it bounces around. There's an almost manic tone over everything that wasn't present in book 1. If I had a better memory for made up words it might be easier.
This may be brilliant or it may be terrible, I can't tell yet. Possibly both? It may out-clever itself. Or maybe it will end up giving profound insight into the human condition.

You know what it is? She (Christine Marshall) sounds exactly like the woman on (TikTok?) who makes those baby name parody videos—fish names, bird names, anatomy names etc. Just some very goofy inflections and overemphasis on odd words.

Miranda Mars is her name. It works great for her comedy videos! Baru is not that sort of comedy.

I wanted to listen to the audiobook instead because I want to close my eyes, but my goodness the narrator makes some strange choices! She sounds like the wife on The Truman Show. I do not think of Baru as someone with a chipper cloying voice 😂

Oh well. I can keep my eyes open I guess

Maybe I'm just not getting into the proper spirit, but this often feels more like the outline for a book than a fully fleshed out book. A lot of interesting elements are there but they don't gel for me into anything moving or special.

I also don't read much gothic literature so perhaps this is what it's like, but I'd expected more insanity. It's all somehow very tidy.

This scene [redacted for spoilers] was inevitable but also very effective.

I guess getting annoyed at the protagonist for their naïveté is a time honored tradition of gothic novel readers.

So far it's good but not great. KJC is a romance novelist at heart I think, and the gothic mystery and the romance are balanced a bit awkwardly, neither developed enough to feel really moving or meaningful. At least so far. But it's still quite readable.

KJC is always eminently readable. That may sound like faint praise but I don't mean it that way; her books are excellent in many respects but readability is the one that matters most to me right now. I'm in the middle of three other books which are all excellent and I want to know what happens, but I find myself unable to focus for more than half a chapter. Self-aware gothic mystery to the rescue!

Is this, at its core (not THE core, but A core, one of its many cores), the same story as The Night Circus?

I like it so far, but there is a bit of a tonal change from the first book, and I can't tell if that is character work, showing how Baru had been changed, or just an evolution in the author's style. The first book had 6 "fucks" total, this one is already at 38. And there are 157 total. I like the new style, it's more... relaxed? conversational? even a bit silly at times? but I'm not sure what I should take from it.

Sadly this is getting dumber and shallower as it goes :-(

If I was a 14 year old boy I would probably love this. As an adult I'm frustrated with its shallowness and simplicity. But I persist because the premise is intriguing (that's why I want it treated with more complexity) and the prose is quite readable.

I'm sure the 14 boys reading this think Vis is Totally Badass. For adults, he's tolerable enough as a narrator, even if I wish he was more interesting.

Just because you're a trained assassin doesn't mean you can't also be a dork ass loser teenage boy.

Honestly if I hadn't read the Tide Child trilogy I would probably drop this, but I trust RJB enough to see where this goes. I am curious about the lost magic and dead gods, but find this fantasy-medieval world less immediately captivating than the see-faring Hundred Isles.

I love the Gullaime SO MUCH 🤗 🫶
And I finally know how to spell that, because I switched from audiobook to text. The narrator is excellent, I love his versions of the characters, especially Meas. It's just that I'm too ADHD to focus on audiobooks most of the time. But I'm still hearing the narrator's voice in my head as I read.

Maybe I was misremembering? Or got PR's name mixed up with another author? Or maybe it was just people saying he was better than Brandon Sanderson which for sure is true 😂 but also not that hard. Anyways I read some GR reviews and yeah, it looks like it's about the world's specialist smartest boy after all, and apparently he doesn't even get out of school by the end of this 700 page book so I prob will DNF.

Currently seems it will be the story of the world's specialist smartest guy being cooler and smarter than everyone else, but this has been recommended by people whose taste I trust. And the Newarre scenes don't exactly support that theory (though they don't explicitly refute it either).

Kvothe is the world's most annoying teenager but I did like his old man innkeeper persona so I have hope. (Very clever of PR to start with that).

I would never have guessed this was from 2007, it feels very 80s, in ways both good (quality of writing, confidence in character and world-building) and bad ("historical" misogyny seemingly unquestioned [yet], basically all male cast [so far]).