Val > Recent Status Updates

first chapter is v good

finished part 1 - the little romance actually not bad - liked the flipped gender dynamics of waiting

Section 4’s language so cool - the object to which she’s compared always casually dropped

this book really feels like itself a work of literary criticism of the sort i read for classics. really interesting

i understand absolutely none of chapter 8: all the fields all the battles, but i feel like it’s realistically possible to decode it. wondering now if i would be able to understand this better if i had been more familiar with her ideas from her other books first. or read more cixous.

i really like the detective and the narrator’s intense observations of and thoughts on her

Feels like a book that may actually be too smart for me. I wonder though also how much would be clearer in Spanish. lots of repetitions of words and phrases of which i’m struggling to understand the significance

getting a hint of that horror genre now with our chronicler's dream...

aaron and marsh are taking their exercises in interpretation a bit weirdly personally. forgive and forget?

the readers as (originally) anti-salbians is an interesting dynamic

(# pages = chapter) enjoying so far, and liking the kind of (self-admittedly) whiny narrator and this sort of direct address in general - mycroft canner gave me the taste for it, i think.

the central concept itself is also very compelling.

ughhh, the gender politics are re-emerging a bit again - stop it with the gendered intuitionism, asimov

on the other hand, neville barron is such an ass

really enjoying the description of society on the moon - playfulness that *kind of* reminds me of terra ignota?

enjoying the third part (now that we’ve gotten past the weird sexist opening) - reminding me more of foundation

3 genders was interesting (so is the sex and their bodies in general), but the Emotional gender is disappointingly (sexist-classic-scifi-) female-coded - based on the pronouns, exaggerated “not like the others”ness of Dua, bioessentialism to the extreme - “Who could tell what any Emotional felt? They were so different they made left and right seem alike in everything but mind” r=smart m, p=dumb m, e=w

starting a purchase on the hetaera

really good but difficult. often have to counterintuitively almost skim over the words to not get bogged down and lost in them (could make a fitting sea metaphor out of that). nice to actually enjoy poetry for once

a lot of the worldbuilding being set out in brief glossary of planetary institutions is a good idea and really interesting - probably wouldn’t have appreciated it quite as much otherwise. also love the whole framing with thravé

Or so I tell myself. But we have existed so long, you and I, accumulating so many layers of memory and interpretation . . . what do I know, really, of who we once were? All I have left is myth.
And surely you’ve now drifted even farther. What might you have become, Siob, in all these centuries since we last met?
Even if I found you again, would you know me? Could we still decipher each other?

woo! windswept sheltering seems cool. and dobroc! and training vails in the long conversation! last interlude was also really interesting for the new ways youths are interacting with their technologies and art