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