![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wednesday Reading
31 January 2018 09:11 amRecently finished
The evening after I heard that Ursula K. Le Guin had died, I re-read the short story "The Day Before the Revolution", from the collection The Compass Rose. It comes after her classic parable, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", and she begins the story with a foreward ending with 'this is a story about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas'. I still remember so clearly the first time I read that, and how it moved me, having just read Omelas. Anyway, it's about Leia Odo, of Odonianism in the The Dispossessed. The revolution that eventually leads to the events in The Dispossessed is starting, but she is on the sidelines. It's a quiet story of an old woman reflecting on her life. The prose is beautiful, and the character feels so true in such a short space. Wonderful story.
Last night I finished Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. I ... want to like it, because people whose opinions I trust like it. And some of it I did enjoy. But all the moments where( these aren't really spoilers, but a cut just in case )
Current reading
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew. A graphic novel about an important Singaporean comic artist, with a lot of focus on the history of Singapore's independence from Britain, its relationship with Malaysia, and conflicts between communist/left-wing and centrist/liberal factions in the independence movement. I am enjoying it, but I admit I find the national history a lot more interesting than the comic book artist.
The evening after I heard that Ursula K. Le Guin had died, I re-read the short story "The Day Before the Revolution", from the collection The Compass Rose. It comes after her classic parable, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", and she begins the story with a foreward ending with 'this is a story about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas'. I still remember so clearly the first time I read that, and how it moved me, having just read Omelas. Anyway, it's about Leia Odo, of Odonianism in the The Dispossessed. The revolution that eventually leads to the events in The Dispossessed is starting, but she is on the sidelines. It's a quiet story of an old woman reflecting on her life. The prose is beautiful, and the character feels so true in such a short space. Wonderful story.
Last night I finished Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer. I ... want to like it, because people whose opinions I trust like it. And some of it I did enjoy. But all the moments where( these aren't really spoilers, but a cut just in case )
Current reading
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye by Sonny Liew. A graphic novel about an important Singaporean comic artist, with a lot of focus on the history of Singapore's independence from Britain, its relationship with Malaysia, and conflicts between communist/left-wing and centrist/liberal factions in the independence movement. I am enjoying it, but I admit I find the national history a lot more interesting than the comic book artist.