June reading list

[cahn]

As I expected when I started this June reading thing, my reading has outstripped my capacity to write about it, not least because all my spare time right now is going to getting this irksome opera PPT done. (I don't read in spare time, I read while multitasking other things.) I am still planning to get to most of these books, but in the meantime here's a list, in rough order of how fascinated I was with it (not completely correlated with how much I liked it), with a couple of words about each one:

*: am definitely planning to write something at least a little more about this, may not be in June proper
~: read for Hugos
+: read as a direct result of reading An Informal History of the Hugos

*~1. An Informal History of the Hugos (Walton) - VOTE FOR WALTON
*~2. Ursula K. Le Guin - Conversations on Writing(Le Guin, Naimon) - Even slight Le Guin is good Le Guin
*~3. The Poppy War (Kuang) - Let's seriously give this person a Campbell already, this is brilliant and ambitious and historically rooted, also very grimdark ALL the content warnings (also! only 2.99 on kindle)
*+4. Xenocide (Card), partial reread ("Gloriously Bright" sections) - I'm so confused as to whether Card knows what he's doing here with the competing religious subtexts, I think he must but...
*+5. Doomsday Book (Willis), partial reread (last third) - I love the last third of this, and I don't agree with a specific thing Walton says in her writeup, in this essay I will
+6. The Last Defender of Camelot (Zelazny, anthology, reread) - this was fine, nice to reread, not much more to say
~7. Belles (DNF) - first person present tense, need I say more, though better than Children of Blood and Bone

Comments

[iberiandoctor]

I remember enjoying Xenocide (greatly, even; largely Lusitania, but I did also enjoy Path and the Gloriously Bright sections), though I clearly don't remember the competing religious subtexts quite enough! What did you enjoy/were you confused about Card's authorial motivations?

[cahn]

ahahahaha I will get back to you later on this at greater length! Briefly, Qing-jao's arc is that of someone whose religious worldview is completely broken by evidence that comes in later -- that part is pretty obvious. The part you almost certainly didn't get is that all the soul/aiua stuff is actually basically lifted from Mormon theology, so in some sense all of that is an argument for a Mormon theology worldview. The juxtaposition of these two subtexts is... interesting to me.

[iberiandoctor]

Huh; you're right, I did not at all get that the soul/aiua stuff is actually basically lifted from Mormon theology. I mean, I think most religions (and certainly all Abrahamic ones) do believe in the concept of the soul, but the notion that all living things have an aiua that lives Outside, that gets called into our plane of existence at birth? is not one that I'm familiar with as a lapsed Catholic/mainstream Protestant. I'd be keen to talk about it further when you're done with your powerpoints!