Reading Wednesday 3/05

[liv]

Recently read: A burden shared by Jo Walton. A clever and very sad short story about an imaginary technology that makes it possible to transfer pain between people. I recommend against reading the comments, personally.

Currently reading: The interior life by Katherine Blake. This was a present from rysmiel a while back. It's a story about a housewife who imagines an elaborate high fantasy scenario. What I'm finding particularly impressive about the story is that it sticks with its frame. Sue, the housewife and narrator, has an almost exaggeratedly dull suburban life, but it's so vividly drawn that I'm never disappointed when the text switches back from her imagined story of magicians saving the world from Darkness to her mundane existence. TIL doesn't exactly break the fourth wall, but it plays with the boundary between stuff that Sue imagines and her within the book reality in really interesting ways. The fantasy element is not bad either, it avoids being too generic, and is often really atmospheric.

Up next: I have a bit of a to-read pile building up, especially presents which ideally I should get to more quickly than I have been in the habit of lately. I would also quite like to read the Hugo nominated novels at least, and should probably get going with that fairly rapidly if I'm going to get through them before Worldcon. I'm probably most intrigued by Too like the lightning by Ada Palmer, though last I looked it was hard to find in a sensible format in the UK. Or Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, which jack read recently and wants to talk about.

Comments

[hunningham]

I found the mundane parts of The Interior Life much more engrossing than the fantasy world, but I found the entire thing rather like reading Dreamwidth - the mixture of everydayness (work & childcare & coping) and then people talking about fannishness and this rich interior life.

[wychwood]

I'm so glad you're enjoying TIL - I loved it (and am right now re-reading it for the second time in a month...). Somehow the "ordinary life" bits are more compelling than the fantasy, but I like both, and the way both progress together. I love how much Sue gets to grow and change, and like you the way the two worlds bleed into one another.

[questioncurl]

I read The Interior Life last year, and find myself hankering every now and then for something more in that world, even though at the time a lot of the more mundane household things—and the inherent class and race assumptions in them—irritated me intensely. I did identify strongly with how her purely private world was able to make her face the grittiness of the world around her.