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Oct. 15th, 2011 07:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darchildreYou guys, I am putting mysteries on hold at the library, so thank you very much for your suggestions. (My mother also suggest Elizabeth George, so I'm putting the first one of hers on hold too.) If you have more mystery series suggestions, I am totally open to them still.
But today, I finished reading China Mieville's Embassytown. Which was OMG, so very good. I just, it is an entire beautiful scifi novel about language and how it shapes us and how we are shaped by it, with properly alien aliens and interestingly alien future humans (the Ambassadors are so neat and creepy and interesting) and politics and war and destruction and hope and rebuilding. I loved every page of it and I would love to read more in this universe but I am also happy with the resolution of the story, which is complete in itself.
I love, also, how the book is about learning to lie and why that's important. Scile thinks that Avice and Spanish Dancer teaching the Ariekei to lie brings about their Fall from grace and maybe it does, but I kept thinking about my own creation myth. About Odin and Hoenir and Lodur/Loki finding Ask and Embla, wordless and wyrdless, and making them something more. Teaching them to speak and, because this is Odin and Loki we're talking about, teaching them to lie. Part of what makes us human, makes us People, is the fact that we tell stories, that we can tell truth through falsehood. Avice and her companions aren't gods, but maybe their story with the Ariekei isn't a Fall so much as a Raising. (But then, I'm a Lokean and thus have a perhaps unusual attitude toward lies.)
In conclusion, two things: 1) This book is awesome and you should read it and then come talk to me about it. 2) There is an audiobook and I am intrigued by that but not at all certain how the narrator would manage the two-voiced Ariekei Language. I don't suppose any of you have listened to it and could tell me how that was handled? (This sort of thing is why there need to be better audiobook reviews.)
But today, I finished reading China Mieville's Embassytown. Which was OMG, so very good. I just, it is an entire beautiful scifi novel about language and how it shapes us and how we are shaped by it, with properly alien aliens and interestingly alien future humans (the Ambassadors are so neat and creepy and interesting) and politics and war and destruction and hope and rebuilding. I loved every page of it and I would love to read more in this universe but I am also happy with the resolution of the story, which is complete in itself.
I love, also, how the book is about learning to lie and why that's important. Scile thinks that Avice and Spanish Dancer teaching the Ariekei to lie brings about their Fall from grace and maybe it does, but I kept thinking about my own creation myth. About Odin and Hoenir and Lodur/Loki finding Ask and Embla, wordless and wyrdless, and making them something more. Teaching them to speak and, because this is Odin and Loki we're talking about, teaching them to lie. Part of what makes us human, makes us People, is the fact that we tell stories, that we can tell truth through falsehood. Avice and her companions aren't gods, but maybe their story with the Ariekei isn't a Fall so much as a Raising. (But then, I'm a Lokean and thus have a perhaps unusual attitude toward lies.)
In conclusion, two things: 1) This book is awesome and you should read it and then come talk to me about it. 2) There is an audiobook and I am intrigued by that but not at all certain how the narrator would manage the two-voiced Ariekei Language. I don't suppose any of you have listened to it and could tell me how that was handled? (This sort of thing is why there need to be better audiobook reviews.)
