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Reading a book
Jun. 21st, 2015 02:56 pmSome years ago I read Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi. I really loved it. When I talked enthusiastically about it to people, though, I found that many had been burned by their experience with The Windup Girl.
Well *now* I'm reading The Windup Girl, as a mother-daughter reading club experience (this is with Little Springtime; next I'll read Ancillary Sword, which I'm going to read with the ninja girl), and I can see where all the hackles and suspicion came from.
The Windup Girl certainly is giving us stuff to talk over, that's for sure. Some stuff has been so glaring that it almost has CRITICIZE ME pasted on its back--rape scenes, for instance. Other stuff is annoying to the two of us but maybe not so much to other readers, like the way in which non-English words are deployed, and which ones (actually, that leads into a more substantive criticism, but I'll save that for when I finish the book).
Even as we're criticizing elements, we can be enjoying or admiring other things, though. We've been greeting each other with things like "Careful not to run into any Japanese gene-hack weevil today" and "Seen any cibiscosis or blister rust this morning?" because Japanese gene-hack weevil, cibiscosis, and blister rust--three types of plague--get mentioned like every page in Windup Girl. And yet, truth is, I'm super impressed by Bacigalupi's imagining of future plagues and his feel for agribusiness names for crop strains and disease strains. It's very immersive worldbuilding.
More when I've finished.
Well *now* I'm reading The Windup Girl, as a mother-daughter reading club experience (this is with Little Springtime; next I'll read Ancillary Sword, which I'm going to read with the ninja girl), and I can see where all the hackles and suspicion came from.
The Windup Girl certainly is giving us stuff to talk over, that's for sure. Some stuff has been so glaring that it almost has CRITICIZE ME pasted on its back--rape scenes, for instance. Other stuff is annoying to the two of us but maybe not so much to other readers, like the way in which non-English words are deployed, and which ones (actually, that leads into a more substantive criticism, but I'll save that for when I finish the book).
Even as we're criticizing elements, we can be enjoying or admiring other things, though. We've been greeting each other with things like "Careful not to run into any Japanese gene-hack weevil today" and "Seen any cibiscosis or blister rust this morning?" because Japanese gene-hack weevil, cibiscosis, and blister rust--three types of plague--get mentioned like every page in Windup Girl. And yet, truth is, I'm super impressed by Bacigalupi's imagining of future plagues and his feel for agribusiness names for crop strains and disease strains. It's very immersive worldbuilding.
More when I've finished.
