I'm killing three birds (books) with one stone (blog post) because I let myself get way behind.
The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
Somehow or other, I reached age 40 without having read Margaret Atwood. In my head, I lump her with some other generally well-regarded, contemporary women writers who probably have little in common except that I haven't read them. (Also on this in-my-head list is Barbara Kingsolver, who when you google her, suggests Atwood as the second "people also search for" person, so maybe it's not all in my head?) I never gave Atwood much thought either way until a respected acquaintance recommended Oryx and Crake to me a couple years back. Several months ago I found a copy of it at a thrift store, so I picked it up. Then shortly after that I found a copy of The Blind Assassin at a thrift store, so I picked it up too. I was probably swayed by the Booker Prize winner status of the latter when I chose to read it rather than the book that had been recommended to me. In the end, I really liked it, but I found stretches of it a bit of a slog. (Or maybe I should say I really liked the end but found stretches of it a slog.)
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
About 70 pages into reading Ancillary Justice, my purse was stolen and I lost it. After my drivers' license and passport, it was the first thing I replaced. (While listing the things I had lost, I recommended it to the woman who took down my insurance claim over the phone. I subsequently recommended it to my stepfather, who was stuck at home with two broken arms, and he read it then promptly went on to read the two additional books in the series, which I was very tempted to do when I finished it too.) I don't read a lot of Sci Fi and when I try to talk about it, I often feel like a little out of my depth: how do I know if something is novel? maybe there are common tropes in the genre but I just don't know? (Who am I kidding, definitely there are.) But ANYWAY, this book kind of blew my mind in a couple specific ways: (1) the AI with no center -- the idea of a mind shared among several entities; (2) the use of she/her gender pronouns regardless of gender (because the AI can't distinguish well), which affected how I visualized the worlds. In short, I really enjoyed this and I would like to read the other books in the series.
In the Dutch Mountains, Cees Nooteboom
I probably should have written about this right when I finished it because I'm already having a hard time remembering it. I read In the Dutch Mountains over 3 days while I was waiting for my replacement copy of Ancillary Justice to arrive. It's a short novel I picked up at a used bookstore in LA without knowing a thing about it in order to check the Netherlands off my list. The blurb described this as a fairy tale, and parts of it were definitely fairy-tale-ish. The book is set in a fictional south of the Netherlands, a Netherlands much larger than the actual Netherlands, and narrated by a Spanish writer/roadbuilder, making it a somewhat odd representative book for the Netherlands. Apart from telling the story, the narrator went off on a lot of long tangents about the process of telling the story, which were part fascinating and part annoying. However, without them, the story itself would have been quite light.
