That said, I liked She Who Remains quite a bit more than I expected to. It's disjointed and in fragments with variable formatting and punctuation. When I saw the text visually - without reading it at all, I thought it was going to be an impenetrable slog. I don't have much tolerance for freeform text. But it turned out not to be a slow read. I got through it quite quickly and found it easy to get into. But while it tackles some very serious subjects, I didn't find that it had a lot of substance. I had nothing much to say about it.
It feels a little funny to include it here, but on Saturday I read -- cover-to-cover -- a book my uncle gave me for Christmas in 1983: White Wash and Pink Feathers, the story of Petros the pelican, a celebrity on Mykonos since his arrival there in 1958 until his death in 1985 (which I only just learned of when I searched up Petros). My uncle went to Mykonos annually as far back as I can remember and often brought me back gifts from there, but this book was probably the first. My uncle went into home hospice care on Saturday and passed away in the early hours of Sunday morning. And so on Saturday morning, I went into my jewelry box and put on a necklace he got me from Mykonos a few years ago and a bracelet he got me from I don't know where some 20 years ago, and I found White Wash and Pink Feathers, which I kept among a small selection of books from my childhood and I sat down and read it. I think my parents probably read me parts of the book -- or maybe even the whole thing; it's not very long -- when I was a kid, but I certainly didn't remember much. It recounts Petros' life on Mykonos from when he was a young pelican (supposedly with his parents and an aunt and uncle? I don't know how much truth there is to this story) who survived a storm that killed most of his family. The book recounts Petros' friendship and fame among humans, but also with some other birds on the island (a stork from Russia, a rooster, a few other pelicans). It's also very much about Mykonos and the changes on the island from the 1950s to the 1980s, with the increase in tourism. I imagine the island of the 2020s looks quite different from the one of 1982, the year of the book's publication - let alone when Petros arrived there in 1958.
On Sunday I started Ann Leckie's latest, Radiant Star, and I finished it this morning before work. I was very excited when I heard she had a new book out. I ordered it from the library a few weeks back. Of course my hold came through while I was out of the country, so I sent it back into circulation (or thought I did) and ordered it again and my second hold showed up just before I returned home. When I went to pick it up at my local branch, both copies were there waiting for me in the hold section, which made me feel a little bad but there wasn't a waitlist anymore so not that bad. I had heard mixed to negative reports from several other folks reading it, so my hopes were tempered, but in the end I really liked it. Someone pointed out that it may be playing on a different genre from some of Leckie's earlier books, and I would certainly say it had a different voice. The story is not told as a first person narrative, but the unknown narrator -- maybe the storyteller more accurately, has a very distinctive tone and interjects quite a lot in a way that I don't recall as a feature of the other books. Radiant Star ends up being mostly about power struggles among several factions with unlikeable leadership, but it also felt like a prequel to stories to come. Perhaps I'll need to reread it if a successor arrives.
