Ex Libris Kirkland is my entirely self-centered way to keep track of what I read, what I enjoy, and what I want to remember.
📓 Recent Notes 📓
I do love the cultural importance in this made-up Radchaai empire of traditionally feminine-coded things. Having a good pair of gloves to protect your hands is important; having a valuable and high-quality set of tea service dishes is important. In this case, the plot kicks off because it's important to maintain multi-generational family heirlooms, and having a valuable set of 'vestiges' with the proper provenance leads to political power.
a note about Provenance
Like other Radch, there are complicated gender things happening (one sect expects only women to be serious people and men to keep a household or be servants), there are at least eight sets of pronouns for the locals, and all the while the official Radch language only has she/her pronouns for everybody. Either I've gotten used to the way Leckie does this, or Leckie has gotten much better at making this gender-pluralism more clear, but this one seemed easy enough to follow and also fun.
a note about Radiant Star
The plot of Radiant Star involves a newly-conquered Radch planet, which seems to consist mostly of one city, and its competing religious sects. The three main sects all uneasily share a central temple (the 'Temporal Location'), like Jerusalem. The key religious conflict is about sainthood; one sect has 'living saints' which sounds like the Japanese practice of self-mummification (sokushinbutsu) - the devotee starves and meditates, finally drinking a preservative, and becomes encased in gold. A rich mogul decides to ascend this way, and the new Radch overseers are horrified but allow it, one last time. In the meantime things go wrong with the city.
a note about Radiant Star
This is the Ann Leckie book that I really wanted to take to the beach, but didn't get my library hold in time. But this one is great; it's also in the Imperial Radch universe, and includes a Ship and its ancillaries, but is mostly otherwise unconnected to the plots of those books. It's MUCH more conversational in tone, and does a these breezy exposition chats between the author and reader. "You probably already know about this [invented scifi religion] but in case there's anyone not familiar with the details let's explain it..." kind of thing.
a note about Radiant Star
The weirdest-named Trollope book so far; a fairly low-key novel about inheritance and identities. The titular question: the old heir to the estate has been abroad for decades, and returns with a new wife and baby that can inherit the things others expected. But IS the baby legitimate? Is he REALLY Popenjoy?
Reading this on the heels of Armadale, which also has a big plot point about a scheme to defraud an estate with a secret 'foreign' marriage.
a note about Is He Popenjoy?
📖 Recent Quotes 📖
There are spectacles which are so much more spectacles than other spectacles that they make the beholder feel that there is before him a pair of spectacles carrying a face, rather than a face carrying a pair of spectacles.
an excerpt from Is He Popenjoy?
[ We are all writing short messages ] In olden times, fifteen or twenty years ago, when telegraph wires were still young, and messages were confined to diplomatic secrets, horse-racing, and the rise and fall of stocks, lovers used to indulge in rapturous expressions which would run over pages; but the pith and strength of laconic diction has now been taught to us by the self-sacrificing patriotism of the Post Office. We have all felt the vigour of telegrammatic expression, and, even when we do not trust the wire, we employ the force of wiry language.
an excerpt from Is He Popenjoy?
[ Love this metaphor for ‘a person doing an introduction and stealing the thunder of the main speaker’: ] Like a good chairwoman, she took none of the bread out of the Baroness's mouth.
an excerpt from Is He Popenjoy?
[loved this thing about 'the rich']
But there was something else that Svyatoslav knew—and he knew it because he had watched his father come home penniless over and over, smelling of sweat and drink: Myusena would never sell the tusks, and live. Somewhere along the way, they would be taken from him. He would be swindled. Killed, even. Men like Svyatoslav's father and Myusena did not get rich. They did not go and live on private islands, or send their children to university in London. No-they fulfilled their purpose: they retrieved things for others. They did the work, and were thrown away. Things like the tusks weren't just for rich people to have, or buy— the rich already owned them. They just needed to be handed over to their rightful owners.an excerpt from Tusks of Extinction
But there was something else that Svyatoslav knew—and he knew it because he had watched his father come home penniless over and over, smelling of sweat and drink: Myusena would never sell the tusks, and live. Somewhere along the way, they would be taken from him. He would be swindled. Killed, even. Men like Svyatoslav's father and Myusena did not get rich. They did not go and live on private islands, or send their children to university in London. No-they fulfilled their purpose: they retrieved things for others. They did the work, and were thrown away. Things like the tusks weren't just for rich people to have, or buy— the rich *already owned them*. They just needed to be handed over to their rightful owners.
an excerpt from Tusks of Extinction