Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

I liked reading about the culture with four-person marriages in "Unchosen Love" and "Mountain Ways". (I'm going to seek out her first story from this culture, "A Fisherman of the Inland Sea".)

"The Matter of Seggri" is presented as multiple documents gathered over centuries about a planet where women outnumber men by 16 to 1. It's a fascinating format to explore the evolving cultural ramifications through a variety of character experiences.

Enjoying this pretty well, despite how often I'm wishing the kids would just tell the grownups what's going on!

The first story, "Coming of Age in Karhide", gets into the detailed workings of the Gethen gender and sexuality established in The Left Hand of Darkness. The book's foreword explains that many of the stories in this collection do the same sort of deep dives into worldbuilding, and I'm here for it!

This is fun. Highly whimsical, which I'm not really the target audience for, but I like the characters and am caught up in the story.

This remains very clever and hard to get my brain around!

This is making my brain hurt, in a good way. (No nosebleed!)

Intriguing setup. I can't wait to get a clearer idea of what's going on here!

Enjoying some sections more than others. The book is especially effective when Painter talks about being caught up and carried away by her art projects.

I'm not the ideal audience for this, but there's a lot about visual art and artists in it that I think readers with that interest would appreciate.

"Mrs. Touchet had a theory. England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi. Nothing real happened in England. Only dinner parties and boarding schools and bankruptcies. Everything else, everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded -- all of that they did elsewhere."

Next book club pick. I'm doing this one on audio, read by the author.

Fascinated by everything in this novel!

Fascinating historical details, such as: "If London was busy above ground, it was full underneath.... And so a huge suburban cemetery had been built in Surrey to accommodate the overspill, and here was the dedicated platform that took you to it, and the special train that transported the dead and those who mourned them. She had read about these death trains but this was her first time seeing one."

Completely absorbed already!

I like the way this keeps subverting expectations, and the characters are wonderful!

Good escalation of complications.

"In April, The Paris Wife. In June, A Reliable Wife. In August, American Wife. In September, The Time Traveler’s Wife. In December, he runs out of decent books with wife in the title. They read Bel Canto." :)

I didn't really have any idea what this was about, other than it featuring a bookstore, so it's a lot of fun waiting to see what unfolds!

"She *was* going to have to sort this out for herself, wasn't she? But how? She wasn't a detective or a journalist. All she had on her side was a maligned ability to read minds, her moderate skills as a petty con artist, and a very good dog."

Off to an exciting start!

"Yeah, I’ll just code a patch to stop feeling anxiety, wow, why didn’t I think of that earlier. (That was sarcasm, I have too much organic neural tissue for that to work.) (Of course I’ve already tried it.)"

Enjoying how this installment really builds on the ones before, giving us a different perspective on the characters.

"But still, a small metal container filled with mushy humans hurtling over spiky rocks for long periods agitates my threat assessment module. There were so many ways to crash and die in mountain ranges, it was also making my stupid risk assessment randomly alert." Great to be back with Murderbot, though it's extra anxious after the events of the previous book.

Glad to see earlier threads coming back into play.

Delightful and intriguing!

This was recommended by a couple of friends, and it's definitely off to a great start.

I don't know how much is research and how much is imagination, but Patchett is certainly evoking a sense of place in this novel!

The way Patchett manages the tension of this story is so good!

As usual with Patchett, I'm immediately loving all the characters and fascinated by the premise!