Lisa Eckstein > Recent Status Updates

I love how the character relationships are developing!

Great balance of plot with different pieces of worldbuilding. The story is moving right along while also getting into all sorts of interesting details.

Great combination of science fictional elements!

Lots of good stuff set up at the beginning of this first contact story!

"But they went on suffering from a vague, irrational hope that if everything, every mystery of the New World, could be examined and known, then they would reach an understanding of how they felt about it." Gloss is very good at portraying human nature while also imagining the science fictional details and logistics.

This is so good and sad and funny. Just as much so on a second reading.

"For 175 years they had gone on talking and thinking and making ready for leaving this world. They had lived for 175 years in a kind of suspended state, a continual waiting for change, but it was a balanced and deep-grounded condition, an equilibrium. They knew their world, root and branch, knew its history and its economies.... Some people thought they had lived for 175 years in a world that was a kind of Eden."

I wanted to reread this after watching the excellent BBC television adaptation. Still great!

Excited about getting to know some of the characters on this generation ship as they reach a possible final destination.

Enjoying the characters and gradually understanding how they all connect.

Very Mandelian right away, with time shifts, secrets, and great, flawed characters!

Interesting additional layer has been added -- curious to see where it's going to go!

Unfolding so much differently than I expected, and it's great!

"All smooth flights are alike. Every turbulent flight is turbulent in its own way." This is fun!

"Was it a week like that or a month? When it came to misery, it was hard for Manuel to keep track, misery became a mist that invaded the days and nights..." A lot of pain and tragedy in this story for poor Manuel.

I was not expecting this book to open with the story of a hitman! Intriguing!

Hoping for some good news for Manuel!

A short book, so it moves along fast. Lots of interesting ideas.

Great setup of characters and worldbuilding!

"Science helped you piece things together, make sense of things. You couldn't get angry at the way mechanical things worked, they just worked, or they didn't, and you worked on fixing them. People were a different matter."

The opening effectively (and beautifully) captures the POV of a child who has no concept of what's happening when he's taken away from his family and sent to live with a series of strangers he can't understand.

This is a very bizarre book. The humor is often too surreal for my taste, but I do love the wordplay and use of language(s).

"I think history and the Telling are the same thing," Unroy said at last. "They're ways of holding and keeping things sacred."

"What is sacredness?"

"What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful."

"He once told Oreo that he had offered to look after a friend’s pachysandra over the weekend, an offer that was hastily withdrawn when he learned that pachysandra was a plant and not an elephant seer whom no one believed."

Now things are developing, and we may get some more answers!

Loving all the humor and fun with language on display already!

Compelling in its way, but just not as fun as the first book, and feels padded out with some unnecessary stuff that drags.

An especially anthropological Le Guin story, with much of the text devoted to an Observer's detailed discoveries about the culture she's studying. All very interesting, but I'm also looking forward to more plot developing.

Really enjoying spending time with this character as she figures out the cultures of this world.

I think I've figured out one of the twists, and I suspect it's the least fun sort of surprise reveal.