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A very emotional and structurally interesting book - somewhere between a set of short stories and a set of chapters with very varied styles and points of view.

I loved the ways the stories were connected to each other, and the best of them were absolutely heartrending pictures of grief, fear, and mourning. Many of them did live on in my mind for some time afterwards. But towards the end I felt like some of the broader attempts to pull it all together in one arc didn't quite land for me.

#SFFBookClub

@calor It's open to anyone, but it's a bit confusing at the moment because hashtags don't quite sync right between Bookwyrm and Mastodon (probably true for Misskey, Pleroma, etc too, Mastodon's just the one I have experience with). All you have to do to participate is to post about the book with the tag. But:

1) We all really appreciate it if anything at all spoilery is behind a warning that says how far into the book you are, so people can wait until they've reached the same place to read it.

2) If you also have a Mastodon account, you'll see more traffic on the #SFFBookClub tag over there, and you'll get more replies if you use that one.

CW for this book: a big piece of what it's about is stuck conflicts and deeply ingrained oppression, and the ways in which mutual fear / the fears of the people currently on top keep them stuck with horrifying consequences. Reading it right now I keep thinking about Palestine, which I think is partly intentional but there are also strong echoes of many other things. I'm about 2/3 of the way through and I think it's excellent, just also a very grim read.

To some extent this applies to City Of Brass too, but this volume paints a lot more of the history of the trilogy's world and goes a lot harder on the political themes.

@mouse@bookwyrm.social Yay! I'm a few chapters in to this right now, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I'm doing.

Chapter 3: I see now that characters from one story do show up in others, so the book overall will get to have character arcs not just a zoomed-out plot one. Makes me even more curious how much the stories have been reworked between individual publication and collecting into book form.

#SFFBookClub

Just sharing Enne's set of CWs for this book from weirder.earth/@picklish/111701657327009106 because hashtags still seem to only partially work between Mastodon and Bookwyrm:

"I wanted to pass on content warnings for: suicide, pandemic, climate change, death, euthanasia, animal experimentation, body horror, despair" #SFFBookClub

I just noticed that I've added a translation to bookwyrm even though I'm reading it in English. More importantly, in today's reading group we realised that there are at times quite large differences between the 1818 and 1831 texts, and decided we're going to stick to the 1831 one, which conveniently is what Standard Ebooks used.

I like how with the 1831 introduction this is a story within a story within a story: Frankenstein's story within Robert Walton's tale of how he found Victor Frankenstein, within Shelley's own frame story about being stuck in the Alps with Lord Byron in the notorious Year Without A Summer.

From the one chapter I've read so far I can tell this is going to be a lot heavier than the last couple of things I've read. Promising start, though. #SFFBookClub