User Profile

nogoodnik Locked account

nogoodnik@bookwyrm.social

Joined 5 months, 2 weeks ago

@idiotchayil@lingo.lol reads books?

This link opens in a pop-up window

nogoodnik's books

View all books

User Activity

Invisible Cities (1997) 4 stars

Invisible Cities (Italian: Le città invisibili) is a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino. It …

[T]he emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to the Kublai. In languages incomprehensible to the Khan, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them...Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks - ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes - which he arranged in front of him like chessmen.

Invisible Cities by 

reading Invisible Cities just after A Memory Called Empire, with modern-sf conceptions of empire fresh in my mind, really brings out passages like this. absolutely /loving/ the richness of Calvino's prose and his imagination of the fantastical. and besides, cultural contact, meaning, and the challenge of communication are all themes I adore

The Other Wind (2012, HMH Books for Young Readers) 4 stars

the crown jewel of Earthsea

4 stars

a wonderful ending to a series that (to me) has its ups and downs - the perfect culmination of what the series becomes in the later books. I feel like the themes in this book settled in where previously I had bounced off from them; like all the best capstones of a series, it paints the rest of the two trilogies in a new light, especially in tandem with Tales from Earthsea.

Tehanu (The Earthsea Cycle, Book 4) (Paperback, 2004, Pocket) 4 stars

the book that's bringing me around on Earthsea

4 stars

I've been reading through Earthsea half out of duty to finish everything by my favorite author; I hated A Wizard of Earthsea, loved Tombs of Atuan, and then found The Farthest Shore kinda tedious. But this book - written nearly 2 decades after the original trilogy - brought everything I love about Le Guin's work into the Earthsea series in a way that hadn't hooked me before. The prose, both deep and clear, and the rich depictions of life on Gont and musings on culture and gender finally brought what I'd wanted to see in Earthsea to the surface.

reviewed Rayuela. by Julio Cortázar

Rayuela. (Paperback, 1987, Alianza, Alianza Editorial) 4 stars

Un clásico - y todavía se ve porque

4 stars

lo leí en desorden, según la recomendación de Cortázar (comenzando con capitulo 78, entonces capitulo 1, etc.). me encantó todo lo juego literario e lingüístico, y todas las conexiones entre un capitulo y otro - quizás lo mas divertido fue descifrar porque Cortázar te manda en ese camino en particular. hace cosas maravillosas e inigualables con el estilo y la estructura del lenguaje. al mismo tiempo, ya que el español no es mi idioma nativo, a veces se me fue el argumento de los capitulos 1-56, especialmente mientras me enfoqué más en como juega con lenguaje que en lo que de verdad pasaba. me valdrá releerlo de manera "tradicional" y traducido - me encantó de verdad pero reconocer la hermosura de la prosa es un poco dificil si de vez en cuando tienes que parar y buscar una palabra en un diccionario.