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oxytocin Locked account

oxytocin@bookwyrm.social

Joined 2 years, 8 months ago

Into queer scifi fantasy tragicomical fiction with complex and not classically happy endings. Uhm, or something like that.

Sometimes I can read books, sometimes I can't. So I read a lot while I can.

Pronouns: she/her

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Patrick Rothfuss: Der Name des Windes (Hardcover, German language, 2008, Klett-Cotta)

In »Der Name des Windes« erzählt Patrick Rothfuss die Geschichte von Kvothe, dem berühmtesten Zauberer …

Page-turner

Well written, funny sometimes, like someone telling a story at a fireplace. Felt cozy to me.

Contains a few not-so-constructive patterns (like "I need to make my heart of stone to control emotions"), but for me it was Ok, definitely better than in "Consider Phlebas".

Stanisław Lem: The Star Diaries (Paperback, 1990, Mandarin)

he Star Diaries is a series of short stories of the adventures of space traveller …

Funky Retro Black Mirror-ish

Some stories felt like the black mirror museum episode, some are a bit boring. (And Ijon can be annoying. He gets angry quickly.) I read it in German, maybe some chapters are funnier in Polish?

Seth Dickinson: The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade Book 1) (2015, Tor Books)

Painful

Exciting, feels realistic, war strategy, a lot of innuendo (and smugness? — everyone feels very clever). Passages of feeling powerful, passages of feeling completely powerless. I would recommend it with a content warning: "Cruel and depressing".

Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas (Paperback, 2008, Orbit)

Consider Phlebas is perhaps one of the lesser-known, but nevertheless the first, of the revelationary …

Meh…

I guess I expected more… There’s one chapter (the eaters) that you can just skip completly imo. There’s been several times when I just wanted to stop reading (the eater-chapter and gendered stereotypes that continue to exist unchanged in the far future…), but I kept going for some reason and have not been rewarded.

C. S. Forester: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (Hornblower Saga: Chronological Order, #1) (1998, Little, Brown)

Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (published 1950) is a Horatio Hornblower novel written by C. S. Forester. …

Sailship fun with nationalism

Most of this book is exciting 18th/19th century sailing mechanics with wind strategy, and trying to capture the other ship without destroying it (I enjoyed it!). The cast is (almost) only men. And there are frequent commentaries on how badly organized the other navies/armies are, in comparison to the English ones.

The prose is not the best one I’ve ever read, but it’s easy to read and the chapters are independent episodes, which makes it a good snack.