User Profile

i think i'm too overwhelmed to really write anything about this book rn, it's too much. spätestens ab der hälfte war ich auch nicht mehr wirklich ausreichend aufnahmefähig (there is so, so much going on in this text, and my memory not nearly good enough to keep all strands in my head at once)

this is probably the only sci-fi work i have ever read which has a solid page of text entirely in latin (and then has the gall to make that horribly weird latin, since most of it was presumably added three-words-a-time over centuries, for complicated in-universe regions)

where's my mycroft :/

This book has been recommended by an uncommonly disperate set of people; curious to see what that is about

as already mentioned, this book is just so much

found this lying around on the street & thought it might be interesting

(admittedly, the absurd narrative speed evens out a bit in the later books; i guess there's a reason why it's the first one that she called 'too like the lightning [which doth cease to be, ere one can say, it lightens]')

annoyingly, this book is still in the category of "almost everything i could possibly say about it has at least essay-length", and i don't have the time or motivation to write essays 🙈

a fun side observation tho: it moves slowly, not in the sense that i'm on page 155 and it's barely evening of the second day described, but in that reappearing characters usually reappear exactly where they were left before the narration switched focus on someplace else, and there are absolutely no "they did $things in the meantime"-passages anywhere — everything is part of the main trunk of the narration grinding along at dizzying (but slow) speeds, without ever taking a moment for breath (while Mycroft repeatedly hits you on the head with the entire canon of 'western' philosophy, and being unnecessarily horny about it all)

Haven't read much so far, but god have i missed Mycroft's voice, he's so absurdly, obnoxiously, incomprehensibly derangend in absolutely every word he writes; i keep having fun imagining what one of his actual readers would think, since he's explicitly writing this for publication soon after the events he's describing

(i'm kinda anxious about how much i like i'll like these books this time overall though — been years since i read this, and i might disagree with Ada more now than I did before, but we'll see)

I'm at the end! This book really has no right to be anywhere near this good.

There's a sequel which I didn't find as good last time, but maybe I should read it again? But perhaps take a break from this and read something else first.