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(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.

@ada@kirja.casa owo was, gar nicht mitbekommen dass er letztes Jahr ein neues Buch veröffentlicht hat

… sollte glaub wirklich mal mehr Zamonien lesen als "nur" das Blaubär-Buch

@ada@kirja.casa ohh it's been so long since i read any of his, perhaps i should again? have fun!

(tho i've heard people say the first book is not the best to start; my own memories of it are a little vague tho, and i think i only ever read the first two books? 🙈)

Not sure if this a very quotable sentence, but i like it so much? it does such a neat job of tying the story together, or at least relating its two main themes as almost-reflections of each other (relatedly, A Memory Called Empire is such an enormously cool title for this book, and i'm still a little disappointed that its sequel just has a Tacitus quote)

also it's just funny how it says "a single moving point of consciousness" at the precise moment in the book when Mahit is at the absolute furthest from being a 'single' person or mind.

@jana actually i'd never looked up what kind of flower a larkspur is, but apparently they're poisionous if ingested (and skin-irritating if touched), so i'm not sure i'd try that dish 🙈

fits him, though, i think.

This is a fun one, in a way, but I'm not sure I'd call it good? There's a fun idea (a videogame-like "save and reload" function for real life, introduced by an all-powerful company) and what I think is a fun if somewhat obvious message (sth like "aim at making the right choices, but don't obsess about past wrong choices, and have the confidence to do so")

Or at least, I can only really read it as a metaphor; I had real trouble suspending disbelief enough to accept that this world would work as the story requires it to — it feels like a morality tale ruminating on what makes a (single) person good, and less like a sf story exploring how the ostensible premise (i.e. the save-and-reload technology) would shape the society within which it exists.

For some reason, whenever I read the name Thirty Larkspur, I assume he is a women and get confused about the pronouns in the following few sentences

dunno why, his seems to be the only teixcalaanli name that feels this intuitively 'gendered' to me

thanks, Robert Harris, for making me unable to read imperium not Latin whenever it occurs in English text. But then ig that's the same, here? As in, what's meant is the power to command by itself and act as the state, which the emporer holds, and not the empire or anything like 'Imperium' usually means in German

(though i wonder if they were as horny about it — but also i just realised the name's similar with Darj Tarat, and seems it's not a coincidence: Petros Getadarj was Armenian, and Lsel's language (or at least phonitactics) are inspired by Armenian according to Martine's short language description at the end of the book!)