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@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!)

this is such a good dedication for this book

I don't think I understood this one at all (at least partially because of language issues, but also does this ever have a lot of moving parts for a 25-page story)