and no photo, but

[darkoshi]

the daffodils have started blooming.

I've been reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie. It's quite good. There's no humor (that I've noticed so far), but the plot becomes quite gripping after a certain point in the story.

Comments

[redsixwing]

I just finished that, and am working on Ancillary Sword now that my library hold is finally here. Quite liked it; interested in your thoughts.

[darkoshi]

Once I finish this book, maybe I'll jot down some of my thoughts about it.

[darkoshi]

Well, I finished Ancillary Justice a few weeks ago, and then started right into Ancillary Sword. It's still quite gripping.

I think I'm still trying to comprehend how each ancillary is the same or different versus each other and their ship in terms of memories/recall and processing power, etc.

The pronoun thing and not knowing if most of the characters are male or female hasn't been much of an issue for me; I'm not sure how much of that is due to my own non-binaryness.

[redsixwing]

>>I think I'm still trying to comprehend how each ancillary is the same or different versus each other and their ship in terms of memories/recall and processing power, etc.<<

I was chewing on that right up to the end of the trilogy, honestly. I never quite resolved it to my satisfaction.

(Mostly, this made me want to write fic real bad, but given I can't remember anyone's names in that trilogy, I don't think that's going to happen.)

The pronoun thing didn't bother me either, but: also nb. So ??

[darkoshi]

I was thinking about the pronoun thing some more today. When I first started reading Ancillary Justice, I kept thinking of all the characters as female because of it. I had to remind myself that they might be male once in a while. By now, I'm picturing (as in visually, how they look, and maybe how their voice sounds) most of the characters as rather androgynous.

I don't usually picture characters in great detail, unless a lot of detail is given in the book, but for some of them I do create a vague "sort of looks like" image in my mind, and that's what I'm talking about.

As to whether the pronouns affect how I think of the characters' mental state and personalities, and if it would be different if male pronouns were used instead, it's hard to say. Right now, the personalities seem rather androgynous to me too. ... Which seems natural, because if you take away appearances and gender cues, and simply deal with the mind, aren't most people androgynous? I'm not sure that's true, but it seems plausible to me. I don't really understand what people mean when they say they "feel male inside" or "feel female inside".

Normally when I read stories, I hear the people with female pronouns "speak" (in my mind) with a higher pitched voice, and they have a different mental "flavor" than the people with the male pronouns, who seem more the "default" people to me. These Ancillary books have been helpful in combating that a little bit for me, personally.

Tisarwat was described as originally having been "flighty". That's one adjective I have difficulty in thinking of as applying to a male person. I'm not sure why.

[redsixwing]

I did end up gendering a couple of characters, and then thinking about why I was doing that, and then changing a couple of them just to see if I could. /g Turns out, yes, and it changed nothing. Most of them read as very androgynous to me, too.

Seivarden, in particular, kept reverting to male.

I tend to picture characters and situations pretty closely. Part of really enjoying a book, for me, is being able to watch a sort of mental video as I read. It was somewhat difficult to do that here, but mostly because I had no really good model of what their clothing looked like.

I don't have much trouble attaching "flighty" to a male character, but part of that may be my long experience in chunks of fandom that have attached thoroughly to the Keet, who is often depicted as more flighty than the average bear.

If I wrote Ancillary Fanfic, it would be one where Breq and Tisarwat and Ship end up in a temporary, consent-based pseudo-network, just so they can scratch all of each other's community itches.