liveblogging a book: The City and the City

[ritaxis]

I was a little disappointed when the Potlach book of honor turned out to be a China Mieville one. I bounced so hard off the one books of his I tried to read that I was fairly certain I didn't want to go there again. So I've been dragging my feet about getting The City and the City -- if I thought hard about it I suppose I could say I left it till late so it would be fresh in my mind -- and I just got it today. My first thought when I had it in my hand was "good, it's not as long as that other one," not so much because it's a busy week for me all told but because that meant I wouldn't have to spend too much time in a Mieville book . . .

Dear dog and all that is canine, this is a disgusting way to begin a book. And yeah, I get that it's supposed to be harsh and awful, but you know, the dead naked woman with smeared makeup and horrible wounds found under a discarded mattress in a squalid crime-ridden neighborhood?

Not edgy. Not daring. Not revelatory. It's trite and I don't like it and it disposes me ill towards what follows. I have contracted to read it and take it seriously, but I really resent it and I resent my fellow potlatchers who voted for it instead of any number of other books.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

I confess that I'd been thinking of going to Potlatch but then decided against it when I saw the short-list of books. It just didn't feel like it would be my type of convention.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

It's so weird. The book is so awful, but the time I went to Potlatch it was really a lot of fun. Of course, that time it was Philp K. Dick and I had read the book years before so I didn't feel like I had to reread it.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I didn't actually like the book -- I haven't liked anything I've read by Miéville -- but I did find it interesting, and I'm intrigued by Miéville's obsession with twinned cities, doubled cities, cities with invisible halves. I think he did the doubling better in Un Lun Dun.

Potlatch will still be a lot of fun. The Book of Honor makes more of an impression on a convention than a Guest of Honor does, because more people can be in its presence for longer than can be in the presence of a person (huh -- that's a new thought to me, and I wonder if it's really true? I think it is, because lots of us have lived with this book for a while before the convention, but none of us would be living with China Miéville if he were the guest of honor), but it's not the whole convention.

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

I found Un Lun Dun a masterwork that drew me in and led me to buy other works by the same author.

It was as if someone read Soul Survivor and bought a bunch of other stuff with my name on it. Any merit of the rest of the work is overshadowed by the unfair comparison to the standard of what was read first.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

They did Among Others last year, and I so wished I could have been there.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I wished I could have been there last year too, but sadly I wasn't up for the non-Prague travel yet.