January novel-reading

[garran]

Thus:

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day
Nick Mamatas, Under My Roof
Steven Brust, Iorich
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn

When a book is described as being about injustice, I usually imagine it as being about the struggle against an injustice. Never Let Me Go is instead about injustice that defeats and distorts you, that is too big to understand even though it suffuses everything, and what it's like to try to understand it, and to try to live anyway. It had the stereotypical "literary fiction" property of being full of characters I didn't like, but I did end up caring about them.

I appreciate Octavia Butler's apparent preoccupation with ethical and biological hybridity and ambivalence; it's something I'm pretty interested in these days, too. The other things I read were also great, but I don't remember anything specific I wanted to say about them and I'd better hurry to school.