Note: In the course of writing this blog post, I arrived at semantic satiation for the word speak, and maybe you will too. In Speak Louisa Hall plays around with concepts of speech and personhood and artificial intelligence. In alternating chapters, the reader hears from Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence; Mary Bradford, a seventeenth-century diarist on her way to a new life in the New World; Ruth and Karl Dettman, who together (but separately) created the first iteration of an AI called MARY; Stephen Chinn, who built MARY into something dangerous and is now writing his…
10 CommentsTag: unsatisfying endings
Review: The Year of the Gadfly, Jennifer Miller
Published 14 Nov 2012
by
Gin Jenny
In October (or, if you are me writing this post, now) I had this cold where I lost my whole entire voice for several days, and I was all sickly to the point that I stayed home from work, and on the day where I stayed home from work, I sat in my bed under blankets, feeling terribly sad, and I read Year of the Gadfly. This is a very uninteresting story to anyone but me. I don’t get sick that often, so to me this story feels terribly sad, like way overblown sad. Unreasonably sad. Like the death of…
14 CommentsReview: Still Life with Fascists trilogy, Jo Walton
Published 16 Sep 2010
by
Gin Jenny
Britain didn’t declare war on Germany. Instead they made peace, and Britain slid gradually into fascism. One might call the trilogy the Small Change trilogy instead, as the books are called Farthing, Ha’Penny, and Half a Crown, but I like the Still Life with Fascists title better. Each book has two narrators, one the first-person narration of a young upper-class English woman, and one the third-person narration of a morally compromised policeman called Carmichael. Don’t you love a morally compromised narrator? The first book, Farthing, is a country house murder mystery. The so-called “Farthing set”, famed for their integral role…
35 CommentsReview: Stern Men, Elizabeth Gilbert
Published 5 Dec 2009
by
Gin Jenny
Ruth Thomas lives on Fort Niles, an island off the coast of Maine, where the main occupation is lobster-hunting. Raised mainly on Fort Niles by her father and her neighbor Mrs. Pommeroy, Ruth’s upbringing is punctuated with time spent in Delaware boarding school. Upon her graduation she returns to Fort Niles determined to start a life there, despite the apparent wishes of her mother’s family, the posh Ellises who only summer in Fort Niles. I liked Eat Pray Love – not unreservedly, but a lot. I liked it when God told her to go back to bed, and I cried…
12 CommentsSiberia; August 15th
Published 15 Aug 2009
by
Gin Jenny
It’s August 15th! Happy Independence Day, India! Where my excellent friend is and I hope she is having a good time teaching children! And Happy Assumption of the Virgin Day, Catholics! I didn’t go to church today despite its being a holy day of obligation, but never mind, I will go another time. And, says my newspaper, and Wikipedia agrees with me, it is also happy birthday to Phyllis Schlafly, which I normally wouldn’t mention except it’s such a coincidence because I was just thinking about her the other day reading The Handmaid’s Tale! (When I was in high school…
2 CommentsMy Sister’s Keeper, Jodi Picoult
Published 24 Sep 2008
by
Gin Jenny
My mum told me to read this. I love my darling mum. She must never, never, never become sick. And neither must my father or any of my sisters. They must stay in perfect health until they are very, very old, and then I will accept that as part of the circle of life they must die peacefully in their sleep after first ringing me up to say a satisfactory goodbye. That is the plan. Deviance will not be tolerated. I really don’t like thinking about my family members dying. Because of Jodi Picoult, I thought about it a lot…
5 CommentsGeek Love and True Love
Published 20 Jul 2008
by
Gin Jenny
The past few days have been a bit weird, reading-wise. I was reading Geek Love – recommended to me by Toryssa as an antidote to the trite blahness of Water for Elephants (Water to Elephants? I can never remember) – and then when I wasn’t reading that, I was reading the Brownings’ letters to each other when they were a-courting. It’s been strange. Geek Love is two stories running consecutively: the main character, Olympia, is a hunchback dwarf from a family that deliberately bred freaks in order to make their circus all interesting, and she’s telling the story of her…
6 CommentsThrone of Jade, Naomi Novik
Published 14 Jul 2008
by
Gin Jenny
Well, I was slightly less thrilled with this than the last one. I know it’s good for Laurence to chill out a little bit because yes, he did in some respects have a stick up his ass, and I appreciate that’s not necessarily an ideal state for a stalwart hero to be in – but I got sad when he started to feel disenchanted with the British government and the Navy and everyone, and how he started thinking sedition mutiny thoughts. I liked His Majesty’s Dragon because of how proper and British he was, and now he’s all different. I…
3 CommentsStory Time, Edward Bloor
Published 1 Jul 2008
by
Gin Jenny
Just grabbed this at the library because I had picked up London Calling and I thought, well, hey, if I like that a lot, I’ll want to have another of this author’s books on hand in order to read it, too. And then when I went to find London Calling in my bag, I guess it was way at the bottom, so I read this one, which was closer to the surface. It’s about these two kids, George and Kate – George is Kate’s uncle but he’s younger than she is – and due to their great brilliance, they get…
Leave a CommentTipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
Published 19 Apr 2008
by
Gin Jenny
I liked Night Watch enough that I got all of Sarah Waters’s other books out of the library in the hopes that I would be getting a grand new favorite author. Tipping the Velvet was evidently her first, and I didn’t like it as much as Night Watch, sadly, but I still totally enjoyed it. So much I stayed up until three last night finishing it even though I have a paper to write today. I’m doing that straightaway after I write this. Lots of interesting Victorian underworld in this book. I spent a lot of this book trying to…
4 Comments