Today wasn’t too bad for a Thursday, even if I do feel like I may be getting something like a sore throat again.
Meanwhile, I finally finished reading China Miéville’s novel Embassytown. I’m usually a big fan of his work, but maybe he was due for a disappointment. It’s been nominated for all kinds of awards, but…well, here’s what I wrote over on Goodreads:
Disappointing, which is not an adjective I’m used to applying to Miéville’s novels. This one is full of intriguing (if not always thoroughly realized or convincing) ideas about language, but ultimately the book feels like a short story or novella masquerading as a novel. There’s a rich sfnal universe lurking in the corners here, other worlds and governments and alien cultures briefly glimpsed, but here a lot of it feels like window-dressing, or like padding, or like it’s there just because Miéville is interested in telling other stories set on different planets in the same universe. The book isn’t actively bad, but I never expected it to be genuinely boring.