Why do I keep reading books that, in the end, I cannot connect with?īefore I realized what my frame of reference should have been, I had a very hard time trying to fit the book’s universe into a coherent whole, and this wound up being a pretty problematic element for me-problematic, in that I could feel myself defaulting to European fantasy norms when the text was telling me otherwise.Is a haunting plot the same as a colonialism/globalization plot?.I found myself dealing with three main threads: The experience of reading the book gave me much more to chew on than the book itself. It gets off to a very slow start with little indication of what the story will become. I didn’t have a clue what the book would be about for the first hundred or so (ebook) pages.
That’s not actually a spoiler, that’s the jacket summary, but I came to this book knowing nothing about it, only that it was supposed to be good and that it featured a non-European fantasy world, which, hurrah! And as I was reading, it occurs to me how much media I consume in which I sort of know what’s coming - you’ve read the book before you watch the movie, or it’s a remake or a mash-up or it’s based on a fairy tale, or you can see the plot coming a mile away. The frustrated one more mirrors my own experience, in that I spent most of the novel irritated by the ponderously layered language and cultural constructs, and by the “boy meets dying girl, dead girl haunts boy, boy falls in love but must set both of them free” plot.
The positive one points out that it’s a love letter to books and reading, while at the same time exploring the tension between history, literate societies and oral societies. I had to read a couple outside reviews to nail down my feelings. Yet for the past few days I’ve been wrestling with how to talk about A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar.
I’ve finished my second whole book on the Kobo and am plowing into my third. Can we talk about how great the “X% done | N hours left” feature is? Because when a book is dragging, it’s pretty much a godsend.
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