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"The thing about illegally breeding fire-breathing possums is that you gotta keep a bucket of water handy."

*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*

(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)

Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!

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From: (Anonymous)

Hehe, this should be interesting! You're further in than me, then; I'm up to around pg 95 now where she's talking about how she can't compromise and I gotta say I relate a lot and get the reasoning, and am enjoying her respect for those who think differently. I'm reading it partly as discussion of the thinking behind ao3 and an (idealised, imo) idea of FOSS, too. In my head this book is "El intends to embark on a career as a freelance free software developer".

It has eased up a bit on the YA lectures over the last few pages though am expecting more to come, and I am reminded again and again that this is an American author utterly failing at sounding Welsh. XD The too-visible Britishisms are still all over the place. There's some US treatment of race, which I could maybe put down to US cultural influence *on* the UK, except El also mentions that characters in school usually call each other by their surnames, which really isn't as much of a thing as children's books would have you believe, so feels like an odd mashup of 1950 and 2023.

Am finding the writing style more clunky than previous books of hers but I'm not sure if it actually *is* clunkier or if I'm just more sensitive to prose style atm. I've been reading and writing more, recently, so maybe that's making it stick out.

From: (Anonymous)

SA

Did laugh my ass off though at everyone in London being SHOCKED at the idea of opening their fancy garden to tourists. Lollll like nobody would have thought of that by now and they all were just sitting around waiting for El to be their moral compass. Maybe it'll get explained in some way that isn't just "El is better than u" but as it stands that bit felt very childish. Now, if it were an Isle of Man enclave, I think she'd have a point.

From: (Anonymous)

SA

Also this is dumb but because I was just reading a book about hospice care, the mention of trading something like an eye for 20 years of life if one has cancer annoyed me because a whole bunch of people with cancer lose eyes etc and don't get 20 more years, or anything, so the calculation felt too neat/cheap. I generally like the mechanics in these books so that one stuck out a bit. I have a weird medical association with them because when I started reading the series I was at a hospital appointment for a friend getting a scan (turned out to be benign!). So probably stuck out even more to me for odd reasons.

From: (Anonymous)

SA

Man just hit the perfect example of what exasperates me with this series.

A few pages back, we get a great anecdote, where she talks about how instead of playing hide and seek, the other kids would play "hide from El" and she would go along even though she knew she was the butt of the joke because it was still better than nothing. That felt very real, and you feel a lot of sympathy.

Then a few pages later, she compares wanting something she can't have to having her face pressed up against the window of a cake shop. It's the most bland, thoughtless cliche ever. And the sentence is kinda purple, "easy sweetness I couldn't buy".

It's such an odd mix of good writing and terrible writing and I can't work out how it came out that way. It's annoying feeling like these books could have been really good, but nearly every good paragraph will have a messed up mirror somewhere. I don't understaaaaaand.

From: (Anonymous)

SA

"if she didn't help me, I'd land myself in the clink"

gjdhfjgfjdhfjs I CANNOT with this fake-British narrator. x'D Was Novick reading Dickens at the time???

From: (Anonymous)

Also lol inasmuch as there are any staff at a buffet, they really won't care if you go back for 2nd, 3rd, millionth helpings; it's there to be eaten and they've seen it all. Suppose this could just be El's paranoia. But I'd assumed it was based on some real travels of Novik's so am just gonna assume she was in a loud group and mistook people's irritation at the noise as judging them for what they ate. :P

From: (Anonymous)

El is flying for the first time, in first class, eating an airline lunch.

"We ate it all anyway. We had low standards."

Lollll El's social class is about as convincing as her Welshness.

From: (Anonymous)

Now this book is acting like the worst thing one can possibly be is a middleaged woman with a utilitarian approach to ethics, and it's all a bit weird. Am used to women being randomly disproportionately hated but was hoping Novik would avoid that. Maybe it'll make more sense later.

From: (Anonymous)

Around pg 290. Am finding the YA morality grating, and am getting bored of the repetitive essays on how this or that person didn't deserve to die horribly. The author seems so certain that her audience thinks someone *does* deserve to die horribly, and she needs to explain why they don't, it's really weird if it's not the way you yourself think.

The narrator continues to hate on this random woman who hasn't done anything on the page, and not engage with any of the points she raised.

I do like the way balance and sacrifice is treated in this book so far, though. It's annoying that such cool mechanics are attached to these characters and this narration.

From: (Anonymous)

And now they've joined the mile-high club. Hope the airline bans them. Poor flight-attendants.

From: (Anonymous)

"Dubai enclave, which is big and modern and firmly aboard the tolerance train"-- this comes out of nowhere and feels like some kind of protesting-too-much. She specifically mentions it tolerating differences of religion, nationality, and sexuality (UAE not exactly *famed* for its tolerance there; not the worst place out there but I'd characterise it more as "looking the other way" than "firmly aboard the tolerance train"...). I can believe that an enclave might follow different laws to the country where it's based, but this currently feels like a performative "I'm challenging stereotypes!", which serves only to reinforce them (in an odd way, because since when were enclaves expected to be moral, or governments assumed to represent the views of all their citizens?) Maybe we'll get more explanation. For now it reads strangely.

From: (Anonymous)

Now got to a neat and satisfying twist which is a really nice use of the mechanics and am annoyed again that these mechanics are in this book instead of the much better book it could have been.

From: (Anonymous)

Sa

But then

"My own personal trolley problem to solve"

Aaaaaaargh
Not the FUCKING trolley problem
Do writers have 1 braincell between them atm?

Fuck me this book is bad
Why is it so bad
I liked her other stuff on the whole
But stuff like this reads like it was written by some kind of YA focus group

From: (Anonymous)

Sa

I feel like the outline for this book is good but the heart is missing and she's going through the motions, along with trying to pacify the online YA crowd, and thus it's torturous. The characters are so thin. The description is so thin. The realisations are so repetitive. I wonder if she just really hated writing this and wanted the project to be over?

From: (Anonymous)

Omg on pg 357 and just burst out laughing at "Me too," Miranda said., character wasn't even in the scene for 3 pages and just pops up again out of nowhere, it's just a cartoon at this point.

From: (Anonymous)

Sa

Just this amazing Itchy and Scratchy and Poochie moment.

"I'll help you," said Aadhya, my first real friend and closest ally.

"And me," said Liu, my other best friend, whom we had just saved from eternal torment.

"Me too," said ~~Poochie~~ Miranda.

From: (Anonymous)

sa

Literally all I know about Miranda is that he's from Austin and he doesn't pass.

From: (Anonymous)

365

"a short Chinese man came in, wearing a Mao suit made out of some kind of fabric that looked almost like denim"

This is just a parody at this point

From: (Anonymous)

368

We've reached "closed-source software causes mass-torture". But El's got a GPL with her! Who will win?

Software parallels worked better when the stakes were a bit lower, gotta say. Having a thinly-disguised promo for copyleft licensing mid-war doesn't exactly add to the drama. I *would* have liked a book that involved more political intrigue from the start, instead of this thing that constantly picks up characters and drops them with minimal development. Like wtf Liu was being *crushed to death* and we're meant to treat it like yesterday's news???

I don't hate everything about this book but it started off wobbly and it has got wobblier and now I just want it to end. Much like a maw-mouth.

From: (Anonymous)

Sa
374
More cool mechanics, though I thought we'd already inferred all this? Also "I don't have the moral high ground, and I won't pretend to," Shanfeng said -- why does everyone in this book talk like this? Where are all the normal people? Liesel is the closest we've had so far so of course she vanished from the narrative ages ago. At least that gives us a respite from the sexless sex scenes, I guess.

From: (Anonymous)

Anyway yeah whenever they get onto ethics it's like it's been custom-written to prompt commentary from some moronic self-righteous letsreader, which it probably has.

From: (Anonymous)

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<small">Ophelia got-- not the hero she wanted, but the hero she deserved."</small>

I don't know if I *can* finish this book. I cut gideon ix some slack for that kind of shit because it was a first novel but

<small>Fuck it, I'm team ophelia now, she's the only person I halfway like in this book at this point, pls defeat them all and make it end.</small>

From: (Anonymous)

Oops but oh well not particularly spoilery I was just being cautious (NOT CAUTIOUS ENOUGH)

From: (Anonymous)

watch nonny break down in real-time, the novel.

From: (Anonymous)

395

Idly curious what examples she had in mind here, because afaict she's not involved in anything where she'd know the pain of a situation like this, which might explain why it's limited to two clumsy paragraphs right at the end of the book.

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(Anonymous) - Re: Books - The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik)

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