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Tildes Book Club - Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang - How is it going?
We'll be discussing this collection of stories at the end of the month. Have you found the book? Are you making progress?
I'm still in the middle of the first story which seems long to me.
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In contrast with my usual pattern of slacking, I’ve actually already started! Chiang’s Exhalation is one of my favorite books, so I’ve been looking forward to this one.
I’ve finished the first two stories and liked both of them. I love how conceptual his stories are. He always has thoughtful, unique premises for them.
I’ve got a platelet donation scheduled for this weekend. That’ll be a nice uninterrupted two hour reading block, so I’ll put more of a dent in the rest of the book then.
I am trying to finish A Spear Cuts Through Water which I picked up after reading comments about it in the nomination thread. (It is fantastic, by the way, it will definitely be on my nom list for next year). Hoping to get to TC after in time for the EOM.
I was impressed by spear cuts through water as a creative piece of writing. I was also drawn into the story. I'm glad you are enjoying it.
I am 77% of the way through according to Kindle - I enjoyed the first story a lot, the second one rather little, and the next two a somewhere in the middle. I'm in the second to last one now.
Ha, I'm pretty much the opposite, except my dislike was stronger. I almost stopped after the third story and am glad I kept going. The tone and language differ quite a bit from story to story. Sometimes it's really easy to see a clear pattern in things written by a person, this author is very good at changing things up.
One thing about the audiobook, there are two different readers. There were two stories in a row read by the woman and I missed the transition, which was really confusing. I think that was between the second and third.
I think I have the same audiobook and yeah, the different narrator creates a completely different sense of the story.
The second one was a bit of a slog for me, except that I have a good friend who, in so many ways, resembles the narrator. The tenor of the interior monologue, even the choice of words, was so familiar, I felt like I was listening to some hyperbolic version of my friend telling me about his most recent epiphanies. I kept wondering, "How much of this will be revealed at the end of the story to be just a chemically-induced episode of mania?"
The eternal struggle between the maximizers and the satisficers strikes again.
Oh, that's weird. A different audiobook I'm reading right now has a full cast. I'm guessing one of them was used as the base for one of the standard AI voices, because for the first few times I heard her I thought they had used AI for just that one person.
I still can't find my actual paper copy and I sad about probably missing this one; just another regular misadventure in ADHD land. -..-
I'm sorry to hear that. I enjoy reading your contributions to our discussion topics.
My loan is almost ready at the library. I'm halfway through my current read, but it's a fast read so I should be done before it's ready to check out.
I'm on the fifth story now, Seventy-Two Letters. I've enjoyed everything so far, but some more than others. As @tanglisha said, there's a lot of variety and tonal changes between stories. Some are very nerdy, while others are emotional and somber.
Since it's a short story collection, it's tough to give "thoughts so far" without giving anything away on earlier stories, so I'll keep mum and wait for the discussion thread proper.
So I bought this when it was on sale... but I'm still recovering from being sick. I haven't started and may just skip this one and come back to it later (which is what I ended up doing with Hyperion earlier in the year - still only 4% in, no idea when I'll pick it up for real). I find that reading story collections is always kind of a hard sell for me because I prefer a plot to carry me through the whole work. (Which, saying that, kind of makes me wonder if there are any "concept anthologies" or collections out there like there are concept albums...)
I tend to not be a fan of short story collections because the word count requirements sometimes don't fit with the stories the authors want to tell. In this case, they were written out independently. Most of them are also on the long side of a short story, an hour or more for the audiobook. They absolutely don't share a cohesive theme or arc, but you might try looking at them as a series of novellas.
Haven't started my re-read yet, but this reminded me to borrow it so I'll get started soon! I remember really liking some stories and feeling more tepid on one or two, so I may jump around a bit in this refresh.
Will borrow the audio book after 2(?) more books.