jemini's reviews
349 reviews

i love our earth! our ship in the sea that is space! 

so human, so loving, so quick and quiet, and achy to your very core and even beyond that. 

v gorg n rhythmic writing, so seamless. 

quite enjoyed it. my coworker told me it’s filled w jargon and is generally perceived as being difficult to read. i agree that this is true but also felt that it worked well to build this intriguing world. the words aren’t that hard to understand with context, it just requires a bit of close reading and then you’re good. 

bears a lot of resemblance to le guin’s cerebral sci-fi/fantasy writing style. 

for some reason i was so touched by severian, the main character, though he didn’t really do anything to gain it. 

also, yes if you read old books, you get some old perspectives—be warned now. 

certainly was interesting. a twining of this post world war 2 reality with the mythology of Jason and the Argo. idek what to say…it was quirky that the main character loved fish, believing it to be the reason why nordic people are superior, to the point that he created an academic journal based on it. 

my favourite stories were the first deer dance, wildcat and the actions, gorsch the cellist, and the red blanket. 

i really enjoyed them. they were very playful and delightfully mischievous in its animism. 

however when i got to the man of the hills, it went downhill. i quickly stopped reading the story as soon as “chinaman” was used and the perception of that character emerged. it was emphasized since all other human characters were not ethnically categorized until this story. additionally since chinaman was used by the west to refer to chinese immigrants, i feel like miyazawa wouldn’t have used that term since he’s japanese and lived in Japan. 

it brought me back to a recurring curiosity I have about mistranslation in translated texts. beyond this instance, i wonder if a lot was missed in all the stories.

so ever classic and the most whimsy of whimsical!!