He might not give you his AO3 user name (assuming he has one, which I do assume) but then again... he might...
I have actually read the thing twice—I almost never re-read books within a year of first reading them, but I found I really wanted to know what it was like to read the thing already knowing the world. The writing makes (or lets) the reader do so much of the worldbuilding work that I suspected it might feel almost empty to read it already knowing the economic/historical/social/sexual/scientific/whatever structures. In fact, for me, it was an excellent second read—kinda narrower but deeper. And I had definitely more of a sense of the parents as different characters on the second read, instead of just being Vail or Staid.
Hunh, now that I think about it, that's a really interesting thing—I _totally_ lumped "the Vail ones" together on the first read. Hunh. I haven't really thought about how much I viewed the book through Staid eyes. And Ruich's essay is very Vail-y. Hmmm.
Relatedly, one of the things I found about having read the book is that I keep wanting to talk about the actual world in terms of the book's world—to talk about how this bit of social gender construction is like that thing in the book, or how this way that we are trying to prepare our children for the world is like that thing in the book, and it's really frustrating that not everybody has read the book to make those conversations possible. It's the first book I've felt like that about since Naomi Alderman's The Power.
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Re: Interesting!
Date: 2022-01-12 06:55 pm (UTC)I have actually read the thing twice—I almost never re-read books within a year of first reading them, but I found I really wanted to know what it was like to read the thing already knowing the world. The writing makes (or lets) the reader do so much of the worldbuilding work that I suspected it might feel almost empty to read it already knowing the economic/historical/social/sexual/scientific/whatever structures. In fact, for me, it was an excellent second read—kinda narrower but deeper. And I had definitely more of a sense of the parents as different characters on the second read, instead of just being Vail or Staid.
Hunh, now that I think about it, that's a really interesting thing—I _totally_ lumped "the Vail ones" together on the first read. Hunh. I haven't really thought about how much I viewed the book through Staid eyes. And Ruich's essay is very Vail-y. Hmmm.
Relatedly, one of the things I found about having read the book is that I keep wanting to talk about the actual world in terms of the book's world—to talk about how this bit of social gender construction is like that thing in the book, or how this way that we are trying to prepare our children for the world is like that thing in the book, and it's really frustrating that not everybody has read the book to make those conversations possible. It's the first book I've felt like that about since Naomi Alderman's The Power.
Thanks,
-V.