gene wolfe's book of the NEWSUN!!!!! reading club

why?

keep fallin asleep after every paragraph, tbh. it's dense.

it is dense. i suggest reading aloud in a foppish voice.

^^^ lol.

i find it a bit of a hard read too, because the action moves a lot slower than a lot of what i have been reading lately, and i also fall asleep reading it. but.. i am keeping on. it's a strangely episodic book and i think some of the episodes are more engaging than others tbh.

If you can find the audio version, read by Roy Avers for the National Library Service for the Blind, it's a nice version.

Spent the last 5 minutes looking for an old photo I remember, of Roy Avers in his big glasses, but can't find it.

read that as Roy Ayers and got excited.

you should read this book and get excited

i'm gonna. but not now. i have all three in hardcover.

i am on chapter 3 now

Everybody Loves the New Sunshine

lolllllll

the one thing I completely remember skipping when I read this a long time ago was that lengthy play at the end

ah you missed the whole point of the series then

i'm glad i'm learning more about jonas.
it seemed like between the end of book 1 and the beginning of book 2 he became severian's best buddy without much explanation. i guess there is a lot that goes unexplained in these books tho.

there is a gap of a few weeks or even a couple months between shadow and claw i think

i do think severian does explain why he likes jonas so much

guys i am reading gene wolfe's wiki and:

After returning to the United States he earned a degree from the University of Houston and became an industrial engineer. He edited the journal Plant Engineering for many years before retiring to write full-time, but his most famous professional engineering achievement is a contribution to the machine used to make Pringles potato chips.[5]

HOLY SHIT!!

you people are lame

i'm not posting again until at least one other person finished chapter one and gets back to me about it

lol linds, that is like the most commonly known trivia fact about gene wolfe! that and he's some weird branch of catholic.

i am almost done with book two, and fully back on board with this series btw. finished the play at the end of book two last night, ordered books three/four.
it is VERY strangely paced, that's for sure.

btw i have been getting tons of kinda marginal, vintage SF paperbacks from the dollar rack at a local bookstore--leinster, leigh brackett, some doc smith and the occasional good title. a couple days ago i got a whole box of edgar rice burroughs books--complete tarzan, complete mars & venus stories, nearly complete pelllucidar & a bio & a big stack of one-offs. if anyone wants my doubles and/or stuff i am going to get rid of let me know. interesting trades considered.

i was gonna start a new thread on ILB to give away my crap but i decided this makes as much sense as anywhere.

haha well i didn't know anything about gene wolfe until now and that blew my mind.
if you find any octavia butler let me know. i've been looking for her stuff in used book stores with no luck. or anyone else i might like. also wondering if the book of the long sun or other gene wolfe is worth reading.

i started the book of the long sun a long time ago -- it was both less dense and less interesting iirc

i have an octavia butler book or two somewhere unless i sold 'em already.
i tried w her but it didn't work. her description of these aliens as masses of hair/tendrils kept grossing me out.

ah you missed the whole point of the series then

― the late great, Thursday, May 24, 2012 11:03 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah fuck

V, I've read as far as the greenhouse/garden scenes in the first book. I like it so far! I'm intrigued! My favorite bits are the nested stories, and the very elliptical way that older Sev omits certain pertinent-ish facts. F'rinstnace, I realized after far too long that creepy Dorcas is 'Cas,' the dead wife the older boatman's mourning for a few chapters prior.

ok here's one of my favorite parts

"it struck me that his face was not only that of a fox but a stuffed fox. i have heard those who dig for their livelihood say there is no land anywhere in which they can trench without turning up the shards of the past. no matter where the spade turns the soil, it uncovers broken pavements and corroding metal; and scholars write that the kind of sand that artists call polychrome (because flecks of every color are mixed with its whiteness) is actually not sand at all, but the glass of the past, now pounded to powder by aeons of tumbling in the clamorous sea. if there are layers of reality beneath the reality we see, even as there are layers of history beneath the ground we walk upon, then in one of those more profound realities, his face was a fox's mask on a wall, and i marveled to see it turn and bend now toward the woman, achieving by those motions, which made expression and thought appear to play across it with the shadows of the nose and brows, an amazing and realistic appearance of vivacity"

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llugdvAsG31qdkmano1_r2_1280.jpg

do we know if book of the newsun directly inspired the boredoms in any way?

Does Frederik Pohl read this thread? He just blogged the Pringles factoid.

frederick pohl if you are reading this thread i <3 u for gateway

by the way ian, it is absolutely true, in fact the covers of various boredoms albums are actually references to certain characters and places in the books

vision creation newsun depicts book 3, little [ ] touching the [ ] on the [ ] of typhon.

the inside illustrations depict the feast of vodalus when viewed in this manner ... note severian and vodalus seated at left and the food heaped on the right, the lines moving upward depict both the trees in the forest and the elevation of consciousness into visions including the new sun at the top, illustrated in black and white

there are several references in this boxset as well. from the top: 1) the tower of [ ] viewed looking upside down from the very top of the ship of the hierodules. the second image depicts the antechamber of the house absolute. the third cover shows the citadel of nessus or perhaps just one tower.

there are other references as well particularly in the super roots series of releases. onanie bomb depicts a masked severian, while super roots 3 depicts an executed criminal carved into five deaths (representing also severian's five deaths in the series = five caskets in the tomb). super roots five shows a hierogrammate as glimpsed in the house absolute, while super roots 7 shows an avern or perhaps the salamander elemental and super roots 8 depicts apheta's planet from book five. finally there is super are with the story represented schematically (severian and the new sun inside of himself)

iirc there's also an iron-cross shaped one in light greenish-blue that is carved into many radial segments, i believe that is a map of nessus or the house absolute, i forget which release that is though.

i think that's it though, obviously not everything they did was a reference to gene wolfe, especially the side projects

Finished the first book. Liked it a lot. Curious about how he'll bring a 'satisfying' conclusion abt. w/ only 3/4 to go, and very little plot movement thus far. (Or am I a savage for wanting more plot?)

how are you liking book two, remy?

i want severian's dog to come back :(

he does ;-)

i bought the first three books over the weekend, and started the shadow of the torturer yesterday. this is my second attempt, as i tried many years ago to read the omnibus collection of the first two volumes, but for whatever reason, i find that i now remember only the part about triskele (lol), severian's three-legged dog. at first, wolfe's prose seemed distressingly dense and even somewhat comically pretentious, but the elevated, archaic language becomes familiar quite rapidly, and the initial torrent of obscure terms slows to a trickle after the first few chapters. i'm only a hundred pages deep, but have the hang of it, and don't find it at all oppressive.

i'm moving slowly not because the writing is difficult to decipher, but because i got sidetracked taking notes and compiling a glossary of unfamiliar terms. fifty pages in, i had twelve pages of transcribed passages and a list of nearly 100 terms with definitions. this turned 90 minutes reading time into about six hours of computer work. that was clearly a ridiculous way to go about things, so now i'm limiting myself to the use of a highlighter.

anyway, i'm struck by how comprehensively gothic the novel is. so elevated, enervated, aestheticized and death-obsessed. everything seems turned in on itself, the outward dream of classic science fiction grounded in ruin, wealth straying to poverty, ambition to servitude, sex to cruel fetish, ordered systems to suffocating ritual. severian even seems to make the gothic agenda explicit in suggesting that "our necropolis" was intentionally designed to resemble a mountain forest.

i'm also strongly reminded of michael moorcock's elric novels, which feature a similarly pitiless protagonist, a torturer's guild, a dying kingdom tyrannically ruled by bloodthirsty and long-limbed aristocrats, decadence curling into perversion, and a generally gothic tone.

looking forward to see where this all goes...

i think parts of it are meant to be comically pretentious, or at least comically high-flown. there is a lot of humor in these books that is not immediately obvious.

it is comprehensively gothic, and yes, similar to elric, but unlike elric characters develop

halfway through the second one. w/out spoilering, what I assume to be a PKDish turn (whale?) has got me interested.

there is a lot of humor in these books that is not immediately obvious.

yeah, it's getting funnier as it goes. i especially enjoyed severian's assessment of master gurloes' failings, "he mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau."

and there's something suggestively almost-meta about passages like this: "we have books whose pages are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams."

some of the commentary on gender is weird (men are to women as clients are to torturers, women are too cruel to make good torturers, etc.), but i'm assuming/hoping that's more a product of severian and his society than of wolfe himself.

there is a fair amount of meta stuff about writing which i think to some extent springs from broader issues of autobiography and memory, but yeah, if you thought that was something, there are books-within-books to come

i would like to say that it's a product of severian as far as gender goes, but even then things are not particularly great on that front. virgins, whores, mamas, crones and not much in between.

SPOILERS UP THROUGH END OF #2.

Finished the second one. I'm reading slowly, and I took a break. I'm loving the twisty-turny narrative, and the meandering exposition w/r/t Sev.'s journeys, but I'm finding a lot of the writing pretty vague and poetic.

As one example, I grew confused about the physical structure of the cell, during the chapters about Sevarian's imprisonment under the autarch's palace. I had been lead to believe in a deep cavelike structure that trailed into Lovecrafty darkness and unlit grottoes. As the chapter progressed, though, he begain detailing neat corridors and metal walls – it seemed more like a military prison, or a submerged battleship. This isn't the first time this has happened – I wonder about the extent to which GW's changing tack is deliberate, and the extent to which it is (/might be) sloppy.

I'm confused about some other things as well:

– The second palace (i.e. are their two palaces coexisiting in the same physical location, linked by tricksy doors,
trompe-l'œil passages, and false walls? Or are there two palaces that /seem/ to exist in the same location, but are remote, a la the greenhouse/gardens with portal to other sides of the planet?).

– The witches. I am very, very confused by their resurrection of the stone city at the end of Claw of the Conciliator. My understanding is: Hildegrin, Jolenta, Dorcas, Sevarian, and some witches help the lead 'sleekly reptilian' witch-lady to commune with somebody on a distant star, who lets them roll back (?) time to resurrect an ancient city. The ancient city's ruler, Apu somebodyorother, spies the witches and attacks Hildegrin. Sevarian comes to Hildegrin's aid and gets conked on the head. When he awakes, he's with Jolenta (revealed as the waitress from book 1), and Dorcas, surrounded by 'wind-lashed grass and tumbled stones.' I assume this means the city was /not/ resurrected?

- The significance of Dr. Talos's play. I assume it is later revealed to be prophetic?

it's not vague, the detail is just buried. the place where severian is imprisoned is actually a luxurious converted ballroom or large drawing room of some sort in a versailles style. it might sound ostentatious but the series is really written as much for re-reading as it is for reading and a lot of details jump out at you the second or third time.

the "second house" is a series of hidden rooms and passageways in the house absolute. i think practically every room in the house is connected to the "second house" in some way, so that every room can be spied on or secretly accessed. there are magic mirrors in the second house but no colocated rooms ... that we know of, anyway.

the witches (and the cumean, who is a cacogen) have power over time the same way father inire has power over space. they don't so much travel in time as bring the two times into simultaneous existence. it is a confusing episode and severian spends chunks of three and four and five trying to figure it out. there are clues but the big reveal is at the end of the fourth book. if you want a hint, there is a connection between apu-punchau and the face in the tomb. btw, the cumean actually is a snake-like creature, not a humanoid.

dr talos' play is one of the most complicated parts of the book. it foreshadows the explication of past events, i.e. the history of old urth. it also explains the prophecies and teachings of the conciliator (which otherwise are not really explained) ... in one part of the book it mentions that talos' play is based on a book called "eschatology & genesis" which is the authoritative text on the conciliator.

it also foreshadows events in book 5 (the coming of the new sun) and reflects on the personalities of the main characters, particularly talos, dorcas and jolenta. i don't really think it directly signposts any particular events in books three and four but like i said it is a really deep section of the book and i haven't sussed out all of the threads yet.

when i say it "foreshadows past events" i mean that it is a metaphorical / allegorical explanation of the history of old urth (for example, what happened before the autarchal system was established. what happened to the sun?) which is then explained in a much more concrete way in the third book (and slightly in the fourth)

started book three yesterday, will post thoughts as they come to me

just about to finish book one. afraid to read this thread b/c everyone's ahead of me, but i'm really, really enjoying it. i thought it was a little hard to get into until the interaction between thecla and severian started, but ever since then i've been into it.

I've started three, too. It's my favorite so far. Might have spoilered myself on some stuff. Thx for clearing ^ up, late great

i always forget that severian is running around barechested.. then they mention it. and i lol.

just finished book three last night. started book four.

things got pretty weird!
but i still have a problem with some of the filler chapters/adventures. the pace can be very plodding when some of the events recounted by severian seem relatively... inconsequential? idk. i'm sure it will all come together.

it was a bummer. ok, he was 87, but i still wanted to talk about it, and apparently nobody i work with has ever heard of the book of the new sun

i should sometime reread the book of the new sun, i liked it but whenever i read this thread it becomes apparent to me that i have no idea about anything that happens in that book. i thought it was, just, people dueling with leaves and maoists telling stories.

at least i finished it though!

― Jaki Liebowitz (rushomancy), Monday, April 15, 2019 4:34 PM (four years ago)

lolll, aaaaand then the next month my egg cracked

so i did reread the first book for a book club with a friend a couple of years back and it immediately became obvious how deeply and profoundly misogynist wolfe's writing is. god damn, wolfe holds every one of his female characters in contempt in specifically gendered ways.

so that was a bit of a bummer

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

should read "several of the strongest .... characters are women"

I'd urge you to remember that New Sun is being written/narrated by an insane torturer, who often obscures his own shitty actions (i.e. rape of Jolenta) and has no real understanding of women, raised solely among men and boys. THAT SAID, I do think there is criticism warranted PRIMARILY because part of Newsun hinges on the Thecla/Severian duality, and in that respect, Narrator Severian, being both man & woman, should probably possess more insight into women than he does.

kinda funny thinking of it that way. there's not really any way in which i'm a "man" but i guess i've had experiences with gender that a lot of people (wolfe certainly included) haven't.

I'd be curious to know what in the text makes you think Wolfe hates women, rather than Severian. He has very conservative views (Catholic innit) for sure, so I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. I'm just curious. In Book Of The Long Sun, several of the strongest and most powerful characters, and are not written in the one-dimensional way that they are sometimes written in New Sun.

- ian, Saturday, January 6, 2024 3:41 PM (two hours ago)

it's been a while so i can't say precisely, and i don't want to make it sound like a rhetorical argument... like you say, wolfe was a catholic. not just a catholic, but the particular strand of catholic with which one should _not_ get into a rhetorical argument, lol.

mainly it's character voice. it's one of the most challenging things about writing... i've noticed a tendency when writing to fill in the lacunae in character experience and voice with my own experiences. this quality was, if anything, even more pronounced in my writing pre-transition, when i had a false universalist conception of human nature.

that is the interesting thing to me... not the question of wolfe's misogyny, but my complete failure to notice it pre-transition. i don't think of myself as ever having been a man, and i don't think it's hormonal. if anything i'd say it's lived experience. looking at things from multiple perspectives. wolfe was extremely intellectually gifted but it is fundamentally an intellectual framing. that i look at things differently now isn't a matter of intellectual growth, just lived experience.

what i remember is the way severian, as narrator, describes women's bodies... from the way severian describes his own life, his own experience, the way he describes and treats women seems like something of a non sequitur. they're ways in which women are treated in _our_ world, under conditions that don't seem to apply in severian's... in particular, i had the impression that severian finds women's bodies to be in some way indicative of their _character_, particularly in a moral sense. i don't remember reading anything in his descriptions of his world that would justify that approach. it's a very catholic way of looking at things. very catholic in a specifically highly patriarchal way. there's very much a sort of "male gaze" to how severian looks at things - again, in my memory. he observes and judges the bodies of the women in a way he doesn't with the bodies of the men.

i think this is something of a failure of thomist and post-thomist intellectual catholicism in general... there's a sort of misrecognition of the ways we're shaped by somatic experience.

if i can get really personal here... one of the most profound experiences i had relating to catholicism was subsequent to my genital reconstruction surgery. without wishing to get too into detail, it is a complex surgery and one does wind up bleeding for quite a long time. to someone from the outside, to me before i had the experience, i didn't understand what the true impact of it would be. one can't until one experiences it. there's something sort of very mystical and spiritual about that, in a way that's aligned with scholasticism, i feel. the thing is that the anatomical and physiological changes are, comparatively speaking, nothing. anatomy textbooks will tell you that there's just not that much difference between male genitals and female genitals, and my lived experience bears this out.

the difference is in having this new perspective, a new way of understanding oneself. after a few days i was able to step into the shower and wash myself. it's out of necessity a gentle, tender experience. i'm not a parent, but i had a very strong sense of treating this new creation as i would a newborn child, with the love i would show to my own newborn child. it seemed profoundly maternal.

i washed myself, and i saw and felt the blood... being raised catholic, i was taught there was something beautiful in blood, and i felt that strongly at that time. i recall seeing and feeling myself and saying "this is my body, this is my blood". and it felt as if it was true for the first time in my life. that for the first time in my life i truly understood myself that my body was _my_ body.

and from a catholic perspective, well, others might dispute it but the catholicism i was raised in, i know full well that it was blasphemous of me to say that. not because i am comparing myself to christ or saying that my body is christ's body. it's not. it's more that under catholicism, under patriarchy, people - all people, but especially _women_ - don't have the right to their own bodies. our bodies are not our own. we are part of the body of christ. we eat of christ's body and drink of christ's blood, and that is the mystery and the sanctity of communion. the abomination. the cruelty. the dominion, of what they call "communion". my body is my body. not christ's. not any man's body. mine.

which i think puts me fundamentally at odds with wolfe's worldview and perspective, and the way he sees women in particular.

anyway. i hope that makes some sort of sense! kind of hard to put into words.

Makes tons of sense and I agree with a lot of it. In fevers I think you’re right - Severian writes about women as caricatures because he’s definitely a misogynist. That’s severian the fictional author of this fictional book of the new sun.

When I first read it, I thought along similar lines. “Why are all these women falling in with him all the time?” Oh yes, he’s the narrator, of course he’s going to tell it that way. I think the late great addresses this up thread perhaps too… it’s helpful to keep in your mind that the fictional guy writing that book is, yes, a misogynist by all modern standards, but also insane, and a liar (sometimes from his insanity I think and sometimes willfully, and he often omits.) Severian also loves to stroke his own ego. This is also a world in which the masters in the bear tower practice monogamous bestiality, so their whole worldview is kinda ducked by all of our modern standards.

None of this to discount your lived experience, but that one of the … things… for me when reading new sun is to Always keep in mind that Severian is a creation of Wolfe, and one whose moral worldview is intentionally fucked up, because it’s the product of an alien and fucked up place.

Sorry. I’m typing in my phone…

. If you have not read the whole series, it may also help to know the whole story, narration especially, becomes radically recontextualized by the climax of the fourth book.

Like… Severian sucks he’s not cool or fun. Sm

oh yeah for sure i don't look at him and be like WOW THIS GUY HAS A BADASS SWORD AND A CLOAK THAT'S, LIKE, BLACK, BUT IT'S EVEN MORE BLACK THAN BLACK, LIKE HE COULD PROBABLY ROUNDHOUSE KICK CHUCK NORRIS IN THE FACE haha

i do wanna push back on the "he's insane" though, i've dealt for most of my live with severe mental illness and i've found that it often is essentialized. it's like the whole "depression quest" thing where sometimes the right choices literally aren't open to us because of where we've been. it doesn't offer any kind of excuse or justification, though, and i think sometimes there's a tendency to do that. i don't see it as "he's lying because he's crazy". i don't see it as _lying_ at all, like, what he's saying doesn't accord with the facts but like you say there's a difference between saying something he genuinely believes and saying something he _knows_ to be false

either way he's responsible for his words and actions and their consequences. like if i'm gonna look at it from jolenta's perspective it doesn't really matter if severian _knows_ what he's doing

to me basically it's... particularly since i take a trauma-focused approach to mental illness, i look at the circumstances and environment severian comes from and, like, my critical approach is to try and see how those experiences have shaped his character

part of the gender essentialization here, i think, part of the misogyny, is that _wolfe_, not the character, mistakes toxic masculinity for manhood itself. being raised among men, being raised without real access to womanhood and women's experiences... that shaped me. it absolutely did. i don't see being a man in the company of men as something twisted and hateful, though. i guess it can be. i guess it depends on your point of view. again there's a lot of subtext i'm missing. is there a lot of pederasty in the torturer's guild? that sort of trauma would explain severian's perspective. because it's learned, it's a learned perspective, learned behavior

I think you should just read Long Sun, lol - completely different writing style and character work, it's interesting (and the main character is effectively raised by women)

In one of the early chapters, Severian tells you straight up that he is insane and the jumble of memories in his brain are impenetrable even to him, he admits that he may not be lying intentionally, but i still think he often does. So i'm not trying to take mental illness lightly -- but it's something he acknowledges. He also contradicts himself in the text occasionally, usually in the manner of "I remember everything!" "oh, i don't remember what happened next..."

re: pederasty - there are allusions to this happening though iirc nothing super concrete. i'll look out for it during this re-read. here's a reddit thread on the topic - https://www.reddit.com/r/genewolfe/comments/bzerhz/severian_the_pederast_does_wolfe_not_situate/

Even w/o pederasty in the guild it's an incredibly fucked up environment. He never saw a woman until he was god knows how old (whenever he was old enough to go to the witch's tower i suppose) -- he has very little idea how to interact with the outside world at all and women in particular imo. Being raised in an environment where violence is cold and common and, in fact, your duty, is also very traumatic probably.

re: sanity,

"I realized for the first time that I am in some degree insane … I had lied often … Now I could not be sure my own mind was not lying to me; all my falsehoods were recoiling on me and I who remembered everything could not be certain those memories were more than my own dreams.”

^ very end of chapter 3

damn that’s an airtight argument

incredible given that even ursula leguin was tricked by this snake

she called him “the melville of our time” by which i am
sure she meant damn this dude seems weirdly sympathetic to this killer whale and this killer whale killer prep the cancel culture harpoon

:shrug:

i’m not trying to be insulting. i’m just saying i agree that a person who is a literal torturer, trained to inflict pain — and more crucially to reject compassion, since he is told to think of the pleas and bargaining and begging of those under torture as like the squeaks of animals that signify nothing but pain — is going to remind us of people that treat us poorly

also he lives in a world where growth is stilled because the sun is corrupt and every mountain has been carved into the likeness of a murderous male autocrat obsessed with power, and this is normalized to the point where people call them mountains and not “the mountain that looks like the old autarch so and so” and the reader has to figure it out

i’m with you, it sounds like a shitty place to be and for that reason i try not to imagine myself as actually in the story or those ppl actually in my world.

but that’s a general reading tactic of mine anyway

if people want to get mad at a book about a decadent lunatic with a huge sword who destroys the world, that’s fine! the author wants that

and when you figure out what kind of “hero” he is you’ve (and remember it’s a bildungsroman so the story only ends when the narrator is no longer himself … and he has photographic memory and relives his experiences like an alzabo, so has no agency to retell his dark past as a better person) unlocked the theme of the book

so anyway yeah stories about these cursed sword dark
edgelord heroes are not for everyone, and its a bit embarassing how many postcolonial voices or whatever stan for him. maybe you’d like elric novels better, simpler guilty pleasure and also good reading

finally if you wonder why i might read like that … it’s so i can compare books like sundiver vs xenogenesis or foundation vs triton on merit of ideas first, since it is sci fi … and i don’t look to art for practical guidance, i have enough immediate accountability in my life (since i get publicly evaluated, by govt name, by children with microphones, in front of mayors and state assembly leaders for years and years now) … like just personally have enough to worry about without muddying the issue

that’s all i’m going to say on it and afaict that’s definite so i’m done for awhile. this is the only corner of this board i feel useful on anyway, and not at all on an affective or social emotional level, just a sliver of personal knowledge i’ve earned at ruinous cost to myself

definitive* not definite … and only fair since i kicked off this whole mess

do you think it's a mess? this is a book you love and you understand and here comes this weirdo who, like, openly admits to not understanding the book and interprets it through her own biased lens. idk, i know that's a flaw of mine, i come off as more authoritative and sure of myself than i actually am. to be honest i don't read a lot of fantasy novels at all - it's not a genre i'm familiar with. so it's not surprising that i'm maybe a bit ignorant of what's going on in this particular book! the next fantasy author on my to-read list is tamsyn muir and not moorcock. i heard tamsyn muir's books have more lesbians.

i mean, what can i do here, retract my opinions? does it even make sense for a person to retract their _opinions_?