Reviews and Comments

I read this book (and the entire Wess'har series) back in late middle/early high school, and it had an enormous impact on me. I've never re-read it, so I figured it's time.

I'm about halfway through and it's frankly astonishing how deeply the perspectives of book are reflected in my life, both directly and indirectly.

I'm really curious how I feel about the series's overall theses when I get to them in earnest; I was nowhere near intellectually active the last time I read it.

Read it!

pretty white and institutional but otherwise it's fine ig

Two words: holy fuck.

AAAA!

It's rare that I read poetry, but yesterday I stumbled across Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I popped in and had a look around, and I picked up and read a bit from this book. It blew me away; I bought it; and this morning I read it cover-to-cover.

Wow.

It manages to capture the ephemeral eternity of love with the knowledge that it will end in a beautiful, consuming, compelling narrative framed as night-time wondering while a lover sleeps.

It's transcendent.

I was pretty frustrated by some early sociopolitical commentary in this book, particularly along racial lines, but that lessened immensely after a couple chapters. It's still dripping with imperial core pretention and high academic elitism. Still, the story has some fun beats, the setting - when it stops being imminently self-congratulatory and Liberal - raises some interesting questions, and the analysis of weaknesses in electoral democracy demonstrates a material experience and theoretical familiarity that would be expected of a storyteller with the author's background. The story really picks up about halfway through; until then it's a bit of a slog. All in all, I wouldn't advise buying the book, but if you have access to it and no compelling reads besides, you could do much worse.

i love oblivious lesbians

thank you autistic butches; thank you autistic fems; thank you sapphics of all kinds

This is an important book for anyone following a dharma tradition in the US, whether or not they consider themselves radical. As is so often the case in these traditions, this book doesn't offer ready-made, neatly-packaged answers; rather, it raises some deeply significant questions and offers some tools to engage with them.

Even better than the first one, somehow; and truer.

Damn.

This is a very good book, but do be warned that Chapter 21 describes the Nanjing Massacre in all its horrific detail - only the names of the combatants and city are changed.