{"id":14698,"date":"2013-10-13T15:52:10","date_gmt":"2013-10-13T22:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2013\/10\/13\/14698.html"},"modified":"2013-10-13T15:52:10","modified_gmt":"2013-10-13T22:52:10","slug":"the-best-sounding-new-book-i-h","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2013\/10\/13\/the-best-sounding-new-book-i-h\/","title":{"rendered":"The best-sounding new book I haven’t read yet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I was in Borderlands Books<\/a> yesterday, and I saw a book on the shelf called Ancillary Justice<\/cite>, by Ann Leckie<\/a>, who sold a story<\/a> to SH<\/cite> a few years back, but who I hadn't heard had a book coming out. (The novel is unrelated to the SH<\/cite> story.)<\/p>\n

[Bizarrely, I managed to leave out the title of the book in the original version of this post, and then not notice for two months. I've now added it.]<\/p>\n

I picked it up to look it over, and Naamen<\/a>, who was staffing the counter, said it was a great book.<\/p>\n

He proceeded to tell me that it features a sentient starship in a human body (apologies if I'm getting any of this wrong; I'm reconstructing from memory) whose original culture doesn't have genders (or at least not the same kinds we have) and who thus refers to all the other characters using female pronouns.<\/p>\n

It sounds, in other words, like exactly my kind of thing. He told me a little more about it, and it kept sounding like exactly the kind of thing I like. And there I was, in a bookstore, with the book in my hand!<\/p>\n

But I ended up not buying it, because my to-read stack is enormous and overwhelming and I'm in one of my occasional moments of feeling like I should get a little further through it before buying any more books. Sooner or later, that'll wear off and I'll start buying faster than I can read again, but for the moment, with great reluctance, I decided not to buy it.<\/p>\n

But that shouldn't stop y'all from buying and reading it!<\/p>\n

Scalzi blurbed it: “Unexpected, compelling and very cool.” Here's an NPR review by Genevieve Valentine<\/a>, and a rave tor.com review by Liz Bourke<\/a> (“a pretty high position on my list of best space opera novels ever<\/em>”).<\/p>\n

So I'm looking forward to reading it. But it'll have to wait until I make a little more progress on my list, so figured it couldn't hurt to post a link in the meantime.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was in Borderlands Books yesterday, and I saw a book on the shelf called Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}