Currently reading
Madame Bovary
Siddhartha
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Collected Essays)
The Children Star
Manstealing for Fat Girls
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone
Radiant Days
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Footnotes in Gaza
Oryx and Crake
I just finished re-reading this completely searing critique of biotech, and like the first time I read it, I found myself racing through the beginning chapters and feeling like the story really picks up steam about two-thirds of the way through. I find this frustrating: my desire for narrative satisfaction is really somehow frustrated by the (actually fairly conventional) structure of this book. I can't puzzle it out but I suspect Atwood's refusing to give the reader something in order to make a point about story-telling and world-creating. I see this particularly in the character of Snowman, a self-declared "word person" who in the course of the narrative becomes (is forced to become?) a story-teller, or origin-myth-maker. Any thoughts on this, if you've read it?As in The Handmaid's Tale (and lots of other dystopian texts), there's some traumatizing material in here, but in the service of a feminist critique of biotechnology and capitalism.
