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Exhalation
May. 9th, 2024 01:39 pmThe Story of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang contains some of the best short stories I've ever read, so I really have no idea why it's taken me so long to get around to reading his other collection, Exhalation.
My favourite BookTuber, TheBookLeo, ranked Story of Your Life as her favourite book she read in 2023, and mentioned that she had always thought she didn't like short stories, until she read these. I wholeheartedly agreed with her - and, when I mentioned this to Dave, he asked me if I'd read Exhalation yet and I had to say no. Since I was just about to enter a gap of nine days between the planned reading of two quite chunky books, it seemed like a good moment to pick Exhalation up - except that I then completed reading it in five days, leaving me with four days of reading still to fill.
Anyway - overall, I loved it, though my rating of the different stories wasn't consistently high.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate - by far the best time travel story I've ever read - five stars.
Exhalation - not sure I really followed the thread of this one, but very original - three stars.
What's Expected Of Us - four pages of mind-blowing conceptual existentialism that ironically provides the exact opposite outcome to its stated purpose - five stars.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - the longest story in the collection and one I remembered Dave telling me about at length when he first read it - but it falls between two stools for me - too long to be punchily impactful like the shorter ones but too short to fully explore the different layers of the story - there were too many time jumps and too much summary for me to really connect to the characters and the arc of the plot - four stars.
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny - museum exhibition catalogue entry, so deliberately written in a remote summary fashion and all telling rather than showing, so interesting but not very emotive - three stars.
The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling - hit home for me because it's about how you can't trust your memories to be accurate (I've been discovering this a lot lately!) - interesting debate between what's true versus what's right - four stars.
The Great Silence - I definitely tend to like the shorter stories more, it seems - this one totally got me in the feels in a way some of the others just didn't - four stars.
Omphalos - loved the ultimate message but, again, it didn't really touch me and it was also quite hard to follow in places - three stars.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom - great concept, with lots of direct action and character depth - very cool and very credible exploration of how society would be affected by the prism technology - awesome ending - five stars.
So - 3x3 stars, 3x4 stars, 3x5 stars.
Great overall - though it generally felt more intellectual than emotional in a lot of ways. But the stories taht affected me really affected me - and they were all good.
My favourite BookTuber, TheBookLeo, ranked Story of Your Life as her favourite book she read in 2023, and mentioned that she had always thought she didn't like short stories, until she read these. I wholeheartedly agreed with her - and, when I mentioned this to Dave, he asked me if I'd read Exhalation yet and I had to say no. Since I was just about to enter a gap of nine days between the planned reading of two quite chunky books, it seemed like a good moment to pick Exhalation up - except that I then completed reading it in five days, leaving me with four days of reading still to fill.
Anyway - overall, I loved it, though my rating of the different stories wasn't consistently high.
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate - by far the best time travel story I've ever read - five stars.
Exhalation - not sure I really followed the thread of this one, but very original - three stars.
What's Expected Of Us - four pages of mind-blowing conceptual existentialism that ironically provides the exact opposite outcome to its stated purpose - five stars.
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - the longest story in the collection and one I remembered Dave telling me about at length when he first read it - but it falls between two stools for me - too long to be punchily impactful like the shorter ones but too short to fully explore the different layers of the story - there were too many time jumps and too much summary for me to really connect to the characters and the arc of the plot - four stars.
Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny - museum exhibition catalogue entry, so deliberately written in a remote summary fashion and all telling rather than showing, so interesting but not very emotive - three stars.
The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling - hit home for me because it's about how you can't trust your memories to be accurate (I've been discovering this a lot lately!) - interesting debate between what's true versus what's right - four stars.
The Great Silence - I definitely tend to like the shorter stories more, it seems - this one totally got me in the feels in a way some of the others just didn't - four stars.
Omphalos - loved the ultimate message but, again, it didn't really touch me and it was also quite hard to follow in places - three stars.
Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom - great concept, with lots of direct action and character depth - very cool and very credible exploration of how society would be affected by the prism technology - awesome ending - five stars.
So - 3x3 stars, 3x4 stars, 3x5 stars.
Great overall - though it generally felt more intellectual than emotional in a lot of ways. But the stories taht affected me really affected me - and they were all good.
