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28/8/12 16:48If you read the first 100-some pages of China Mieville's Railsea and want to throw it against the wall for being precious, metafictional, overwritten, and weird for the sake of weird:
Give it another few pages.
I don't know that I've every experienced such a rapid turnaround in my feelings about a book (and I went into it expecting to like it, because China Mieville.) I think it just took me a long long time to assimilate some of its linguistic weirdnesses, but in the end I liked it very much -- how it takes a wrecking ball to a lot of assumptions about "genre fiction does THIS, and literary fiction does THIS" -- he seems to be as deeply invested in the vividly and bloody fight scenes as in his breaking-the-fourth-wall experiments.
(Also notable for having a significant character who doesn't identify as a man or a woman, and having a backgrounded polyamorous household raising children, although ( spoilers ). Not sure how I feel about the disability-related stuff, though if nothing else it was interesting as an inversion of the trope.)
Give it another few pages.
I don't know that I've every experienced such a rapid turnaround in my feelings about a book (and I went into it expecting to like it, because China Mieville.) I think it just took me a long long time to assimilate some of its linguistic weirdnesses, but in the end I liked it very much -- how it takes a wrecking ball to a lot of assumptions about "genre fiction does THIS, and literary fiction does THIS" -- he seems to be as deeply invested in the vividly and bloody fight scenes as in his breaking-the-fourth-wall experiments.
(Also notable for having a significant character who doesn't identify as a man or a woman, and having a backgrounded polyamorous household raising children, although ( spoilers ). Not sure how I feel about the disability-related stuff, though if nothing else it was interesting as an inversion of the trope.)