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current reading...
Oct. 16th, 2006 10:32 pmI'm reading Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, because I've seen it mentioned quite often, but never read it myself. I am currently in the middle of the second book, and still undecided whether I actually like the series, but it's at least interesting enough to keep me hooked.
Though I admittedly found the racial memory thing in the first book very weird and not appealing. I mean, I would have been okay with it if the book was situated a little more towards the fantasy end of the genre spectrum in other respects, but despite the extreme competence of the heroine, and the horse communication and stuff like that, that makes it fun fiction rather than some documentary reconstruction, this Lamarckian memory thing, with added telepathy and regression into past lives no less, seemed far more "out there" to me than the rest. That could be of course because I have no clue about pre-historic living beyond the vague memories of a couple of weeks when we covered it in history class in fifth grade before moving on to Mesopotamia, and a few museum trips where we looked at stuff from local excavations of old poles and pieces of broken stone stuck in some ex-swamp where local neolithic settlements were. Anyway, at least the mental superpowers seem to feature less in the second one.
Also, I am for sure learning a lot of English words I never encountered before, mostly tons of animal and plant species as well as tool names. Now I know that a "Stichel" is called "burin", and that's even a tool I have actually seen and used myself before (though I doubt the steel one I used in wood working class looked much like whatever stone thing they had). One thing that is strange is that I keep looking up the plant and animal names, even though especially with plants it's not as if I have much of an idea what the plant looks like after knowing its German name either. Still for some bizarre reason it is a much less nagging unknown once when I looked up for example that "elecampane" is "echter Alant", that "henbane" is "Bilsenkraut" or that an "dovekie" is a "Krabbentaucher", even though it's not as if I associate actual images or knowledge with either name. It is somewhat weird and ridiculous, but I can't seen to suppress the urge.
Though I admittedly found the racial memory thing in the first book very weird and not appealing. I mean, I would have been okay with it if the book was situated a little more towards the fantasy end of the genre spectrum in other respects, but despite the extreme competence of the heroine, and the horse communication and stuff like that, that makes it fun fiction rather than some documentary reconstruction, this Lamarckian memory thing, with added telepathy and regression into past lives no less, seemed far more "out there" to me than the rest. That could be of course because I have no clue about pre-historic living beyond the vague memories of a couple of weeks when we covered it in history class in fifth grade before moving on to Mesopotamia, and a few museum trips where we looked at stuff from local excavations of old poles and pieces of broken stone stuck in some ex-swamp where local neolithic settlements were. Anyway, at least the mental superpowers seem to feature less in the second one.
Also, I am for sure learning a lot of English words I never encountered before, mostly tons of animal and plant species as well as tool names. Now I know that a "Stichel" is called "burin", and that's even a tool I have actually seen and used myself before (though I doubt the steel one I used in wood working class looked much like whatever stone thing they had). One thing that is strange is that I keep looking up the plant and animal names, even though especially with plants it's not as if I have much of an idea what the plant looks like after knowing its German name either. Still for some bizarre reason it is a much less nagging unknown once when I looked up for example that "elecampane" is "echter Alant", that "henbane" is "Bilsenkraut" or that an "dovekie" is a "Krabbentaucher", even though it's not as if I associate actual images or knowledge with either name. It is somewhat weird and ridiculous, but I can't seen to suppress the urge.