Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

I tried. I made myself go through the first 50 pages. This book won awards and is classified as 'weird fiction' that I should like, but I couldn't continue. I actually got all three books of the trilogy set in this world, however there are too many random stuff that just takes too much effort to get used to.  The scarab-head-women-with-great-bodies is one of them, not necessarily the most undigestible. 

It seems that I like fantasy and speculative fiction books that at least have some starting point in the current reality, human universe.  I mean even in far-off books like the Dune series by Herbert, there is still Earth somewhere in the long lost past. Same with the Foundation series by Asimov.  I guess I just cannot digest books that don't have Earth and Humans somewhere in the narrative, albeit long gone.

I won't be reading many more weird fiction books that do not contain Earth and Humans. 

Choke by Chuck Palahniuk

 After I read "Fight Club" and was even more amazed than the movie, which is one of my favorites, I was expecting a lot.  Great Expectations.  And that's a sure way to get disappointed which is exactly what happened here. "Choke" starts very bombastic, with all these urban legends about sexual exploits of sex addicts, however that doesn't last long, only a couple of chapters. Even the jailbird women that Victor has sex with become repetitive by the middle of the book.  His trademark choking in restaurants also becomes tired and doesn't appear much after the first third of the book, until the end when the heroes come for revenge.

The main story is about Victor and his mother who's losing her mind in a private hospital. It turns out that she is not his mother, not even in the Jesus Christ version with foreskin, but just plain stole the baby from a stroller in a mall. Also Dr. Paige is a patient, not a doctor, and is definitely not from the future, so crazy.  The reveals are definitely not as great as in "Fight Club", but then again M. Night Shamlayan could never repeat the success of "Sixth Sense" no matter how many chances he got (and wasted).

It is an easy read since Palahniuk's style is very conversational and flowing, with short sentences and not much description, but it is definitely not as satisfying as "Fight Club." I have a couple of more Palahniuk's books, and if those two don't work out either, I will give up on him.

The Telling by Ursula LeGuin

This is the sixth and last novel set in the Hainish cycle, although Ursula LeGuin said that she never intended to write a cycle; that it just happened. The novel is written about 30 years after the last Hainish novel was published and few years before Mrs. LeGuin's death. LeGuin is famous for the "soft" science fiction she writes.  The focus is not on technology, science or exploration, but on the inter-person relationships, community dynamics and tradition. Many of her science fiction novels are parables for the treatment of indigineous groups here, on planet Earth, by the colonizing powers, like for example in "The Word for the World is Forest". 

"The Telling" is pretty much a straight-forward critique of the Chinese Communist Party, the Cultural Revolution in Communist China and the overall contemporary social order and priorities of Communist China.  It starts on the "planet" Aka, with one main continent and a capital in the city of Dovza, which is a stand-in for Peking/Beijing including a huge square in the middle (Tiananmen) where horrible execustions have happened.

The Dovzan government, which calls itself "The Corporation" and its citizens "consumer-producers" is hell-bent on modernizing their society so they can catch up with the Hainish and the other advanced races of the Ekumen. To this purpose they destroyed all of their traditional culture, burned all the traditional books, murdered or imprisoned the sages of traditional wisdom called 'maz'. The Dovzan Corporation allows only culture that directly supports the Corporation and its project "Road to the Stars" while everything else is suppressed or destroyed.

The protagonist, Sutty, is a lesbian Indian woman from Terra (Earth), which grew up during a period of counter-revolution against the Ekumen and the Hainish where religious extremists and terrorists called "The Unists" took over the entire planet and murdered most scientists and free thinking people in the name of their "God".  Sutty studies in a Vancouver Hainish University within the "Pale" of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is under the direct protection of the Hainish, so she is largely sparred the religious terrorism and horror of the Unists, but her partner is murdered during a terrorist attack on the Vancouver Library district. 

She is sent as a Hainish/Ekumen representative to Aka, but because in LeGuin's Hainish universe there is no faster than light travel (only NAFAL - Nearly As Fast As Light), it takes about 65 years in real time for her to arrive, while in her subjective time only a few months pass.  During this time the Dovzan Corporation has taken over Aka in a violent revolution and proceeded to murder everyone that is even slightly opposed to its principles, while The Unist Government on Earth has been overthrown with the help of an emissary from the Hainish (originally Terran) which the "fathers" of The Unists proclaim to be "God".

Sutty travels to the last part of Aka where traidtional knowledge is kept called Ozkat-Okzat, which is a stand-in for Communist Chinese-occupied Tibet, where she meets the surviving maz and is introduced to their traditional knowledge.  The entire time she is closely followed and surveilled by Dovzan Corporation agents, the top being "The Monitor" who tries to prevent her from hearing any authentic stories from the indigenous people of Ozkat-Okzat. Eventually Sutty learns the horrible truth about brutal murders of the Monitor's grandparents by the Government (orchestrated by his own father) that made him a broken man, with only path to blindly propagate the programming of the Corporation.  This mirrors the happenings in Communist China, especially during the (Un)Cultural Revolution where children were betraying their own parents to the Government and having them imprisoned or even executed. 

The book ends with Sutty collecting all the traditional knowledge and books of Aka from the maz of Ozkat-Okzat and sending them to the Ekumen where they are to be preserved until the inevitable fall and destruction of the Corporation of Dovza and return to the traditional values on Aka. 

This is a much slower book than the previous ones in the Hainish Cycle, without much action or fighting, but the detail and attention with which the Aka societies are described makes them a living, breathing entity, on par with any real society on Earth.