What ended up sticking out to me most while reading Oryx and Crake was how little good was attributed to the human race ("homo sapiens sapiens" [Atwood 99]). It was rather strange that despite hearing the story from a human's point of view, from Snowman's reflections on the past, the reader is presented with quite a terrible view of humanity.

One thing I found interesting about Pattern Recognition--especially as it includes a world of screen names--is the use of names. Obviously we touched on Cayce in class, but only briefly. What struck me most about Cayce was that, just before she explains the pronunciation of her name, she actually tells Voytek, "Call me Ishmael" (Gibson 32). Never having actually read Moby Dick (my high school was rather terrible), I would have just been confused by this statement except that in another of my classes, we just recently read a different novel with a very similar reference.

If we wrote a reading response for Neuromancer, do we write another for Pattern Recognition or no, since it's another Gibson? (same question goes for Oryx and Crake/Atwood)

What struck me most about Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber was not any of the obvious subjects addressed in the novel: race and gender issues, rape, incest, self-love, self-respect, etc; rather, the language she used to discuss these things was so exact in its strange dialect and such a crucial part of the novel. In most of the novels we have read thus far, there is some strange vocabulary that helps define the strange world we read about, but in general, the language in which the author tells the story is easily understandable.

One of the topics we didn't discuss in class yet about Slow River, interestingly enough, is gender relations. Perhaps because the majority of the characters are female, this is not as obvious an issue as in earlier novels we've read; most of the character interaction is between women, in effect denying the gender discussion. In this, however, Griffith makes the gender discussion simply different, rather than obsolete. The first obvious difference is the fact that the child abuser, the perpetrator of incest, is the mother of the family, not the father.

(Note: when writing "employer," I did want to have the subscript 1 [I hope someone talks about this] but it didn't copy over to the blog and I don't know if/what html coding would do this.)

Despite the fact that I really enjoyed Lilith's Brood, I'm skipping this reading response. I've just had a lot of writing to do recently...

When we were discussing in class whether or not humans deserved what the Oankali were doing to/for?

Though we discussed all the issues involved in the duality inherent in our culture and language, I don't think we really discussed the issue of duality itself as Ursula Le Guin portrays it in The Left Hand of Darkness. It is true that our fixation with the opposites of male and female make interpreting the world of Gethen difficult; we can't quite comprehend the idea of androgynous humans. But this doesn't mean our refusal to let go of this way of thinking is necessarily bad.

(I have a different edition of the book, so I apologize that the page numbers are off.)