books

Every book is a journey into a new world. In some books that world is just much further away.

It's easy to get started with a book that is set into a real world especially if it features a setting familiar to you. Even if it has some fictional elements, is set into some historical period or even in the near future it still doesn't require that much imagination  to see the world. Sure there are far away places you have never been or cultures you are not familiar with in the real world too that can give you enough distance from the ordinary.

Ancillary justice is the first book of Ann Leckie's space opera trilogy Imperial Radch. Among other things it introduces us the space faring culture of Radchaai who, while expanding across the galaxy have abandoned the concept of gender.

Ann denotes this gender neutrality by using the female she as a personal pronoun for everyone. An interesting take on exploring the gender neutrality. One can just wonder why not use one of the established neutral pronouns.

Reading books is a wonderful thing. One of the wonders if how it affects how you experience time. Sometimes you notice you have lost hours without noticing. Other times it feels like you have been reading for hours but only a fraction of that had actually passed.

This relative time can happen with any book. What I have noticed however is that usually it's those long 1000+ page tomes that usually end up making the passage of time feel much longer than it actually is. Likewise the shorter ones seem to have the ability to compress time.