My favourite twitch streamer has been reading a couple of chapters of this on her stream once a week, so I decided to read it myself!
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I mostly like science-fiction. About to embark on a re-read of the Discworld series.
Mastodon: @hyperlinkyourheart@mastodon.art
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2024 Reading Goal
8% complete! Hyperlink Your BOOKS has read 1 of 12 books.
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Hyperlink Your BOOKS started reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Hyperlink Your BOOKS finished reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber
Hyperlink Your BOOKS wants to read John Dies at the End by David Wong
Hyperlink Your BOOKS commented on McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy
Hyperlink Your BOOKS commented on The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber
Hyperlink Your BOOKS wants to read This All Come Back Now by Mykaela Saunders
This All Come Back Now by Mykaela Saunders
The first-ever anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction – written, curated, edited and designed by blackfellas, for …
Hyperlink Your BOOKS started reading McCarthy's Bar by Pete McCarthy
Hyperlink Your BOOKS wants to read Movement by Thalia Verkade
Movement by Thalia Verkade
Our dependence on cars is damaging our health — and the planet’s. Movement asks radical questions about how we approach …
Hyperlink Your BOOKS wants to read Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier
Click Here to Kill Everybody by Bruce Schneier
From driverless cars to smart thermostats, from autonomous stock-trading systems to drones equipped with their own behavioral algorithms, the Internet …
Hyperlink Your BOOKS reviewed Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Survival is insufficient
5 stars
Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.
It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.
Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled …
Station Eleven is a novel about a pandemic of apocalyptic proportions, but, crucially, it is not about the end of the world so much as it is about the birth of a new one.
It follows several characters through different periods in their lives, from decades before the pandemic, to its early days, to 15 and 20 years after the event. Most of the main characters are creatives with different relationships to their art, and to Arthur Leander, a famous actor who dies onstage during a production of King Lear, on the day that the pandemic reaches North America. His death serves a focal point, and symbolically as the death of the old world that brings forth new life.
Life after the pandemic is difficult and dangerous, especially at the beginning. However, most of the focus is on a period 20 years after the event, when people have mostly settled down into relatively stable settlements. It follows the Travelling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel the Great Lakes region of North America performing Shakespeare and classical music, and a man who builds a museum of artifacts from the fallen civilisation. It's not about an animalistic, Hobbesian struggle for survival, but the preservation of culture and memory, and communicating what we are into the future, because, as the (borrowed) slogan of the Travelling Symphony puts it, "survival is insufficient".
It's about memory and trauma, loss, isolation and hope, it's in turn haunting and terrifying, but above all, beautiful. Loved it.
Hyperlink Your BOOKS finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven is a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, her fourth. It takes place in the Great Lakes …
Hyperlink Your BOOKS commented on Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Content warning Comparisons of TV show & Novel, spoilers for both
Well it seems confirmed at this point that Jeevan and Kirsten did not have any relationship in the first 15 years, and most likely not in the first 20. Maybe they will meet again at some point, but in the year 15 interview bits she recalls him only as the man who performed CPR on Arthur and was kind to her.
I was genuinely spooked by the disappearances of the members of the traveling symphony, and Kirsten and August getting separated from them. The world of the novel seems significantly more threatening than the one of the TV show, though they both contain dangers and human compassion. In the book, Kirsten talks about how things have settled down from the violence and chaos of the early years, but when we meet the traveling symphony they are thrown immediately into a dangerous situation. In the TV show Kirsten is clearly traumatised by violence, but what we see of the early years seems like a continuation of civilisation, just scaled down - most striking for me was that only a year after the event somebody was plowing roads through the winter snow - and when we meet the traveling symphony they are having a good experience in a peaceful town on their usual route. And yet as Jeevan is setting out from his brother's apartment in the novel, the only danger he seems to face, despite his fears, is isolation. Perhaps there's something about the different experiences of men and women, adults and children, in that.
Hyperlink Your BOOKS commented on Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Content warning Comparisons of TV show & Novel, so possible spoilers for both
I've read the first couple of sections and really enjoying it so far, but it's interesting to note the differences between the book and the TV show.
1) Jeevan meets Kirsten in the book but apparently doesn't take her to his brother's place. Will they meet at all? 2) The Prophet built his cult on the Station Eleven book in the TV show, but in the book it seems to be based on Christianity. Also he seems to be looking for child brides rather than being a leader of lost children. I assume he will turn out much less sympathetic in the book. 3) The traveling symphony set out for the airport of their own accord in the book, rather than being coerced. Well it's not entirely their choice, but it's not anybody from the airport forcing them to go there.
I wasn't expecting them to be identical, of course.