So... seems like I gave up a while ago... i hadn't realised. Well, I guess August 2010 I was just finishing up the writing of my PhD so there probably wasn't much time to keep count.
I did end up reading Everything Ravaged, Everything burned - which was pretty nice. Estelle Tang had a nice review of this. I recall being a little unsettled with the graphic descriptions in the final story - in particular a creative viking ritual called a "bloody angel". Like watching a Chan-wook park film - you sort of wonder what it adds to your life to be exposed to macabre art. I guess at some level it stops you from making your way passively through life without having to experience emotion, which is sort of good. There were a whole lot of pretty human characters in these stories, I remember hearing Tower say that he liked to bring the reader's character sympathies to an alternative point as the stories progress... I'm not sure whether this worked or not. The characters were human, but because they weren't my kind of human, I found it hard to genuinely sympathise.
I also made attempts to read flatterland, but i found it got a bit dull and I couldn't be bothered with the teenage girl-square protagonist (or is she a pentagon?). On the other hand, I found reading flatland earlier in the year delightful. It is a metaphor for relativity, in particular of how we perceive the forces of 4 dimensions in 3.
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