{"id":846,"date":"2003-10-21T21:38:59","date_gmt":"2003-10-21T21:38:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=846"},"modified":"2012-04-24T21:39:48","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T21:39:48","slug":"the-years-of-rice-and-salt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/?p=846","title":{"rendered":"The Years of Rice and Salt"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><em>The Years of Rice and Salt<\/em> by Kim Stanley Robinson<\/h3>\n<p>We had ten people for this book plus one email review, all  at StrangeHurst House. Although 8 people started the book only 4 people  finished. Five people had read KSR before, mostly his Mars trilogy.<\/p>\n<p>The book follows 3 souls through several incarnations in an alternate  world where the Black Plague killed off most of the Europeans. Using  the &#8220;bardo,&#8221; an in-between-incarnations waiting room, to separate the  different lives helped the souls and the reader to review and separate  each life. The episodic nature of the<!--more--> novel helped one reader navigate  the great length of the book.<\/p>\n<p>Those who did read to the end enjoyed the book and its speculations,  especially the technology of the &#8220;future&#8221; years. The finishers found the  style rich with the changing characters allowing a neat exploration of  motivations.<\/p>\n<p>Most everyone agreed the book was too darn long with more detail than  was needed. Most of the non-finishers felt the book lacked ACTION. One  reader said she got to page 200 then lost her will to read. Another  person would have cut 400 of the 900+ pages. A Cliff Notes edition was  suggested.<\/p>\n<p>A few readers disagreed with the author&#8217;s re-vision of history,  arguing that more than a single change was needed to really change  history. We quibbled over bits of the plot.<\/p>\n<p>Afterwards several people had dinner at the Mongolian Grille.<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8212; Judy Strange<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson We had ten people for this book plus one email review, all at StrangeHurst House. Although 8 people started the book only 4 people finished. Five people had read KSR before, mostly his Mars trilogy. The book follows 3 souls through several incarnations in an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":848,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions\/848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fact.org\/reading\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}