What I am reading right now...

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's an alternate history type of novel, describing what would happen if the Great Plague had wiped out virtually all Europeans instead of 1/3 or so that actually died. The blurb describes,

...[A] universe where the first ship to reach the New World travels across the Pacific Ocean from China and colonization spreads from west to east. This is a universe where the Industrial Revolution is triggered by the world's greatest scientific minds--in India. This is a universe where Buddhism and Islam are the most influential and practiced religions and Christianity is merely a historical footnote.

All very intriguing, and I'm certainly enjoying the first few chapters. I was excited to see Mogadishu on a map provided at the beginning of the first section, but so far it is only mentioned in passing. And then only as an "Arab trading post". Oh well, maybe later on we will get a loving description of Hawl Wadaag and Jidka Sodonka...

Scifi.com has a review, which I haven't read since I hate reading reviews before I read the book (or watch the movie). I got the book from a friend, who though I might enjoy it.

I'll write a few notes here later, as I'm reading the book. So far the most hair-raising thing I've read in a while details the castration of a skinny African boy by Chinese slavetraders. *Shudders* I actually gasped out loud at a key scene. You know, the FGM practiced in Somalia and other parts of Africa has always struck me as a particularly mean-spirited act carried out by women who had to undergo the same procedure themselves, so they take it out on the younger generation (if it had to happen to me, why not her?). In Robinson's book, the eunuch who purchases the slaves is said to have the same mentality, hating men who are "intact". When people explain evil, they don't give enough credit to simple xaasidnimo.

Well, back to the novel for me.