Last week was a good reading week for me. I finished 2 books and am a decent way on a third. One of the books was fairly standard paranormal fluff. A fun read, but not hard and thematically not interesting to write about no matter how much I enjoyed reading it.
The other book? Well, it was a book for knitters, sewers, and spinners. Of course, that was provided that you like science fiction and the distopian novel.
Yarn, by Jon Armstrong (© 2010), reads like the bastard love child of 1984, Zamyatin's We, and a bevy of fashion designers. Instead of the government controlling the lives of the people, it is a mega corporation, encouraging the population to endless consumption and reveration of the corporate state. While it isn't all bad, the crimes and horrors are omnipresent. The world is a giant mall with saleswarriors and tourists and "fashioning."
What made this story an interesting read for me was the timeline. The main thrust of the story takes place in about a day, maybe two. However, interspersed between the current action are the memories of the past, giving a lie to the beauty and freedom of the place, showing the hardships and horrors in both a stark light of reality and a rosy glow of memory.
It wasn't a hard read, though neither was 1984 or We, but it did make me think a little bit harder about consumption and the control of our lives and politics by the companies we use.
Oh, and it is a little alarming to me to see the back of the book use the term fashionpunk. Really, we have novels about probably everything.
