Mating

Challenging but rewarding read, needed to look up a word every other page or so. By the end I was very annoyed with both characters, but that was kind of the point. I wish for a story more about Tsau, less about the whites self-regard.

I'm mildly uncomfortable with the fact that my new favourite female character was created by a man, but oh well. The female protagonist of Mating strikes me as rare because she's so clearly driven by both intellect and minutely dissected emotion working in tandem. Rush pokes fun at the pretentiousness of intellectualism without ever being smug, and writes about emotions with zero sentimentality.

The narrator of this novel is one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.