"Embassytown"

[fiefoe]

I've been meaning to read China Mieville for ages, but maybe this book isn't the right place to start. Maybe too many made-up words and too much exposition at the start is what's giving me trouble?

• "Now, granted, words can't actually be referents, that I grant you, there's the tragedy of language, but our asymptotic efforts at deploying them aren't nothing, either."
• Even cosseted in that manchmal-field I felt all the tugs of strange velocity, as we moved in what were not really directions, and the misleading gravity bubble we'd brought with us did its best.
• "They speak by regurgitation. Pellets embedded with enzymes in different combinations are sentences, which their interlocutors eat."
• I mentioned the Festivals of Lies... "But I thought they couldn't," someone said. "That's sort of the point," I said. "To strive for the impossible."
• "Come save me from the village idiots," she sometimes said to me after downloading updates alongside other automa.
• Dialects comprehensible only as palimpsests of references to everything already said, or in which adjectives are rude and verbs unholy.
• "There's nothing like this anywhere. It's not about the sounds, you know. The sounds aren't where the meaning lives."
• the Hosts, for which Language was speech spoken by a thinker thinking thoughts
• Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.