Do you know that feeling of jealousy when listening to a native speaker, who so effortlessly performs this language that you struggled so bad to learn and still feel like you will never live up to the spoken quality of a native, even though your fluent? And after that the embarrassment of being jealous off something like this? Something the native speaker can’t even change? I’ve felt like that a lot of times. My English is good, but I’m still so far away from being as good as a native speaker and maybe that day will never come and this book actually made it very obvious for me. It taught me about my ignorance. It made me feel literally stupid at times because I had to look up so many words, but here comes the twist: Exactly that feeling made me give this book five stars and love it like I do. These moments made me sympathise with the main character even more, because she feels this exact same feeling. She’s caught up in her fascination for a culture, a people, a language, and learns and studies and memorises their books, their poetry, but once she gets there, apart from the obvious things that go wrong, she realises how much she is different from them, how much this language is designed for foreigners to feel like a foreigner. She is stuck in this cycle of jealousy, because she wants to use this language so effortlessly and beautifully as the Teixcalaanli do, but she isn’t one of them and as such she will never master it like they have. Her struggle feels real and in return brings life to the book, more than all of the beautiful descriptions of flowers and ornaments and clothing. Those were greatly appreciated as well of course, but this cultural barrier between the Stationers and the Teixcalaanli is a masterpiece. Other than that, this book managed to surprise me with its’ ending. That’s something I haven’t experienced in quite a while, either because it was obvious or I didn’t care. The end of A Memory called Empire on the other hand I did care about a lot. „How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of ‘you’?“ This is a frequently asked question in this book and at first I thought it was an unnecessary question, because everything seemed logical to me. There is Mahit and then there is the imago machine, which introduces the recorded personality aka memories and personality of another person into Mahits mind. I thought it was clear, where Mahit ended and Yskander began, but that changed throughout the story, as I began to think of Yskander a an individual mind, a person trapped within a person and I came to wonder, maybe I understand something the wrong way. How alive is he really? How much does he feel like himself? Can he feel trapped and can he go crazy in the darkness and loneliness of being shut off of Mahit… An intriguing question and I have asked myself the same thing multiple times, while reading this book, but on a different level, as compared to Three Seagrass or any other Teixcalaanli citizens. My version of this question is: How alive is the imago inside someone’s imago machine? How much of their own individual „you“ do they still feel? Does Yskander know how long he is locked out off Mahits mind? Does he feel alone? Will he go mad? Can he go mad? Does he feel at all? I hope I will get more information in Part 2… I would recommend this to anyone looking for a decent Science Fiction read, that does not have too much of science in it, but a lot of plot to unravel. For me personally this was a five star book, no doubt about it.

In the beginning, reading this was slow-going. Not through any fault of the writing. The issue was me entirely. It takes my brain time to adjust to nomenclature, but once I was able to wrap my head around it, the rest came easy. It makes me nervous to write about A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE because of how close its themes are to my current philosophical plight. On a surface level, sure, this was an action-packed space opera where 400 pages happen in two weeks (!!!) but it's more than that. OH <i><b>BOY</i></b> was it more than that. The two themes that had me by the throat was 1) loving the hand that colonized you and 2) how much of your sense of self is your memory? Both are prevalent in the title alone. At one point Yskandr says, "most of personality is endocrine" (345) and I still don't get it. All we are are the hormones that we secrete? But at the same time, it gives me some form of relief to think of the possibility of the absence of an essential self. Again, I still don't know where I stand on the Source of Self question (which is so unlike me). And when the question of "how do I know you're you?" comes up a lot especially surrounding the discussion of the imago machine, but Mahit's rebuts it by pointing out how is it any different to Teixcalaan's staunch preservation of culture and heritage - how everything is a reference, an allusion to history and culture that they cannot seem to let go. <spoiler>I feel like I ought to say something about how Mahit and Three Seagrass culminated their relationship, both working and personal. I don't feel cheated - this is <i>not</i> a fanfic. I did not expect some kind of promise. The 'break-up' (if you can even call it that) was pragmatic. A straightforward reference to Three Seagrass' <i>vainglorious ambition</i> with no hard, bitter feelings whatsoever. All they were to each other, it seemed, was a tether vanquished by the finality of emotional response that resulted from insurrection, grief, and... novelty. Sure, it made me sad. But what's life without some of that?</spoiler> <b>The rest of this review is just going to be me and the sentences that make me go hmmmm.</b> There's continuity of memory, and that makes a self. A self is whoever remembers being that self. One of them corrects: <i>"Continuity of memory filtered through endocrine response.</i> One of them corrects: <i>We all remember being that self, and we are not the same."</i> * Thought again of the City as an algorithm: considered, for the first time clearly, that no algorithm was innocent of its designer. It couldn't be. There was an originating purpose for an algorithm, however distant in its past - a reason some human person made it, even if it had evolved and folded in on itself and transformed. A City run by Ten Pearl's algorithm had Ten Pearl's interests embedded in it. A City run by an algorithm designed to response to Teixcalaanli desires was not innocent of those same Teixcalaanli desires, magnified, twisted by machine learning. * Empire was empire - the part that seduced and the part that clamped down, jaws like a vise, and shook a planet until its neck was broken and it died. * A mind is a sort of star-chart in reverse: <i><b>an assembly of memory, conditional response, and past action, held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signalling,</i></b> rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness. * Nothing the Empire touched would remain hers.