What Are You Reading (Not On A) Wednesday
Jul. 28th, 2019 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCurrently Reading:
Fiction: NA
Non-fiction: Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Lit Mag: The Lifted Brow 41
Academic: Germano's PHD to Book, although I haven't actually opened it for a while.
Recently Finished: Very many things, apparently.
Meanjin 78-1 by Jonathan Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
After taking months to read Summer 2018, I binged Autumn in two days. And loved it.
Highlights:
Adolfo Aranjuez, Quest and Queerness
Tony Birch, There Is No Axe
Dean Biron, Ordinary People
Omar Sakr, My First and Second Language
The only disappointment I have is with the 'Endnotes'. Sean Michaelef's 'Strike Up the Blandings' is, well, bland.
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
On the one hand: enjoyable nostalgia
On the other hand: holy CRAP the odious classism. No, children, you living in a farmhouse *with its own stables and yard* does not make you comparably poor to the railway porter or anyone else in the village and I rather wish that had been the lesson this book was gunning for.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was absolutely charmed by the first third - by the MC's atypical, literalistic outlook on life, and the way that was used to (I thought) skewer the strange fixations and normative demands of more typical people.
The second third I spent cringing with embarrassment, which of course was as intended.
The final third, hmm. I was satisfied when she turned on her not-actually-partner and put her foot down about who she was and what she was best suited to in life, but. The cadence of the ending surprised me: I was expecting to end, not on 'I am a convenience store animal!' but on another wry dig at normal people - perhaps at the discovery that everyone filled in for her a narrative of heartbreak, one that she could use to deflect from her professional choices. But we... didn't get that, and I'm left feeling a little like Furukura was the butt of a joke, rather than the teller of the joke.
In the beginning of the book I saw Furukura's love of routine, of small changes, of individual items treated with care, as embodying the sort of virtues of present-ness and attention valued in Japense Bhuddism and in Shinto, despite her outsider social position. By the end, I started to suspect Furukura was a full-blown satire of the absorption of identity into work, and I was no longer sure the Furukura's atypicality was being positioned as a possible avenue of virtue.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don't read much hard sci-fic (I've read far more than usual in the past few months, thanks to a book club - but this wasn't a book club pick). One reason is that I'm not terribly interested in the 'escape earth and restore humanity' narrative of the generation ship subgenre, but this? This grapples with the things that the big trope outlines often miss. *Who* gets to travel? What power relations are reproduced? How can a society like a generation ship develop, when time itself will mean they lose touch with their origins and purpose?
This book went through my mind with a wire scourer. It was a gripping experience, but not a comfortable one; and yet I felt bolstered by it. (As I said on Twitter, though, the catharsis to discomfort balance likely gets more volatile the more points of intersection you have with the MCs, so, handle with care.) It has a diversity of characters and narrative: most of the MCs are black or mixed-race (and mixed only on a white-to-black spectrum: that was one thing that struck me as odd, the total absence of any other ethnic group. I know Solomon was modelling her ship structure on an antebellum plantation, but I have Questions about the future-to-us-past-to-the-characters Earth that produced this ship, and populated it only with a white elite and a black underclass: where on earth did everyone else go?); many characters are queer in gender or sexual preference; disability is common, and neither perfectly accommodated nor utterly stigmatised.
And what this book doesn't do is promise you a future or a fantasy in which those things aren't hard. It doesn't even promise a utopian revolution against the corrupt elite. It just exerts a deep, profound sympathy for its characters as they work to put one foot (or prosthetic) in front of the other, answering the questions in front of them, making decisions in the moment about what is the right thing - or the least terrible - thing they could choose to do, and reacting to decisions *others* have made on similar grounds.
Against Love: A Polemic by Laura Kipnis
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
DNF at 1.5 chapters, with prejudice. There's a lot of nuanced critique that can be - and has been - made of the marriage industrial complex, the contemporary cult of romantic love, and of toxic monogamy. This book does not make those critiques, although it enumerates the woes of the unhappily monogamous. Zero points for critical thinking.
Up Next: Uh. I've now run out of the immediate fiction I feel like reading. I have a couple of e-books stashed in my Kobo that are on my long to-read list, so I guess those? Plus I have a book on Arthurian romance, and a volume of Banana Fish. Mostly I am trying to squash the urge to sublimate panic into BUYING JUST THE PERFECT BOOK.
Online Fiction:
Rafeif Ismail (Meanjin Autumn 2019), Something like revolution. Migration, fascism, and encounters with Djinn.
Lola Button (Meanjin Autumn 2019), Free Ticket. In which a woman gets a free ticket to a concert and the result *isn't* creepy.
Also, I finished a re-read of Aviolot's The Course of Honour, which has quite recently been pulled down from the AO3. I hope that means that pro publication is in the works: certainly Course of Honour is a far better work than Captive Prince.
Music notes: I bought Washington's 'There, There' and am enjoying it a lot.
I am also somewhat fixated with 'Easy Target' by Bitch:
Fiction: NA
Non-fiction: Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Lit Mag: The Lifted Brow 41
Academic: Germano's PHD to Book, although I haven't actually opened it for a while.
Recently Finished: Very many things, apparently.
Meanjin 78-1 by Jonathan GreenMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
After taking months to read Summer 2018, I binged Autumn in two days. And loved it.
Highlights:
Adolfo Aranjuez, Quest and Queerness
Tony Birch, There Is No Axe
Dean Biron, Ordinary People
Omar Sakr, My First and Second Language
The only disappointment I have is with the 'Endnotes'. Sean Michaelef's 'Strike Up the Blandings' is, well, bland.
The Railway Children by E. NesbitMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
On the one hand: enjoyable nostalgia
On the other hand: holy CRAP the odious classism. No, children, you living in a farmhouse *with its own stables and yard* does not make you comparably poor to the railway porter or anyone else in the village and I rather wish that had been the lesson this book was gunning for.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka MurataMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was absolutely charmed by the first third - by the MC's atypical, literalistic outlook on life, and the way that was used to (I thought) skewer the strange fixations and normative demands of more typical people.
The second third I spent cringing with embarrassment, which of course was as intended.
The final third, hmm. I was satisfied when she turned on her not-actually-partner and put her foot down about who she was and what she was best suited to in life, but. The cadence of the ending surprised me: I was expecting to end, not on 'I am a convenience store animal!' but on another wry dig at normal people - perhaps at the discovery that everyone filled in for her a narrative of heartbreak, one that she could use to deflect from her professional choices. But we... didn't get that, and I'm left feeling a little like Furukura was the butt of a joke, rather than the teller of the joke.
In the beginning of the book I saw Furukura's love of routine, of small changes, of individual items treated with care, as embodying the sort of virtues of present-ness and attention valued in Japense Bhuddism and in Shinto, despite her outsider social position. By the end, I started to suspect Furukura was a full-blown satire of the absorption of identity into work, and I was no longer sure the Furukura's atypicality was being positioned as a possible avenue of virtue.
An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers SolomonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don't read much hard sci-fic (I've read far more than usual in the past few months, thanks to a book club - but this wasn't a book club pick). One reason is that I'm not terribly interested in the 'escape earth and restore humanity' narrative of the generation ship subgenre, but this? This grapples with the things that the big trope outlines often miss. *Who* gets to travel? What power relations are reproduced? How can a society like a generation ship develop, when time itself will mean they lose touch with their origins and purpose?
This book went through my mind with a wire scourer. It was a gripping experience, but not a comfortable one; and yet I felt bolstered by it. (As I said on Twitter, though, the catharsis to discomfort balance likely gets more volatile the more points of intersection you have with the MCs, so, handle with care.) It has a diversity of characters and narrative: most of the MCs are black or mixed-race (and mixed only on a white-to-black spectrum: that was one thing that struck me as odd, the total absence of any other ethnic group. I know Solomon was modelling her ship structure on an antebellum plantation, but I have Questions about the future-to-us-past-to-the-characters Earth that produced this ship, and populated it only with a white elite and a black underclass: where on earth did everyone else go?); many characters are queer in gender or sexual preference; disability is common, and neither perfectly accommodated nor utterly stigmatised.
And what this book doesn't do is promise you a future or a fantasy in which those things aren't hard. It doesn't even promise a utopian revolution against the corrupt elite. It just exerts a deep, profound sympathy for its characters as they work to put one foot (or prosthetic) in front of the other, answering the questions in front of them, making decisions in the moment about what is the right thing - or the least terrible - thing they could choose to do, and reacting to decisions *others* have made on similar grounds.
Against Love: A Polemic by Laura KipnisMy rating: 1 of 5 stars
DNF at 1.5 chapters, with prejudice. There's a lot of nuanced critique that can be - and has been - made of the marriage industrial complex, the contemporary cult of romantic love, and of toxic monogamy. This book does not make those critiques, although it enumerates the woes of the unhappily monogamous. Zero points for critical thinking.
Up Next: Uh. I've now run out of the immediate fiction I feel like reading. I have a couple of e-books stashed in my Kobo that are on my long to-read list, so I guess those? Plus I have a book on Arthurian romance, and a volume of Banana Fish. Mostly I am trying to squash the urge to sublimate panic into BUYING JUST THE PERFECT BOOK.
Online Fiction:
Also, I finished a re-read of Aviolot's The Course of Honour, which has quite recently been pulled down from the AO3. I hope that means that pro publication is in the works: certainly Course of Honour is a far better work than Captive Prince.
Music notes: I bought Washington's 'There, There' and am enjoying it a lot.
I am also somewhat fixated with 'Easy Target' by Bitch: