What Are You Reading Weekend returns!
Apr. 20th, 2025 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricApparently, I have not made one of these posts since June least year. I don’t know how 10 months have passed, I feel like I only recently finished The Woman In White.
I spent a lot of yesterday reading about 1970s far-left Japanese insurgent groups. I had no idea they even existed. I started with Blood on the Snow: The Horrifying Implosion of Japan’s United Red Army, although I had to pause and look up the details of the details of the Japanese Red Army Faction and their first hijacking in order to understand it. I can’t remember where I stumbled across the link, but the writer for Unseen Japan has a deft touch with personality and group dynamics, which makes the story (two embattled far-left groups merge, and retreat to a lodge in the mountains to work on integrating their cohorts; less than two months later, the police find twelve bodies and the remainder of the group fleeing across the range - ending in a multi-day hostage standoff).
From there I followed the series, and was particularly struck by the personality and clearly iron-hard will of Shigenobu Fusako, who had left Japan shortly after the United Red Army merger, and set up an international arm, the Japanese Red Army. I know I’d heard of the Lod Airport Massacre before, but I’m fairly sure I had only heard it attributed to “Palestinian terrorists”, not, as it turns out, three Japanese leftists who had followed one singularly focused revolutionary-trotskyist Japanese woman who wanted to join with the PFLP as allied liberationists. The Unseen Japan narrative paints a picture of Shigenobu as firmly pro-Palestinian, but also frustrated by her group’s inability to resource itself for independent action - tied to either the PFLP or their far left European insurgent allies and their respective priorities.
A fascinating complement was Fusako Shigenobu, an Open-Ended Revolution, by Mei (May) Shigenobu, Shigenobu Fusako’s daughter. As well as a touching portrait of her mother, and an interesting insight into Mei’s own life (she is now the Tokyo correspondent for MBC, the Saudi-run network, on their cable news), that article fills in some of the details of what the JRA and/or its members did, other than terrorist action. I’m just going to straight up quote Mei Shigenobu (and you can, I’m sure, assume certain rose-and-revolutionary-red tinted shades of glasses):
I ended up reminded of an interview I read a while back with Leila Khaled in 972+ (written 2014), which has some interesting points to make about, eg, BDS. But what both the dive into Shigenobu Fusako’s life, and that article, both drove home to me is that learning about the 20th century history of terrorism in the years after 2001 (and perhaps especially learning this in a conservative xn school) really flattened the diversity of people, groups, and tactics of the 1970s. (Also, absolutely wild that my teenage obsession with Women In Islam, filtered as it was through what I could access in my home town, and/or USyd library collection where Ahmed Shboul had been teaching from the same books since the 80s, ended with me knowing about lingerie culture in Egypt but not about, well, Leila Khaled.)
Currently Reading:
Fiction
Gregory McGuire, Wicked. Someone told me that this book was “not as good” as the musical, and I’ve definitely heard people say it’s Worse In The Queer Way. I am baffled. The ableism as applies to Nessa Rose is still there, but honestly, far less simplistic.
Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. The front cover of this second-hand copy fell off shortly after I got it, and then the book (I’d guess 90s paperback?) fell behind the bed and the back cover has taken some weird damp damage as well. I have a new copy on the way, because… well, because.
Non-Fiction
Will Tosh, Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare, in fits and starts
Richard Firth Green, A Crisis of Truth. I’ve had the USyd copy out for nearly a year now, revisiting (in fits and starts) legal details I did not particularly care about or didn’t internalise at any point 2008-2022, but the vague memories of which impede and frustrate my encounters with modern legal history. I have tried, on and off, since at least 2011, to buy a second-hand copy, and it has never been worth the $50 AUD + shipping given I had access to university copies. But I found a NEW copy for $40-ish dollars and domestic shipping, from an Aus/NZ online-only bookstore. I think it might be print-on-demand? Everything looks exactly the same (cover, pagination, publication details page) except for the tiny note on the final verso which, instead of “printed in the united states”, has the details of “Ingram Content Group Australia”.
And part-read on the backburner: (selected)
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu
Bessel Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
Hannah Fry, The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus. Fun Christmas-themed maths/logic exercises.
and, for some reason, Enid Blyton More Adventures on Willow Tree Farm. I ploughed through both Cherry Tree and Willow Tree farms in audiobook then stalled out on this one. Unsure if its not for me or if I just lost whatever “inner seven year old is running the show” mood I was in; unsure whether to abandon it or file it for a future mood.
Recently Read:
The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret Barrister
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was fascinating, and written with remarkable humour and wit for what is actually angry and depressing material.
Also I learned how the Magistrates Court works in the UK and who presides over them, and I am ... wow. What IS really striking is that the Secret Barrister doesn't seem to be aware that it's not just the Americans who don't do the "lay magistrate" thing - down here in Aus we started with those, thanks to colonialism, and decided to get rid of them!
Conversely, the Secret Barrister also doesn't seem to be aware of the aspects of the UK (/Eng-Wales) system which closely related jurisdictions in fact envy! "The UK has much greater availability of legal aid" is something I've heard plenty of commentators upon how NSW works remark upon.
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I wonder what it says about me that read The Secret River, and came away with a fascination with the history of the Hawkesbuy but no real desire to keep reading Kate Grenville until this came across my path. And I loved it, and admired it much, much more than the literary-lush narrative style she wins awards for.
This is sparse - clearly fiction, in the way it invents incidents and individual conversations and scenes for a woman whom Grenville did not know well while she was alive - but sparse, hewing close to the documented outline of her grandmother's life. At times I could actually identify the context-providing sources that she would have needed to cite, if this was a biography.
And Dolly Maunder is such a well-drawn character, while growing progressively less and less likeable as she gets older. I liked the *book* more and more the less likeable she became. The points where the narrative dwelt sympathetically on her - when, for instance, she thinks over how she and her husband have been compatible and successful business partners despite their loveless marriage, she's still not a person that *I* would like (or who would like me, at all).
It's also striking - given I then went on to read "One Life", which was written earlier than this one - how *unlikeable* Grenville's mother appears in this book, too. One sympathises with her, bounced from school to school and town to town and too aware that her mother does not love her: but it's hard to like her. In "One Life", she is likeable and Dolly is not; in "Restless Dolly Maunder" it's hard to like either of them, but one is invited to sympathise with Dolly's awareness of her own inability to bond with her daughter as much as with the daughter.
One Life: My Mother's Story by Kate Grenville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Should this be shelved with fiction or biography? Restless Dolly Maunder is clearly fiction, but there has been fictionalising here, too - the scripting of scenes and conversations, at minimum.
The life of Isabella/Nance, who trained as a pharmacist in the years of the Great Depression - one of the few jobs, her mother was told, where a woman could keep working after marriage or even children (although, in Nance's several attempts to set up her own business, to support her family while her husband first pursued radical politics then the law, it became clear that being legally able to own and run a business did not overcome the practical barriers) - is in many ways more interesting to me than that of Dolly, but I believe I preferred Dolly's novel to this, perhaps because Restless Dolly Maunder stood just a little further over the fiction line.
I Can't Remember The Title But The Cover Is Blue by Elias Greig
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was extremely funny - little dialogue style "Me: ... Customer [Characteristic]: ..." scenes, brought to life by excellent caricatures.
Checkers by John Marsden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Found this in a box at home. I never ended up with a copy of So Much To Tell You but I had this.
Honestly not his greatest work - although good work on realistially and empathetically characterising an assortment of kids in inpatient psych. I'd completely forgotten there was a gay character here.
What brings it up from 3 starts to 4 is the sheer audacity of writing a Teenagers In Psych Ward novel which is also a mystery/thriller about, of all the fucking things, _insider trading_. It works though!
Backdated: The next bunch of books in my record after Detransition Baby and Stephanie Alexander’s Home are a bunch of Chaucer and/or 18th c texts, and then an eight-book re-read of Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series and then Protector of the Small. This was, as you might guess, deep in the “this egg is now scrambled” phase. I… have a few actually load-bearing thoughts on Alana, which I ought to write up one day (in conversation with PTerry, and probably also Silence and also Butler and also fucking Pierre Bourdieu).
But I will also say that something which I struggle with - I remember turning this over and over in my head in my late teens and early twenties - is that… not only am I not like Alana, it’s a total toss-up whether Alana would like me. Kel, on the other hand? It’s pretty clear I have little in common with Kel, and I doubt she’d think I was ideal company - but I remember thinking somewhere in my late teens or early twenties “but I am, or I think I should be, someone Kel would respect”, which is a wholly different question.
Some short fiction, read at some point
Cislyn Smith, Tides that Bind, which is about Scylla and Charibdys.
Abra Staffin-Wiebe, Becks Pest Control and the Case of the Drag Show Downer. This was published in 2022, back when drag + kids was Topical, scary, but still more of a harbinger than the “just one part of all the Doom” situation we have now.
Michelle Lyn King, One-Hundred Percent Humidity, which Electric Lit pubished with the compelling tagline “The only thing more humiliating than virginity is sex”.
Guan Un, Re: Your Stone , in which Sisyphus encountered corporate email.
Recently Added To My To-Read List:
Fiction:
Leanna Renee Hieber, Strangely Beautiful, which looks like a fun lil steampunk adventure
Victor Heringer, trans James Young, The Love of Singular Men. If I’m on a gay lit dive, I definitely don’t read enough in translation, and this looks like my kind of thing.
Steve MinOn, First name, second name. Aus lit, Chinese myth/cosmology and immigrant intergenerational heritage, queer author, porous boundary between fiction and autobiography. Seems like fun to me.
Non-fiction
Moudhy Al-Rashid, Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History
Billy-Ray Belcourt, A history of my brief body
Esther Cuenca Liberman, The making of urban customary law in medieval Europe
I spent a lot of yesterday reading about 1970s far-left Japanese insurgent groups. I had no idea they even existed. I started with Blood on the Snow: The Horrifying Implosion of Japan’s United Red Army, although I had to pause and look up the details of the details of the Japanese Red Army Faction and their first hijacking in order to understand it. I can’t remember where I stumbled across the link, but the writer for Unseen Japan has a deft touch with personality and group dynamics, which makes the story (two embattled far-left groups merge, and retreat to a lodge in the mountains to work on integrating their cohorts; less than two months later, the police find twelve bodies and the remainder of the group fleeing across the range - ending in a multi-day hostage standoff).
From there I followed the series, and was particularly struck by the personality and clearly iron-hard will of Shigenobu Fusako, who had left Japan shortly after the United Red Army merger, and set up an international arm, the Japanese Red Army. I know I’d heard of the Lod Airport Massacre before, but I’m fairly sure I had only heard it attributed to “Palestinian terrorists”, not, as it turns out, three Japanese leftists who had followed one singularly focused revolutionary-trotskyist Japanese woman who wanted to join with the PFLP as allied liberationists. The Unseen Japan narrative paints a picture of Shigenobu as firmly pro-Palestinian, but also frustrated by her group’s inability to resource itself for independent action - tied to either the PFLP or their far left European insurgent allies and their respective priorities.
A fascinating complement was Fusako Shigenobu, an Open-Ended Revolution, by Mei (May) Shigenobu, Shigenobu Fusako’s daughter. As well as a touching portrait of her mother, and an interesting insight into Mei’s own life (she is now the Tokyo correspondent for MBC, the Saudi-run network, on their cable news), that article fills in some of the details of what the JRA and/or its members did, other than terrorist action. I’m just going to straight up quote Mei Shigenobu (and you can, I’m sure, assume certain rose-and-revolutionary-red tinted shades of glasses):
Fusako had initially worked at Al Hadaf magazine, the public relations office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), alongside its editor-in-chief Ghassan Kanafani. Her role there strengthened Japanese support for the Palestinian cause by keeping Japanese leftist activists informed of what was happening on the ground in the Palestinian struggle and the Middle East. She also provided logistical support to Japanese volunteers who arrived, connecting them to related Palestinian partners.
Some Japanese medics went to Lebanon to open clinics in refugee camps, or to train people in acupuncture; artists contributed artwork or co-produced plays, while writers wrote about or translated the writings of prominent Palestinians such as Kanafani. For decades, the JRA performed the kind of work that NGOs have taken on. The only difference was its ideological framework and the fact that they were volunteers.
I ended up reminded of an interview I read a while back with Leila Khaled in 972+ (written 2014), which has some interesting points to make about, eg, BDS. But what both the dive into Shigenobu Fusako’s life, and that article, both drove home to me is that learning about the 20th century history of terrorism in the years after 2001 (and perhaps especially learning this in a conservative xn school) really flattened the diversity of people, groups, and tactics of the 1970s. (Also, absolutely wild that my teenage obsession with Women In Islam, filtered as it was through what I could access in my home town, and/or USyd library collection where Ahmed Shboul had been teaching from the same books since the 80s, ended with me knowing about lingerie culture in Egypt but not about, well, Leila Khaled.)
Currently Reading:
Fiction
Non-Fiction
And part-read on the backburner: (selected)
Recently Read:
The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret BarristerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was fascinating, and written with remarkable humour and wit for what is actually angry and depressing material.
Also I learned how the Magistrates Court works in the UK and who presides over them, and I am ... wow. What IS really striking is that the Secret Barrister doesn't seem to be aware that it's not just the Americans who don't do the "lay magistrate" thing - down here in Aus we started with those, thanks to colonialism, and decided to get rid of them!
Conversely, the Secret Barrister also doesn't seem to be aware of the aspects of the UK (/Eng-Wales) system which closely related jurisdictions in fact envy! "The UK has much greater availability of legal aid" is something I've heard plenty of commentators upon how NSW works remark upon.
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate GrenvilleMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I wonder what it says about me that read The Secret River, and came away with a fascination with the history of the Hawkesbuy but no real desire to keep reading Kate Grenville until this came across my path. And I loved it, and admired it much, much more than the literary-lush narrative style she wins awards for.
This is sparse - clearly fiction, in the way it invents incidents and individual conversations and scenes for a woman whom Grenville did not know well while she was alive - but sparse, hewing close to the documented outline of her grandmother's life. At times I could actually identify the context-providing sources that she would have needed to cite, if this was a biography.
And Dolly Maunder is such a well-drawn character, while growing progressively less and less likeable as she gets older. I liked the *book* more and more the less likeable she became. The points where the narrative dwelt sympathetically on her - when, for instance, she thinks over how she and her husband have been compatible and successful business partners despite their loveless marriage, she's still not a person that *I* would like (or who would like me, at all).
It's also striking - given I then went on to read "One Life", which was written earlier than this one - how *unlikeable* Grenville's mother appears in this book, too. One sympathises with her, bounced from school to school and town to town and too aware that her mother does not love her: but it's hard to like her. In "One Life", she is likeable and Dolly is not; in "Restless Dolly Maunder" it's hard to like either of them, but one is invited to sympathise with Dolly's awareness of her own inability to bond with her daughter as much as with the daughter.
One Life: My Mother's Story by Kate GrenvilleMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Should this be shelved with fiction or biography? Restless Dolly Maunder is clearly fiction, but there has been fictionalising here, too - the scripting of scenes and conversations, at minimum.
The life of Isabella/Nance, who trained as a pharmacist in the years of the Great Depression - one of the few jobs, her mother was told, where a woman could keep working after marriage or even children (although, in Nance's several attempts to set up her own business, to support her family while her husband first pursued radical politics then the law, it became clear that being legally able to own and run a business did not overcome the practical barriers) - is in many ways more interesting to me than that of Dolly, but I believe I preferred Dolly's novel to this, perhaps because Restless Dolly Maunder stood just a little further over the fiction line.
I Can't Remember The Title But The Cover Is Blue by Elias GreigMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was extremely funny - little dialogue style "Me: ... Customer [Characteristic]: ..." scenes, brought to life by excellent caricatures.
Checkers by John MarsdenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Found this in a box at home. I never ended up with a copy of So Much To Tell You but I had this.
Honestly not his greatest work - although good work on realistially and empathetically characterising an assortment of kids in inpatient psych. I'd completely forgotten there was a gay character here.
What brings it up from 3 starts to 4 is the sheer audacity of writing a Teenagers In Psych Ward novel which is also a mystery/thriller about, of all the fucking things, _insider trading_. It works though!
Backdated: The next bunch of books in my record after Detransition Baby and Stephanie Alexander’s Home are a bunch of Chaucer and/or 18th c texts, and then an eight-book re-read of Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series and then Protector of the Small. This was, as you might guess, deep in the “this egg is now scrambled” phase. I… have a few actually load-bearing thoughts on Alana, which I ought to write up one day (in conversation with PTerry, and probably also Silence and also Butler and also fucking Pierre Bourdieu).
But I will also say that something which I struggle with - I remember turning this over and over in my head in my late teens and early twenties - is that… not only am I not like Alana, it’s a total toss-up whether Alana would like me. Kel, on the other hand? It’s pretty clear I have little in common with Kel, and I doubt she’d think I was ideal company - but I remember thinking somewhere in my late teens or early twenties “but I am, or I think I should be, someone Kel would respect”, which is a wholly different question.
Some short fiction, read at some point
Recently Added To My To-Read List:
Fiction:
Non-fiction