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highlyeccentricWhat Are You Reading Wednesday:
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
What are you currently reading?
New additions to this list since last fortnight:
- Pat O'Connor, Friendships Between Women, which is technically a work book (and proving unexpectedly useful re: work, given it's modern sociology) but is also giving me personal thinkythoughts.
- Merl Storr (ed), Bisexuality: A Critical Reader, which is technically personal reading but is giving me a crisis of theory. I'm up to bisexual epistemolgy, you see. WHAT IS A BISEXUAL ANYWAY? Ahem. I'm discovering a strong dislike of the way men write about bisexuality, and it's making me think difficult thoughts about heterosexual dating while queer.
- Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton was going along just fine except I really don't like Mary's new fiancé. I also don't like how everyone bullied her into almost accepting her other suitor, but the new guy is a whiny wet lettuce.
I also started listening to the fairy tales of Charles Perrault in French. Litteratureaudio.com is my new friend.
What did you recently finish reading?
Swiss Watching: Inside Europe's Landlocked Island by Diccon Bewes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Oh, I loved this book. So full of obscure facts! I liked Slow Train better, for having a more coherent thread, but this was fascinating and also quite useful for understanding what's going on around me.
Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was an engaging, well-realised novel with a fantastic sense of place (no shit, a novel about indigenous australian culture has a strong sense of place). I also found it very demanding - the book drew few judgement lines about any characters, and Lucashenko manages to convey the protagonist's annoyance with and disapproval of certain things - for instance, Twoboy's dismissal of other indigenous locals' as 'jumped-up southerners'- with a light touch that doesn't give you much to latch onto.
As a white Australian *expat* reader, and not even someone from the Byron area, I also found it demanding to juggle my sense of homesickness and identification with the characters and their places, modes of speech, etc without eliding the fact that for the most part (I think Therese is the only substantial non-Indigenous character?) these are not *my* places and not my language and so on. All I can say is that it was lovely to read a novel where the narration - not just dialogue, the whole narration - flowed easily between standard English, Australian idiom, Aboriginal English (mostly familiar to me) and Language (almost none of which I recognised, since Bunjalung isn't the indigenous language of either the region where I grew up or the Sydney basin. I still can't get my head around the distinction between 'goorie' and 'koori' which seemed to be at play, but wasn't in the glossary, and everything I can find online says they're alternate spellings of the same word).
For the most part, I loved the character arcs and interactions. Jo and her daughter's relationship was very well depicted, again with a light touch - at first I noticed that Ellen seemed to hardly figure in Jo's internal monologue, and was irked by evident distance between them conflicting with the character-POV assertion of how important her daughter was to her. Lucashekno's narrator's touch is very light, never pointing out that gap or how it is negotiated and eventually closed, but it is, and I liked it a lot. The micro-level gender politics are also well drawn but never prescribed by the narrator. It's obvious Twoboy is something of a git, and the narrative doesn't make bones about the community and family building work that's done by women and ignored by the men in the story - but the closest thing to a prescription on the matter that ever arises is at the very end, when Granny says, of Twoboy, 'my young cousin has a lot to learn'.
The only strong prescriptions that Jo and the narrator make are in placing fair blame on the dugai (white folks) for fucking shit up, messing with indigenous individuals and families on a micro level and macro: Jo understands very well her own problems, her family's problems, etc, but also that her self-esteem, the traditions of family and community, and connection to the land have all been screwed over and stirred up by colonial interference. And fair enough. The book as a whole is highly skeptical of the whole concept and administration of Land Rights, which is interesting.
What I was disappointed with was the lack of engagement with Aunt Sally and Uncle Oscar's characters throughout. I feel like Uncle Oscar was shuffled off for a neat ending (and, uh, the implications of 'suicide over child abuse allegations' were not explored AT ALL) and was really the only completely Bad Guy character throughout. Given the book's reluctance to demarcate Good and Bad People, that was an odd choice. Whereas Aunt Sally, who is clearly a Good Person who happens to be on the other side of a kerfuffle, was not engaged with - we only have Jo's reported word that she's dignified, good at community maintenance, etc. If Jo had engaged with them before Twoboy came along, or perhaps if Ellen had a friendship with one of the children of their mob... hmm.
I *did* like the final resolution of the plot with Granny and Sam and the white farmer who turned out to be a sekrit protector of sacred spaces. I especially liked that no one told Twoboy a thing about it. Ehehehe. You keep your land rights, Mr Twoboy, and the little old lady you've paid no attention to will be over here, ensuring the continuity of the sacred rites.
Witchery, Etc by Rel: this is a zine-format 28-page minicomic, also being published page by page as a webcoming here.kayloulee sent it to me with a bundle of other swag from a con in Toronto. It's adorable! The webcomic is only 19 pages in, so if you like cute comics about witches who are neither good nor bad, and also about men with pumpkin heads, start following now!
And I finished Karras' Unmarriages. The book has the same easy-to-read style as Sexualites in Medieval Europe (although it's pitched slightly higher), but lacks the really punchy critical insights of her article-length work. I loved the historiographical introduction (*that* was punchy), and found the book as a whole interesting, but it was very... descriptive. I think that's what it aimed to be. To describe a whole bunch of options that weren't marriage. I would set it as a textbook / required reading in a heartbeat, but was a bit disappointed in it as cutting-edge scholarship.kayloulee should consider reading it, especially the chapter which is mostly reports from the Parisian church courts. Prime example of history as the craft of very slow gossip.
What will you read next? Hopefully I will FINISH some stuff. Sunny Chernobyl needs to go. The chances of me ordering 900 million books on contemporary bisexuality are also quite high, constrained only by my finances (the interlibrary system here doesn't have a great selection of anglophone queer theory, I wonder why?).
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
What are you currently reading?
New additions to this list since last fortnight:
- Pat O'Connor, Friendships Between Women, which is technically a work book (and proving unexpectedly useful re: work, given it's modern sociology) but is also giving me personal thinkythoughts.
- Merl Storr (ed), Bisexuality: A Critical Reader, which is technically personal reading but is giving me a crisis of theory. I'm up to bisexual epistemolgy, you see. WHAT IS A BISEXUAL ANYWAY? Ahem. I'm discovering a strong dislike of the way men write about bisexuality, and it's making me think difficult thoughts about heterosexual dating while queer.
- Trollope, The Vicar of Bullhampton was going along just fine except I really don't like Mary's new fiancé. I also don't like how everyone bullied her into almost accepting her other suitor, but the new guy is a whiny wet lettuce.
I also started listening to the fairy tales of Charles Perrault in French. Litteratureaudio.com is my new friend.
What did you recently finish reading?
Swiss Watching: Inside Europe's Landlocked Island by Diccon BewesMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Oh, I loved this book. So full of obscure facts! I liked Slow Train better, for having a more coherent thread, but this was fascinating and also quite useful for understanding what's going on around me.
Mullumbimby by Melissa LucashenkoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This was an engaging, well-realised novel with a fantastic sense of place (no shit, a novel about indigenous australian culture has a strong sense of place). I also found it very demanding - the book drew few judgement lines about any characters, and Lucashenko manages to convey the protagonist's annoyance with and disapproval of certain things - for instance, Twoboy's dismissal of other indigenous locals' as 'jumped-up southerners'- with a light touch that doesn't give you much to latch onto.
As a white Australian *expat* reader, and not even someone from the Byron area, I also found it demanding to juggle my sense of homesickness and identification with the characters and their places, modes of speech, etc without eliding the fact that for the most part (I think Therese is the only substantial non-Indigenous character?) these are not *my* places and not my language and so on. All I can say is that it was lovely to read a novel where the narration - not just dialogue, the whole narration - flowed easily between standard English, Australian idiom, Aboriginal English (mostly familiar to me) and Language (almost none of which I recognised, since Bunjalung isn't the indigenous language of either the region where I grew up or the Sydney basin. I still can't get my head around the distinction between 'goorie' and 'koori' which seemed to be at play, but wasn't in the glossary, and everything I can find online says they're alternate spellings of the same word).
For the most part, I loved the character arcs and interactions. Jo and her daughter's relationship was very well depicted, again with a light touch - at first I noticed that Ellen seemed to hardly figure in Jo's internal monologue, and was irked by evident distance between them conflicting with the character-POV assertion of how important her daughter was to her. Lucashekno's narrator's touch is very light, never pointing out that gap or how it is negotiated and eventually closed, but it is, and I liked it a lot. The micro-level gender politics are also well drawn but never prescribed by the narrator. It's obvious Twoboy is something of a git, and the narrative doesn't make bones about the community and family building work that's done by women and ignored by the men in the story - but the closest thing to a prescription on the matter that ever arises is at the very end, when Granny says, of Twoboy, 'my young cousin has a lot to learn'.
The only strong prescriptions that Jo and the narrator make are in placing fair blame on the dugai (white folks) for fucking shit up, messing with indigenous individuals and families on a micro level and macro: Jo understands very well her own problems, her family's problems, etc, but also that her self-esteem, the traditions of family and community, and connection to the land have all been screwed over and stirred up by colonial interference. And fair enough. The book as a whole is highly skeptical of the whole concept and administration of Land Rights, which is interesting.
What I was disappointed with was the lack of engagement with Aunt Sally and Uncle Oscar's characters throughout. I feel like Uncle Oscar was shuffled off for a neat ending (and, uh, the implications of 'suicide over child abuse allegations' were not explored AT ALL) and was really the only completely Bad Guy character throughout. Given the book's reluctance to demarcate Good and Bad People, that was an odd choice. Whereas Aunt Sally, who is clearly a Good Person who happens to be on the other side of a kerfuffle, was not engaged with - we only have Jo's reported word that she's dignified, good at community maintenance, etc. If Jo had engaged with them before Twoboy came along, or perhaps if Ellen had a friendship with one of the children of their mob... hmm.
I *did* like the final resolution of the plot with Granny and Sam and the white farmer who turned out to be a sekrit protector of sacred spaces. I especially liked that no one told Twoboy a thing about it. Ehehehe. You keep your land rights, Mr Twoboy, and the little old lady you've paid no attention to will be over here, ensuring the continuity of the sacred rites.
Witchery, Etc by Rel: this is a zine-format 28-page minicomic, also being published page by page as a webcoming here.
kayloulee sent it to me with a bundle of other swag from a con in Toronto. It's adorable! The webcomic is only 19 pages in, so if you like cute comics about witches who are neither good nor bad, and also about men with pumpkin heads, start following now!And I finished Karras' Unmarriages. The book has the same easy-to-read style as Sexualites in Medieval Europe (although it's pitched slightly higher), but lacks the really punchy critical insights of her article-length work. I loved the historiographical introduction (*that* was punchy), and found the book as a whole interesting, but it was very... descriptive. I think that's what it aimed to be. To describe a whole bunch of options that weren't marriage. I would set it as a textbook / required reading in a heartbeat, but was a bit disappointed in it as cutting-edge scholarship.
kayloulee should consider reading it, especially the chapter which is mostly reports from the Parisian church courts. Prime example of history as the craft of very slow gossip.What will you read next? Hopefully I will FINISH some stuff. Sunny Chernobyl needs to go. The chances of me ordering 900 million books on contemporary bisexuality are also quite high, constrained only by my finances (the interlibrary system here doesn't have a great selection of anglophone queer theory, I wonder why?).