What Are You Reading Weekend
Apr. 15th, 2018 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricBehold, an update
Currently Reading: Mrs Dalloway, for work; Empress Orchid, for funsies; Best Australian Poems 2016; Vilette; an Everyman 'Three Arthurian Romances' that I ordered a while ago for work and used to chase a single citation but an now reading for fun. Caradoc is a bit mad, folks.
Recently Finished: Many things, and I won't get the full list done here.
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety by Marjorie Garber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
That awkward position of 'this is very useful to me' and 'this is obviously dated' and 'this reads as trans-exclusionary in a weird way but it does literally predate the term transgender coming into scholarly use so uh. I am not equipped to judge'.
Blueberry Boys by Vanessa North
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hey look, a 'city careerist goes home to the country and falls in love' romance that doesn't end with complete career abandonment, and nor does it posit the country love interest's life as Perfect and Most Fulfilling! Neat.
My one qualm is with the religious subplot. Okay, Religious Dude and his church can deal with the gay thing in the end - good good. What wasn't raised as a question, leading me to wonder if the author had ever spent time in traditional Christian circles, was 'is it okay to date non-christians'. Like. That's a possible stance that was simply not considered. It should at least have come up early on in context of 'well okay if I did come out, my sexuality would be unwelcome in my church and my faith unwelcome among the queer community'. Because, for all the fact that the marriage lobby section of the lgbt/queer communities has paliptations for accepting pastors, all evidence of my friends suggests it is not actually easy to date as a queer religious person.
A Little Bush Maid by Mary Grant Bruce
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was my first re-read as an adult. I loved these books as a child, and reading them over again was indeed comfortingly familiar. On the other hand, I do wonder WHAT I found in Norah to attach to so strongly? I can't think of a female POV character LESS like me in all of children's lit.
Interesting: I found the source of my borderline phobic Thing about bushfires. Got to the 'yarn' about Norah having saved the sheep from a fire, and started sobbing, vastly disproportionate to my actual feelings about this scene as an adult. So. THAT explains a lot, from the summer I spent carrying floppy disks of my pre-teen writings with me every time I left home, to the days I've spent obsessively scrolling the ABC disaster live pages for stories of civilian firefighting endeavours.
Predictable: holy crumble, the racism. I mean. I knew it'd be there, I just... was expecting something more comparable to the levels in LM Montgomery, having apparently forgotten how Billy is characterised. The bit about 'black eighteen' desiring praise from 'white twelve' was particularly ugh.
Meanjin Summer 2017 by Jonathan Green
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This contained both some really fantastic stuff and some stuff that made me side-eye it very hard. Katharine Murphy's A Parliament Without Politicians? offered some ideas which my pragmatist sensibilities but are worth considering. Rebe Taylor's article on The Wedge Collection's indigenous artefacts is fascinating.
Susan Wyndham's The Last Literary Editor is definitely worth a read - it covers the decline of specialist literary review pages in australian newspapers. Rebecca Smith's In the Presence of Light is an essay on Melbourne's baltic pine floorboards, which is way more interesting than you'd expect.
Mark Pesce's piece on reality and facebook was hard-hitting, and yet, already out of date given 2018's developments.
I really recommend Mark E Dean's memoir piece on Walking to Guernika.
I do not recommend Lauren Rosenwarne's piece on media and reactions to feminism. Anyone who complains about being interrupted in their lecture-hall exposition on the Tyranny of Cock by students reminding her that some women have cocks /and can't link the fact of transmisogyny to the aforesaid phallocentric logic/ doesn't deserve to be complaining in major national outlets, geez.
View all my reviews
Up Next: The #theunreadshelfproject2018 challenge is to read your longest-standing TBR, which I think will be Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une Jeune Fille Rangée. I'm definitely not going to finish it this month, but worth starting. Maybe I can find an audiobook?
I also need to start the latest Meanjin - i have a digital subscription now, which means it isn't glaring at me from a shelf.
Music Notes: so how about that new Janelle Monae?
Toward the end of my thesis I slipped and fell down the Harry Styles hole: bought the full album, but like the Spotify exclusives better. ALSO bought an album by Little Big Town because I so much liked his cover of 'Girl Crush'.
ALSO: I saw Metallica live on Wednesday! It was AMAZING. I only lasted an hour into their set before ducking out to the back wall, but the visibility was pretty good from back there, and the sound. I've been listening to Metallica on computer speakers since 2005, and I know people say speaker quality makes a difference but I rarely notice (I got good USB speakers in Sydney mostly because k cared - I cognitively recognised the sound was fuller, having got them, but my computers since that one have had better sound cards anyway). But. Wow. Okay. Live made a HUGE difference to some of those tracks.
Currently Reading: Mrs Dalloway, for work; Empress Orchid, for funsies; Best Australian Poems 2016; Vilette; an Everyman 'Three Arthurian Romances' that I ordered a while ago for work and used to chase a single citation but an now reading for fun. Caradoc is a bit mad, folks.
Recently Finished: Many things, and I won't get the full list done here.
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety by Marjorie GarberMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
That awkward position of 'this is very useful to me' and 'this is obviously dated' and 'this reads as trans-exclusionary in a weird way but it does literally predate the term transgender coming into scholarly use so uh. I am not equipped to judge'.
Blueberry Boys by Vanessa NorthMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hey look, a 'city careerist goes home to the country and falls in love' romance that doesn't end with complete career abandonment, and nor does it posit the country love interest's life as Perfect and Most Fulfilling! Neat.
My one qualm is with the religious subplot. Okay, Religious Dude and his church can deal with the gay thing in the end - good good. What wasn't raised as a question, leading me to wonder if the author had ever spent time in traditional Christian circles, was 'is it okay to date non-christians'. Like. That's a possible stance that was simply not considered. It should at least have come up early on in context of 'well okay if I did come out, my sexuality would be unwelcome in my church and my faith unwelcome among the queer community'. Because, for all the fact that the marriage lobby section of the lgbt/queer communities has paliptations for accepting pastors, all evidence of my friends suggests it is not actually easy to date as a queer religious person.
A Little Bush Maid by Mary Grant BruceMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was my first re-read as an adult. I loved these books as a child, and reading them over again was indeed comfortingly familiar. On the other hand, I do wonder WHAT I found in Norah to attach to so strongly? I can't think of a female POV character LESS like me in all of children's lit.
Interesting: I found the source of my borderline phobic Thing about bushfires. Got to the 'yarn' about Norah having saved the sheep from a fire, and started sobbing, vastly disproportionate to my actual feelings about this scene as an adult. So. THAT explains a lot, from the summer I spent carrying floppy disks of my pre-teen writings with me every time I left home, to the days I've spent obsessively scrolling the ABC disaster live pages for stories of civilian firefighting endeavours.
Predictable: holy crumble, the racism. I mean. I knew it'd be there, I just... was expecting something more comparable to the levels in LM Montgomery, having apparently forgotten how Billy is characterised. The bit about 'black eighteen' desiring praise from 'white twelve' was particularly ugh.
Meanjin Summer 2017 by Jonathan GreenMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This contained both some really fantastic stuff and some stuff that made me side-eye it very hard. Katharine Murphy's A Parliament Without Politicians? offered some ideas which my pragmatist sensibilities but are worth considering. Rebe Taylor's article on The Wedge Collection's indigenous artefacts is fascinating.
Susan Wyndham's The Last Literary Editor is definitely worth a read - it covers the decline of specialist literary review pages in australian newspapers. Rebecca Smith's In the Presence of Light is an essay on Melbourne's baltic pine floorboards, which is way more interesting than you'd expect.
Mark Pesce's piece on reality and facebook was hard-hitting, and yet, already out of date given 2018's developments.
I really recommend Mark E Dean's memoir piece on Walking to Guernika.
I do not recommend Lauren Rosenwarne's piece on media and reactions to feminism. Anyone who complains about being interrupted in their lecture-hall exposition on the Tyranny of Cock by students reminding her that some women have cocks /and can't link the fact of transmisogyny to the aforesaid phallocentric logic/ doesn't deserve to be complaining in major national outlets, geez.
View all my reviews
Up Next: The #theunreadshelfproject2018 challenge is to read your longest-standing TBR, which I think will be Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs d'une Jeune Fille Rangée. I'm definitely not going to finish it this month, but worth starting. Maybe I can find an audiobook?
I also need to start the latest Meanjin - i have a digital subscription now, which means it isn't glaring at me from a shelf.
Music Notes: so how about that new Janelle Monae?
Toward the end of my thesis I slipped and fell down the Harry Styles hole: bought the full album, but like the Spotify exclusives better. ALSO bought an album by Little Big Town because I so much liked his cover of 'Girl Crush'.
ALSO: I saw Metallica live on Wednesday! It was AMAZING. I only lasted an hour into their set before ducking out to the back wall, but the visibility was pretty good from back there, and the sound. I've been listening to Metallica on computer speakers since 2005, and I know people say speaker quality makes a difference but I rarely notice (I got good USB speakers in Sydney mostly because k cared - I cognitively recognised the sound was fuller, having got them, but my computers since that one have had better sound cards anyway). But. Wow. Okay. Live made a HUGE difference to some of those tracks.