![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
What Are You Reading Weekend
Mar. 11th, 2018 12:54 pmIt's been a while - about a month - but my reading pace has slowed abruptly with the PhD deadline looming.
Currently Reading: Meanjin 76.4. I MIGHT finish it before 77.1 comes out but I doubt it. Also Best Australian Poems 2016, and technically Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests, although that's just waiting around for me to skim a few more bits of it. Oh and I started an m/m romance called 'Caught', and I'm not sure if I'll be able to withstand the second-hand embarrasment factor long enough to continue.
Recently DNF'd: The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, for glaring white people cluelessness. There's 'everything's racist if you look at it right' and then there's 'story about americans 'helping' in Afghanistan, written by a white woman who went on a humanitarian mission and stayed to teach afghani women to be beauticians'. If I read further I'd have to put my Critical Analysis hat on, and I have too many other things to read to bother with that right now.
Recently Finished:
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a really interesting, engaging read. I found the account of the hurricane particularly fascinating - I'd never really thought about hurricane preparedness before the car became widespread. (Bushfire, yes: plenty of my childhood australian reading dealt with bushfires as a plot point).
The one thing that bothered me - and I say it bothered me, not that it is Bad and Wrong - was the was this book took domestic violence in its stride as an inevitable part of heterosexual relationships. It was uncomfortable component of leisure reading, but historically very interesting - I don't have much of a sense of american black women's literature but even just juxtaposing against toni morrison, there's an interesting difference there.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first time I've re-read Little Women / Good Wives since... at least five years ago, maybe a decade. And. Huh. The biggest and sharpest difference is now I have an exact mental picture of Vevey and the boat proposal scene! I remain caught between actually, honest-to-god, LIKING Professor Bhaer and his relationship with Jo and intense resentment of the compulsory heteronormative conclusion. Only now I have read /Portrait of a Lady/ too, and my conclusion is I want to jiggle with timelines so that Jo can run off with Isabelle Archer or possibly Isabelle's friend Henrietta. That'd be nice.
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary Elwes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a really FUN read! I learned many amusing things. It is, however, quite obviously not all directly written by Elwes, and I'm sad at how small the billing his co-writer/ghostwriter gets is. Joe Layden obviously collected all the interviews with the rest of the cast and arranged them to complement the narrative, which was a HUGE part of the reading experience. I'm also fairly sure I could identify sections where the seams between Elwes' memoir-recount and Layden adding in information and plot summary and the like were obvious - and I assume there were more that I couldn't see.
Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by J. Jack Halberstam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was... interesting, especially Halberstam's reading of the 2016 Boys Don't Cry controversy. However, it didn't tell me much I didn't already know, and it... hmm. Halberstam openly owns the trans-masc bias of the book, and justifies it on the grounds of most trans theory being by trans women, but... I'm not sure that's the best choice for what this book proclaims itself to be. This book is not the Little Book of Transmasculininty, according to its cover, and yet at times it seems to be trying to do that AND be a generalist trans work.
I also find it interesting, from the outside, how you find trans women thinkers noting that trans men dominate the conversation, and then trans men saying the same of trans women (and then enbies saying the same of both, and around we go). Some of this has got to be cyclic - if public and scholarly attention goes in cycles, trying to correct imbalance, you'd get a cycle of 'there's not enough attention to X' / 'there's SO much attention to X and not enough to Y!'
Get a Grip by L.A. Witt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I finally managed to read a pulp romance book without freaking out! For most of february I couldn't read new-to-me genre lit, and this was the litmus test. I started this one multiple times and kept banging out because I could see that the plot required MISUNDERSTANDINGS and FEELINGS and I couldn't deal.
I liked this. I was a little too... the ending seemed to jump too fast from 'okay let's be not-casual' to 'IN FACT LET US BE FAMILY'. There's an option of 'single parent has boyfriend who knows his family but might not necessarily be stepfather material', especially as the kids get older! That's a thing that people do! Parent's new partner as a sort of benevolent extended relative is an option not considered here.
On the bright side, ongoing threesomes WERE considered as part of the partnership model, so that made me a bit less cynical.
View all my reviews
Up next: I have a couple of other queer romances from riptide, and I bought some het ones via kobo recently. Those, possibly, because most of my hard-copy TBR is dense literature and non-fiction, and I don't really have the werewithal right now.
Music notes: Still enjoying Gary Moore. I bought a best of Nick Cave album, also good. The new Janelle Monae singles are, as the internet promised, great; and I bought a greatest hits of blink 182, because... Reasons.
Currently Reading: Meanjin 76.4. I MIGHT finish it before 77.1 comes out but I doubt it. Also Best Australian Poems 2016, and technically Marjorie Garber's Vested Interests, although that's just waiting around for me to skim a few more bits of it. Oh and I started an m/m romance called 'Caught', and I'm not sure if I'll be able to withstand the second-hand embarrasment factor long enough to continue.
Recently DNF'd: The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul, for glaring white people cluelessness. There's 'everything's racist if you look at it right' and then there's 'story about americans 'helping' in Afghanistan, written by a white woman who went on a humanitarian mission and stayed to teach afghani women to be beauticians'. If I read further I'd have to put my Critical Analysis hat on, and I have too many other things to read to bother with that right now.
Recently Finished:
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale HurstonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a really interesting, engaging read. I found the account of the hurricane particularly fascinating - I'd never really thought about hurricane preparedness before the car became widespread. (Bushfire, yes: plenty of my childhood australian reading dealt with bushfires as a plot point).
The one thing that bothered me - and I say it bothered me, not that it is Bad and Wrong - was the was this book took domestic violence in its stride as an inevitable part of heterosexual relationships. It was uncomfortable component of leisure reading, but historically very interesting - I don't have much of a sense of american black women's literature but even just juxtaposing against toni morrison, there's an interesting difference there.
Little Women by Louisa May AlcottMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the first time I've re-read Little Women / Good Wives since... at least five years ago, maybe a decade. And. Huh. The biggest and sharpest difference is now I have an exact mental picture of Vevey and the boat proposal scene! I remain caught between actually, honest-to-god, LIKING Professor Bhaer and his relationship with Jo and intense resentment of the compulsory heteronormative conclusion. Only now I have read /Portrait of a Lady/ too, and my conclusion is I want to jiggle with timelines so that Jo can run off with Isabelle Archer or possibly Isabelle's friend Henrietta. That'd be nice.
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride by Cary ElwesMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was a really FUN read! I learned many amusing things. It is, however, quite obviously not all directly written by Elwes, and I'm sad at how small the billing his co-writer/ghostwriter gets is. Joe Layden obviously collected all the interviews with the rest of the cast and arranged them to complement the narrative, which was a HUGE part of the reading experience. I'm also fairly sure I could identify sections where the seams between Elwes' memoir-recount and Layden adding in information and plot summary and the like were obvious - and I assume there were more that I couldn't see.
Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability by J. Jack HalberstamMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was... interesting, especially Halberstam's reading of the 2016 Boys Don't Cry controversy. However, it didn't tell me much I didn't already know, and it... hmm. Halberstam openly owns the trans-masc bias of the book, and justifies it on the grounds of most trans theory being by trans women, but... I'm not sure that's the best choice for what this book proclaims itself to be. This book is not the Little Book of Transmasculininty, according to its cover, and yet at times it seems to be trying to do that AND be a generalist trans work.
I also find it interesting, from the outside, how you find trans women thinkers noting that trans men dominate the conversation, and then trans men saying the same of trans women (and then enbies saying the same of both, and around we go). Some of this has got to be cyclic - if public and scholarly attention goes in cycles, trying to correct imbalance, you'd get a cycle of 'there's not enough attention to X' / 'there's SO much attention to X and not enough to Y!'
Get a Grip by L.A. WittMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I finally managed to read a pulp romance book without freaking out! For most of february I couldn't read new-to-me genre lit, and this was the litmus test. I started this one multiple times and kept banging out because I could see that the plot required MISUNDERSTANDINGS and FEELINGS and I couldn't deal.
I liked this. I was a little too... the ending seemed to jump too fast from 'okay let's be not-casual' to 'IN FACT LET US BE FAMILY'. There's an option of 'single parent has boyfriend who knows his family but might not necessarily be stepfather material', especially as the kids get older! That's a thing that people do! Parent's new partner as a sort of benevolent extended relative is an option not considered here.
On the bright side, ongoing threesomes WERE considered as part of the partnership model, so that made me a bit less cynical.
View all my reviews
Up next: I have a couple of other queer romances from riptide, and I bought some het ones via kobo recently. Those, possibly, because most of my hard-copy TBR is dense literature and non-fiction, and I don't really have the werewithal right now.
Music notes: Still enjoying Gary Moore. I bought a best of Nick Cave album, also good. The new Janelle Monae singles are, as the internet promised, great; and I bought a greatest hits of blink 182, because... Reasons.