What Are You Reading (Not On A) Wednesday
Jul. 20th, 2019 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricCurrently Reading:
Fiction: Convenience Store Woman, still. It's reached the Embarrassing Stage.
Non-Fiction: Kipnis' Against Love, which is... a bit shallow and a lot limited. Germano's From PhD To Book.
Lit Mag: I started The Lifted Brow 41, and then... devoured the Autumn Meanjin instead.
Other: none
Recently Finished:
Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. This punched me in SO MANY feels. It is in a great part the chronicle of the rift that opens up when someone leaves a working class background to pursue non-vocational education - albeit a very specific and exaggerated version, as Westover came from a millenialist, anti-education family who did not even send their children to primary school.
More than that, though, what resonated for me was Westover's specific account of *history study as the saving of her*, and her passion for history as a product both of what her upbringing had denied her *and* what it had given her (the description of her poring over 19th c mormon tracts as similar to the skills she'd use later, as a historian, faced with abstruse texts, was particularly great). Confronted with the realisation that the narrative of the past she'd received from her father was wrong, she became interested not just in filling fact gaps, but in historiography.
While my upbringing was nowhere near comparable to Westover's, that's... definitely how I ended up (almost against my will) in gender studies and queer theory. I didn't need to know 'gay people existed in the past', i needed to know 'how we think about sexuality, and even whether we divide people up according to 'orientation' has varied wildly and widely over time, here, let's look at how'. Westover doesn't talk about that much, but the mechanisms are similar.
Kris Ripper, the entire Queers of La Vista series: previous reviews stand. Good binge-read, would binge-read again.
Pratchett and Gaiman, Good Omens: well, I had to downgrade my star rating for the constant low-grade casual racism. No individual case is *super* egregious, but it's like they couldn't resist the opportunity every so often. Of Its Time and all that, but ugh. This is one aspect in which the show is Much Better. Sadly, the show is not Much Better at 'women with character'. In fact it's so much worse. Book version Anathema/Newt works, because the narrative voice sits with Anathema and is clear about the 'well it's disappointing but we might as well, not got long to live' situation. The show? Look, Gaiman writes great Aziraphale/Crowley chemistry, but he never... mastered writing women. Pratchett didn't really do romance arcs, or Longing, or any of that, but he DID master women. Pity Gaiman couldn't learn it from him.
Meanjin Summer 2018 by Jonathan Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was not a great edition. I enjoyed many of the essays: Yen Rong Wong's the very model of a model ethnic minority, Melissa Lukashenko's Writing as a Sovereign Act; Alexis Wright's The Power and Purpose of Literature; Tim Robertson's Cow's for Peace, Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian's The last days in Manus prison. The rest of the edition was not particularly remarkable.
I also finished the autumn Meanjin, which I'll review next week.
Up Next: I'm just working on reading down my stack before I leave. Kipnis, then I guess a book on Arthurian romance.
Music notes: went through a bit of a Nick Cave episode this week.
Then I moved on to Leonard Cohen, specifically the Live in Dublin recording of First We Take Manhattan. It's sinister and... an Experience.
I hadn't heard the original album version by Jennifer Warnes, though, and it's pretty great too:
An article I read this week described Leonard Cohen's work as existing on a spectrum between horniness and apocalypse. I can think of a handful of other male artists who definitely do the same (Nick Cave and Hozier both spring to mind) but I'm having trouble thinking of women. Halsey, possibly. Anais Mitchell. Janelle Monae is a few squares sideways, over in the horniness-dystopia-rebellion spectrum.
Fiction: Convenience Store Woman, still. It's reached the Embarrassing Stage.
Non-Fiction: Kipnis' Against Love, which is... a bit shallow and a lot limited. Germano's From PhD To Book.
Lit Mag: I started The Lifted Brow 41, and then... devoured the Autumn Meanjin instead.
Other: none
Recently Finished:
Educated by Tara WestoverMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow. This punched me in SO MANY feels. It is in a great part the chronicle of the rift that opens up when someone leaves a working class background to pursue non-vocational education - albeit a very specific and exaggerated version, as Westover came from a millenialist, anti-education family who did not even send their children to primary school.
More than that, though, what resonated for me was Westover's specific account of *history study as the saving of her*, and her passion for history as a product both of what her upbringing had denied her *and* what it had given her (the description of her poring over 19th c mormon tracts as similar to the skills she'd use later, as a historian, faced with abstruse texts, was particularly great). Confronted with the realisation that the narrative of the past she'd received from her father was wrong, she became interested not just in filling fact gaps, but in historiography.
While my upbringing was nowhere near comparable to Westover's, that's... definitely how I ended up (almost against my will) in gender studies and queer theory. I didn't need to know 'gay people existed in the past', i needed to know 'how we think about sexuality, and even whether we divide people up according to 'orientation' has varied wildly and widely over time, here, let's look at how'. Westover doesn't talk about that much, but the mechanisms are similar.
Meanjin Summer 2018 by Jonathan GreenMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This was not a great edition. I enjoyed many of the essays: Yen Rong Wong's the very model of a model ethnic minority, Melissa Lukashenko's Writing as a Sovereign Act; Alexis Wright's The Power and Purpose of Literature; Tim Robertson's Cow's for Peace, Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian's The last days in Manus prison. The rest of the edition was not particularly remarkable.
I also finished the autumn Meanjin, which I'll review next week.
Up Next: I'm just working on reading down my stack before I leave. Kipnis, then I guess a book on Arthurian romance.
Music notes: went through a bit of a Nick Cave episode this week.
Then I moved on to Leonard Cohen, specifically the Live in Dublin recording of First We Take Manhattan. It's sinister and... an Experience.
I hadn't heard the original album version by Jennifer Warnes, though, and it's pretty great too:
An article I read this week described Leonard Cohen's work as existing on a spectrum between horniness and apocalypse. I can think of a handful of other male artists who definitely do the same (Nick Cave and Hozier both spring to mind) but I'm having trouble thinking of women. Halsey, possibly. Anais Mitchell. Janelle Monae is a few squares sideways, over in the horniness-dystopia-rebellion spectrum.
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Date: 2019-07-20 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-23 03:29 am (UTC)