Books, I have read some lately
Dec. 21st, 2012 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
highlyeccentricQuite a few, really. I've been frantically consuming words to fill the gaps in my schedule and the depression-void. It's not really working, but hey, interesting books!
Julia Jarman, The Time-Travelling Cat and the Viking Terror
This was quite adorable! The basic premise is that Topher, an English schoolboy in the early 21st century, possesses a cat who travels through time. At a catalyst moment, Topher may find himself travelling with her, and waking up (basic personality intact, but with no memories of his modern past) inserted into a historical setting. In this case, during a failed terrorist attack on a London bus, he finds himself as a part-Danish youth in an Anglo-Saxon village which, we know from the set-up, is soon to be destroyed by the Viking Ingwar the Boneless.
Things I found interesting about this book:
- it makes an equation between Viking predations and terrorism. I'm not quite sure how *well* this works, but I think Julia Jarman is making a laudable effort to present both forms of violence in a way which allow children to process them better in relation to one another.
- dependant on those two points, it's also making an interesting point about prejudice and fear - Topher's friend Sanjit is, in terrorist-averse London, a target of undue suspicion, and he and Sanjit are both suspicious of others in turn. This might've gone by the wayside if Jarman hadn't followed it up by establishing Saxon-past Topher as a half-Danish kid, and his father as a Danish trader who'd married a Saxon woman. The point seems to be that prejudice is damaging but legitimate precaution (anticipating Viking invasion, closing the Tube, etc) is reasonable. Feeds back to the point about helping children process, I think.
- it's pretty scary! I think it's for 9-12 year old kids, but I would not have been happy reading it at that age. Don't give it to children who have trouble processing violence, are afraid of terrorists, or have issues with bereavement at the time.
- the hilariously inaccurately badass spear-wielding nuns of Ely! They crack me up. Totally inaccurate! Inexplicably living in the modern cathedral, specifically referred to as the Ship of the Fens! Shaving their heads and posing as Celtic mercenaries! Generally being badass!
I will excuse that inaccuracy on grounds of badassery. I'm less impressed with the *runic literacy* of both Topher's granny and the Abbess, and holy balls is it obvious that Julia Jarman never actually looked up the *meanings* of Anglo-Saxon names she pulled from royal lists somewhere. A carl's son in the cornfield is not going to be called Aethelstan, sorry!
The presentation of religion in this was interesting too. Topher consistently prays to 'The God of the Cross' or sometimes the Cross God, which I think was a good choice to 1. sufficiently drive home that medieval Christianity is not your neighbourhood Sunday School and 2. avoid accidentally writing a Christian children's book. Having said that, she's not handling the mingling of Christian and pagan ideals well - Topher keeps thinking 'we're all Christians now!' despite the fact that he himself has always been one (his father is a convert - in fact Topher's religious outlook felt like he should've been a convert too, maybe having come with his father as a child, but the origin story says that the villagers found his father injured and alone by the riverside, having been abandoned by his trading fellows). It's a good try, but it could've been done better while still preserving the same sense of alien-christianity and nearness of paganism.
Jeff Sparrow, Money Shot: A Journey Into Porn and Censorship
Thanks to this book I now know rather more about many things which I didn't know much about before. These things include (in roughly sequential order): the inner workings of the Australian Classification and Media Authority; the retail and distribution of offline adult material in Australia; the vast assortment of people from both ends of the political spectrum and everywhere in between who advocate higher or stricter or better enforced censorship in Australia; Sexpo; the Eros Association; assorted activist individuals and movements of the 60s/70s sexual and social liberation in Australia; gonzo porn; the Northern Territory Intervention; neo-liberal social economics. Other topics covered, upon which I was pretty well informed to begin with and haven't gone away vastly more so (but you might!) include: sex-positive feminism, history and development of; arguments in favour of porn in general and non-censorship in particular; the Australian Sex Party; chastity advocates and evangelical Christians; why internet filtering cannae work; and the difference between actual child abuse (mostly in-family) and Fear of Predators on the Internet.
So, I learned a lot of interesting stuff! I was also impressed with the way Sparrow put this together.
- Narrative style: it's what is apparently called 'narrative non-fiction'. One presumes Sparrow bumbled around the country for some years, researching everything he could about porn and censorship, and then grinding out his findings in a book. It *reads*, however, not as an essay or a series of arguments, but as a sort of travelogue. Each chapter has a coherent theme, and there's a clear progression of information and critique through the book (for instance, he'll refer to interviews which 'happened' in the previous chapter, and introduce new arguments/evidence which relate to the current chapter). What they don't have is a thesis-first approach, a 'here's what I'm going to say and here's me saying it' structure. Instead, Sparrow has spent a lot of time carefully crafting this story so it *feels* like a steadily-evolving train of thought.
- Treatment of different perspectives: Sparrow makes no bones about his own political, liberal background, or the fact that he's interviewing, say, Fiona Patten from a position of far greater common ground than he has with Melinda Tankard-Riest. But he says he took care to represent the arguments of all parties fairly and concisely: I think he did more. I think he drew out what was good and laudable out of each interviewee's perspective, and consistently critiqued all 'sides' of the debate. He's certainly not more critical of liberal-to-libertarian perspectives than he is of the conservatives - in fact, I think he's more so, obviously irritated by the failure of most pro-porn activists to offer actual solutions to the sexism and racism of the industry.
- Social conscious and clarity of thought: Sparrow's interests or investments, the common themes which come up in every chapter and in many interviews, are consistent and laudable. He's concerned about individual liberties; about the fact that minorities so often bear the brunt of censorship; about sexism and racism as social ills; about the physical and mental well-being of the young. He shows great sympathy, for instance, for the picture of traumatised/struggling adolescents growing up with raunch culture, as outlined by Tankard-Reist - at the same time as he questions the anecdotal nature of her information. He makes consistent distinctions between individual liberties and systemic prejudice, between an individual's right to film or watch violent pornography and the fact that this pans out as a consistent pattern of male dominance and female submission in the vast majority of porn.
- Perception. Sparrow just struck me as very perceptive. He made links you don't often see made - for instance, he cottoned on to the fact that chastity movements are very much a product of contemporary culture, and that their appeal lies in offering a straightforward answer to the conflicting and often scary demands placed on young people by a hypersexualised culture. I also found his commentary on views of pornography in remote indigenous communities (where X-rated material was generally unavailable even BEFORE the Intervention) to be insightful, but I didn't have a solid grounding before reading this, so perhaps it isn't. And the big structural link which underpins the whole book - that the union anti-pornography activists from the left and right is facilitated because both, in this current environment, accept basic market economics and the authority of the state. On the other 'side', he critiques the difference between modern sex-positive stances (if it's fun, do it!) and the anti-capitalist liberal movements of the 70s. I think he missed something here: there are, after all, plenty of clusters of anti-capitalist sex-positive people out there. But I think he's right insofar as the anti-capitalist part of sexual liberation never became mainstream, and what you end up with is, well, Sexpo.
- Conclusion: I'm just thoroughly impressed with Sparrow, who's obviously a child of the 70s, and politically aligned with the sexual and social liberation politics of that period, for managing to end on a happy note. He talks about the downfall of a movement he was party to, but he ends on an open-ended desire to see what we might make of sex, sexuality and freedom of the press beyond market economics. Take ten points, Mr Sparrow, you're well ahead of most adults of your generation whom I know.
Jean Webster, Daddy Long-Legs (a re-read of which I barely remembered the childhood reading) Adorable book has unexpectedly creepy ending! When I read this as a kid I must've -expected- so hard that she would turn out to be Uncle Jervis' illegitimate daughter or something that that's how I remembered it. It would be a dick move to send your illegitimate child to an orphan asylum and then anonymously and capriciously take up the role of guardian and send them to college - but the actual turn of events is NOTABLY CREEPIER.
It is also such a middle-class fantasy. Somewhere there is an alternate story in which Jerusha Abbot became a bookkeeper, never went to college, but earned her own wages and discovered books and writing in her spare time. That book would not have sold nearly as many copies, I'm sure.
Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth Oh my, this was *adorable*, and completely full of puns. I love me some puns! I'm not sure how it is that I never read this as a child, and I'm seriously considering taking it to my parents' place at Christmas and demanding that Dad read me a story.
I'd say this ought to have been a part of my childhood - and perhaps it ought - but it is also perfectly suited to me right now. Although I don't share Milo's disinterest in learning for learning's sake, I am at times too much like him in that "when he was going he thought about coming back and when he was coming he thought about going out". Ahaha, oh, dear. The fundamental principle of this story is attentiveness, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it - being present enough to learn from everything, and to notice the absurd when it's right in front of you.
and finally,
Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken Oh my, screwed-up nonconsensual telepathy, and self-aware characters and narrator, oh my! *dies a thousand deaths of delight*
Ahem. I mean, this is a lovely book! A bit... um, bloodthirsty, for for what's packaged as a low-to-middle teens book. And heavy going in places with family abuse issues. But all very well handled, IMHO.
I just fucking -love- the telepathic not-romance plot. BESTEST. BESTEST. I know SRB did something similar with Mae/Nick, but Mae rubs me the wrong way in ways Kami does not. Also featured are SRB's trademark interests in family dynamics and endless puns. And her disinclination to pick the obvious and most popular kinds of supernatural creatures as centrepieces of her YA supernatural-urban-fantasy thingy.
It didn't make me cry or break my heart - indeed, my heart sang at the supposedly heartbreaking cliffhanger, because I'm cruel and mean and psychologically sound. But it *did* absorb me so much that I got on a train which was going west and didn't notice it had been diverted until I was halfway across town in a northerly direction.
Julia Jarman, The Time-Travelling Cat and the Viking Terror
This was quite adorable! The basic premise is that Topher, an English schoolboy in the early 21st century, possesses a cat who travels through time. At a catalyst moment, Topher may find himself travelling with her, and waking up (basic personality intact, but with no memories of his modern past) inserted into a historical setting. In this case, during a failed terrorist attack on a London bus, he finds himself as a part-Danish youth in an Anglo-Saxon village which, we know from the set-up, is soon to be destroyed by the Viking Ingwar the Boneless.
Things I found interesting about this book:
- it makes an equation between Viking predations and terrorism. I'm not quite sure how *well* this works, but I think Julia Jarman is making a laudable effort to present both forms of violence in a way which allow children to process them better in relation to one another.
- dependant on those two points, it's also making an interesting point about prejudice and fear - Topher's friend Sanjit is, in terrorist-averse London, a target of undue suspicion, and he and Sanjit are both suspicious of others in turn. This might've gone by the wayside if Jarman hadn't followed it up by establishing Saxon-past Topher as a half-Danish kid, and his father as a Danish trader who'd married a Saxon woman. The point seems to be that prejudice is damaging but legitimate precaution (anticipating Viking invasion, closing the Tube, etc) is reasonable. Feeds back to the point about helping children process, I think.
- it's pretty scary! I think it's for 9-12 year old kids, but I would not have been happy reading it at that age. Don't give it to children who have trouble processing violence, are afraid of terrorists, or have issues with bereavement at the time.
- the hilariously inaccurately badass spear-wielding nuns of Ely! They crack me up. Totally inaccurate! Inexplicably living in the modern cathedral, specifically referred to as the Ship of the Fens! Shaving their heads and posing as Celtic mercenaries! Generally being badass!
I will excuse that inaccuracy on grounds of badassery. I'm less impressed with the *runic literacy* of both Topher's granny and the Abbess, and holy balls is it obvious that Julia Jarman never actually looked up the *meanings* of Anglo-Saxon names she pulled from royal lists somewhere. A carl's son in the cornfield is not going to be called Aethelstan, sorry!
The presentation of religion in this was interesting too. Topher consistently prays to 'The God of the Cross' or sometimes the Cross God, which I think was a good choice to 1. sufficiently drive home that medieval Christianity is not your neighbourhood Sunday School and 2. avoid accidentally writing a Christian children's book. Having said that, she's not handling the mingling of Christian and pagan ideals well - Topher keeps thinking 'we're all Christians now!' despite the fact that he himself has always been one (his father is a convert - in fact Topher's religious outlook felt like he should've been a convert too, maybe having come with his father as a child, but the origin story says that the villagers found his father injured and alone by the riverside, having been abandoned by his trading fellows). It's a good try, but it could've been done better while still preserving the same sense of alien-christianity and nearness of paganism.
Jeff Sparrow, Money Shot: A Journey Into Porn and Censorship
Thanks to this book I now know rather more about many things which I didn't know much about before. These things include (in roughly sequential order): the inner workings of the Australian Classification and Media Authority; the retail and distribution of offline adult material in Australia; the vast assortment of people from both ends of the political spectrum and everywhere in between who advocate higher or stricter or better enforced censorship in Australia; Sexpo; the Eros Association; assorted activist individuals and movements of the 60s/70s sexual and social liberation in Australia; gonzo porn; the Northern Territory Intervention; neo-liberal social economics. Other topics covered, upon which I was pretty well informed to begin with and haven't gone away vastly more so (but you might!) include: sex-positive feminism, history and development of; arguments in favour of porn in general and non-censorship in particular; the Australian Sex Party; chastity advocates and evangelical Christians; why internet filtering cannae work; and the difference between actual child abuse (mostly in-family) and Fear of Predators on the Internet.
So, I learned a lot of interesting stuff! I was also impressed with the way Sparrow put this together.
- Narrative style: it's what is apparently called 'narrative non-fiction'. One presumes Sparrow bumbled around the country for some years, researching everything he could about porn and censorship, and then grinding out his findings in a book. It *reads*, however, not as an essay or a series of arguments, but as a sort of travelogue. Each chapter has a coherent theme, and there's a clear progression of information and critique through the book (for instance, he'll refer to interviews which 'happened' in the previous chapter, and introduce new arguments/evidence which relate to the current chapter). What they don't have is a thesis-first approach, a 'here's what I'm going to say and here's me saying it' structure. Instead, Sparrow has spent a lot of time carefully crafting this story so it *feels* like a steadily-evolving train of thought.
- Treatment of different perspectives: Sparrow makes no bones about his own political, liberal background, or the fact that he's interviewing, say, Fiona Patten from a position of far greater common ground than he has with Melinda Tankard-Riest. But he says he took care to represent the arguments of all parties fairly and concisely: I think he did more. I think he drew out what was good and laudable out of each interviewee's perspective, and consistently critiqued all 'sides' of the debate. He's certainly not more critical of liberal-to-libertarian perspectives than he is of the conservatives - in fact, I think he's more so, obviously irritated by the failure of most pro-porn activists to offer actual solutions to the sexism and racism of the industry.
- Social conscious and clarity of thought: Sparrow's interests or investments, the common themes which come up in every chapter and in many interviews, are consistent and laudable. He's concerned about individual liberties; about the fact that minorities so often bear the brunt of censorship; about sexism and racism as social ills; about the physical and mental well-being of the young. He shows great sympathy, for instance, for the picture of traumatised/struggling adolescents growing up with raunch culture, as outlined by Tankard-Reist - at the same time as he questions the anecdotal nature of her information. He makes consistent distinctions between individual liberties and systemic prejudice, between an individual's right to film or watch violent pornography and the fact that this pans out as a consistent pattern of male dominance and female submission in the vast majority of porn.
- Perception. Sparrow just struck me as very perceptive. He made links you don't often see made - for instance, he cottoned on to the fact that chastity movements are very much a product of contemporary culture, and that their appeal lies in offering a straightforward answer to the conflicting and often scary demands placed on young people by a hypersexualised culture. I also found his commentary on views of pornography in remote indigenous communities (where X-rated material was generally unavailable even BEFORE the Intervention) to be insightful, but I didn't have a solid grounding before reading this, so perhaps it isn't. And the big structural link which underpins the whole book - that the union anti-pornography activists from the left and right is facilitated because both, in this current environment, accept basic market economics and the authority of the state. On the other 'side', he critiques the difference between modern sex-positive stances (if it's fun, do it!) and the anti-capitalist liberal movements of the 70s. I think he missed something here: there are, after all, plenty of clusters of anti-capitalist sex-positive people out there. But I think he's right insofar as the anti-capitalist part of sexual liberation never became mainstream, and what you end up with is, well, Sexpo.
- Conclusion: I'm just thoroughly impressed with Sparrow, who's obviously a child of the 70s, and politically aligned with the sexual and social liberation politics of that period, for managing to end on a happy note. He talks about the downfall of a movement he was party to, but he ends on an open-ended desire to see what we might make of sex, sexuality and freedom of the press beyond market economics. Take ten points, Mr Sparrow, you're well ahead of most adults of your generation whom I know.
Jean Webster, Daddy Long-Legs (a re-read of which I barely remembered the childhood reading) Adorable book has unexpectedly creepy ending! When I read this as a kid I must've -expected- so hard that she would turn out to be Uncle Jervis' illegitimate daughter or something that that's how I remembered it. It would be a dick move to send your illegitimate child to an orphan asylum and then anonymously and capriciously take up the role of guardian and send them to college - but the actual turn of events is NOTABLY CREEPIER.
It is also such a middle-class fantasy. Somewhere there is an alternate story in which Jerusha Abbot became a bookkeeper, never went to college, but earned her own wages and discovered books and writing in her spare time. That book would not have sold nearly as many copies, I'm sure.
Norman Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth Oh my, this was *adorable*, and completely full of puns. I love me some puns! I'm not sure how it is that I never read this as a child, and I'm seriously considering taking it to my parents' place at Christmas and demanding that Dad read me a story.
I'd say this ought to have been a part of my childhood - and perhaps it ought - but it is also perfectly suited to me right now. Although I don't share Milo's disinterest in learning for learning's sake, I am at times too much like him in that "when he was going he thought about coming back and when he was coming he thought about going out". Ahaha, oh, dear. The fundamental principle of this story is attentiveness, mindfulness, whatever you want to call it - being present enough to learn from everything, and to notice the absurd when it's right in front of you.
and finally,
Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken Oh my, screwed-up nonconsensual telepathy, and self-aware characters and narrator, oh my! *dies a thousand deaths of delight*
Ahem. I mean, this is a lovely book! A bit... um, bloodthirsty, for for what's packaged as a low-to-middle teens book. And heavy going in places with family abuse issues. But all very well handled, IMHO.
I just fucking -love- the telepathic not-romance plot. BESTEST. BESTEST. I know SRB did something similar with Mae/Nick, but Mae rubs me the wrong way in ways Kami does not. Also featured are SRB's trademark interests in family dynamics and endless puns. And her disinclination to pick the obvious and most popular kinds of supernatural creatures as centrepieces of her YA supernatural-urban-fantasy thingy.
It didn't make me cry or break my heart - indeed, my heart sang at the supposedly heartbreaking cliffhanger, because I'm cruel and mean and psychologically sound. But it *did* absorb me so much that I got on a train which was going west and didn't notice it had been diverted until I was halfway across town in a northerly direction.