What Are We Reading, Page 11

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What Are We Reading, Page 11

1vwinsloe
Dic 16, 2020, 9:56 am

I have a post up on the BRR page (Book Recommendations Requests) to try to find books that my elderly mother will enjoy. I'd appreciate it if you would make some recommendations if you can think of any. I'm making a list that she can give to the library. Thanks in advance!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/327261#unread

2overlycriticalelisa
Dic 16, 2020, 1:42 pm

just finished normal people by sally rooney and i really liked it. i think it probably reads as pretentious, but i find i often like that, and this seemed really insightful. i thought it was great. i haven't read her earlier book, which i understand is similar, and i might not have liked it as well had this not been my first of hers.

i am listening to the end of everything by katie mack which is super interesting.

and i'm just starting a reread of the haunting of hill house because i couldn't resist it. it's one of my favorite books of all time and has my favorite passage in all of literature. i had to read it again.

3Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Dic 16, 2020, 3:21 pm

I read Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi and was quite disappointed. Ugh, all the talk about religion, but last night I was thinking about it and wondered if it was far more insightful than I had realized. I'm many years away from college literature classes and in-depth analysis of symbology. Pretty much now when I read I just pick up what's on the surface. The main character was raised Alabama evangelical (white Alabama evangelical even though she's from Ghana) with all the attendant speaking in tongues and fire and brimstone. I'm kind of surprised I finished the book because I hate that kind of nonsense. Somehow the girl grows up to be a scientist, the jump between the two is not well explained except that her mother who is completely enthralled with her church is so depressed and self-absorbed that when she says she wants to be a scientist Mom just says ok. This neuroscientist goes through her day treating her mother's depression with religious talks with her pastor as the mother wants. She's obsessed with the idea of whether or not there is a soul or is the brain the center of humanity. As I have no interest in religion, I also have little interest in philosophy. What difference does it make if it's soul or brain, just get on with your life. This scientist spends her days tormenting mice in experiments about addiction leading, of course, in the end, to their murder and dissection. At one point she is talking about the oneness of all things in the glory of life. She says "holy the mouse." Holy the mouse my eye, she is tormenting it. Then it popped into my little brain - as the god of her mice she could be saying that if there is a god, it values its mice humans but doesn't take all that much interest in their welfare. God is working towards its own ends, and day to day existence of the mice is unimportant. Ok, then. That's a pretty clever statement and a pretty clever way to demonstrate it. So, I guess the book is better than I thought.

4vwinsloe
Dic 17, 2020, 8:00 am

>2 overlycriticalelisa: I read Conversations with Friends and commented that there was really too much handwringing about sex. I have Normal People sitting on my TBR shelf and, if it is really more of the same, I think that I will skip it.

>3 Citizenjoyce:. I really liked Homegoing, but I think that I will skip Transcendent Kingdom. Your description reminds me of my adolescent attempts to merge science and religion by theorizing that Noah's sons must have procreated with apes.

5Citizenjoyce
Dic 17, 2020, 10:56 am

>4 vwinsloe: Right, that's the kind of religious thinking that goes with our childhood.

6Citizenjoyce
Dic 19, 2020, 12:19 am

I just finished Eggshells by Caitriona Lally which won the Rooney Prize for "an outstanding body of work by an emerging Irish writer under forty years of age" in 2018. I have to say, when I first started reading this book I wondered what kind of idiot would award it a prize of any sort. If you like lists of anything you can think of, this is the book for you. This is a stream of consciousness novel about Vivian who considers herself a changling and spends her days trying to find a portal to send her back to where she belongs. I think she's autistic and she is alone in a home left her by her aunt. I think she lives "on the dole" because she does have a social service worker who keeps urging her to look for jobs. By alone, I mean this woman is able to live her life exactly as she wants, but she has no one to help her figure out how that should be. However, this is better than it could be - once she had parents who put her in a fire, changling that she is, to send her to her own country and get their real daughter back. So far, alone is better than that. She does have a sister, also named Vivian, who finds her quite distasteful. She also finds herself distasteful, evidently, because she will not look in a mirror; however, her very strong body odor is comforting to her. She will very occasionally bathe or wash her hair, but she prefers the way she smells without doing so. She writes up an ad for a friend and puts it on a tree, voila, she gets one as smelly and disoriented as she. She likes having a friend, within limits. She needs lots of alone time. Her behaviors in a 6-year-old would seem cute and precocious, but she's a gray-haired woman. It's a pretty short book, worth reading just for the novelty.

7vwinsloe
Modificato: Dic 19, 2020, 10:42 am

>6 Citizenjoyce:. Sounds like something that could be found in the DSM-V.

8Citizenjoyce
Dic 19, 2020, 1:48 pm

>7 vwinsloe: Maybe. I won't say it started out as a graduate thesis, but it could have.

9overlycriticalelisa
Dic 19, 2020, 8:04 pm

>4 vwinsloe:
i wouldn't say there's handwringing about sex. there is exploration of sex, as the characters are late teens through their mid-20's. i think what i meant, though, was that i heard the writing style and maybe the voices of the two books are similar.

if you do read it, i'd love to know if you think it's similar or different enough...

10vwinsloe
Dic 20, 2020, 9:07 am

>10 vwinsloe:. I'm sure that I will get to it eventually, and will post my impressions here.

11vwinsloe
Dic 27, 2020, 10:08 am

I've been looking over this year's reads to add to the Library Thing Top Five 2020 (https://www.librarything.com/list/42765/all/), and I am sad to say that it has not been a banner reading year for me.

However, I picked out The Bear and the Nightingale as appropriate for the season, and it may make my personal Top Five list.

12Citizenjoyce
Dic 27, 2020, 6:20 pm

>11 vwinsloe: I have such a hard time picking favorites. I haven't done it for a few years.
I just finished Dolly Parton, Songteller. It's not a favorite, but the audiobook was great because she sang snippets of her songs. I guess everyone loves Dolly Parton's joy as she faces all the nastiness life has to offer. I hate schmaltz, and she's the queen of schmaltz, but I have to forgive her and enjoy the tunes.

13vwinsloe
Dic 28, 2020, 9:06 am

>12 Citizenjoyce:. I just saw that on a list of best audiobooks, and it specifically mentioned the song snippets.

My best list is usually compiled by looking at the books that got the most stars. I pretty much give everything 3 stars if I liked it. Very few get 4 or 5 stars. Very, very few this year, which may be a reflection of my mood and not the books themselves!

14vwinsloe
Modificato: Gen 10, 2021, 10:26 am

I just finished Melinda Gates's book, The Moment of Lift. It is basically a memoir regarding how Melinda Gates got involved in philanthropy that specifically empowers women, after realizing that the root causes of chronic poverty and ill health often come from patriarchal culture. If you have read the books by Nicholas Kristof and his wide Sheryl WuDunn this book covers a lot familiar ground. Gate's perspective is obviously much different though, and I was surprised how influenced she is by her deep Roman Catholic roots. It's a short book and worth the read.

15Citizenjoyce
Gen 10, 2021, 4:49 pm

>14 vwinsloe: how surprising that she's so influenced by her religion yet so empowering to women. I'll check it out.

16SChant
Gen 11, 2021, 4:57 am

Starting Harem Years, a memoir of pioneering Egyptian feminist Huda Shaarawi.

17Sakerfalcon
Modificato: Gen 12, 2021, 4:53 am

One of the best books I read in 2020 was The family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer. My main criticism was the lack of focus on the female characters, who tended to be idealistic young girls seeking marriage or shrewish wives. So I started this year by reading Deborah by his sister Esther Kreitman to redress the balance. The novel portrays the same world of Polish Jewry, but with a tight focus on Deborah, the daughter of an unworldly Rabbi and his sickly wife. The family move from a small village to a larger town and finally to Warsaw, but Deborah's prospects remain unchanged. This was an absorbing portrayal of a distinct place and time and of a culture which valued women only for their ability to bear sons.

I've also just finished Such a fun age, which is a deceptively light and entertaining read disguising some thought-provoking issues about race and class.

18Citizenjoyce
Gen 12, 2021, 4:57 pm

>17 Sakerfalcon: I loved Such a Fun Age. We white folk can be so blind.
Continuing my read of lists of best books of 2020, I find many of them pretty ho hum, but some stand out: Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is speculative fiction about a future in which a virus affects animals making them poisonous to humans. The solution seems pretty easy, stop eating animals, but people lead by the meat processing industry think that equates to starvation, so cannibalism becomes legal. The narrator is a man in charge of a head processing plant (humans raised for consumption are referred to as heads). He seems to be growing a conscience about his profession. I don't know if Bazterrica is a vegan, which seems a difficult thing to be in South American countries, but she makes strong points with an entertaining though very gory story.
Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline is a Canadian novel about First Nation mythology. I love the characterization and the plot though I was quite surprised at the ending. What? That's it? Is there a sequel?
The Comeback which author Ella Berman says was begun before the MeToo movement perfectly describes how grooming works. In this age of gaslighting, it was perfect.

19Citizenjoyce
Gen 13, 2021, 12:00 am

Another bright star in my reading of the bests of 2020, Lakewood by Megan Giddings is speculative fiction about medical experimentation. Are aliens involved? What's going on? Who is who they say they are? Giddings is concerned about medical experimentation on women and people of color and coercion to participate. The reader stays confused throughout.

20Sakerfalcon
Gen 13, 2021, 7:47 am

>19 Citizenjoyce: Lakewood sounds really good. I will look out for it.

21vwinsloe
Gen 13, 2021, 9:30 am

>18 Citizenjoyce: Both Tender is the Flesh and Lakewood sound really interesting. I'm putting them both on my wishlist. Thanks.

22Citizenjoyce
Gen 13, 2021, 4:56 pm

I read a good book not on any 2020 lists because it was written in 1948, The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald an autobiographical story about her time spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium when she was a young divorced woman and mother of two. She does credit the sanitarium with getting her well in the days before antibiotics for the disease but does a good job of making fun of the severe, invariable rules. I can only imagine this funny free-spirited woman and her effect on nurses whose devotion was for more to rules than to the comfort of patients. I have to admit, I can be fanatically devoted to rules at times and strongly opposed to them at others, so I could identify with everyone in the book except nurses who gave cold patients tepid wash water and the sweet southern belle whose goal seemed to be to annoy as many co-patients as possible as she worked to wind the staff around her dainty little fingers. The depiction of race was refreshingly accepting, kind of the way I think life is, though I'm proved wrong daily.

23Sakerfalcon
Gen 14, 2021, 8:47 am

>22 Citizenjoyce: The plague and I is a great read, my favourite of MacDonald's four autobiographical works. The sanatorium is such a strange, closed world and she depicts it with clarity and humour.

I'm currently enjoying Rhododendron pie, a vintage novel by Margery Sharp about a girl who doesn't really fit into her highbrow family. It's set in the 1930s and has just been reprinted for the first time since publication.

24vwinsloe
Modificato: Gen 21, 2021, 9:00 am

I'm reading The Wolf Road. It's a novel about an orphan girl raised by a serial killer in post-apocalyptic Canada. The story starts with the end, and you wonder what the author may have to say about the journey. So far, there seems to be a series of violent encounters with different sorts of bad men. Nevertheless, I'm intrigued enough to keep going.

25SChant
Gen 23, 2021, 8:45 am

About to start Priya Satia's Time's Monster, a look at how historical interpretations of the British Empire have impacted not only the events of the time, but also future orthodoxies. Looks to be a challenging work.

26spiralsheep
Gen 23, 2021, 8:53 am

I've just finished The Girl Who Fell to Earth and The Desert and the Drum, which are two books about contemporary young Bedouin women: one novel and one memoir; one traditional and one modernised lifestyle; one set in the west of Africa and one in the east of Arabia. Two very different books in style and intent but which complement and supplement each other for any reader interested in reading about young women in Bedouin cultures.

27Sakerfalcon
Gen 26, 2021, 8:11 am

I'm currently reading Lost pianos of Siberia, in which the author travels in search of some of the pianos which were brought to Siberia during the tumultuous events of the C19th and C20th centuries. It's an interesting take on Russian history.

I'm also reading (have been for a while now!) Heather Clark's massive new bio of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet. So far I'm very impressed. It is detailed but it all feels relevant, and she resists the common temptation to see every act as a foreshadowing of the author's eventual suicide. She is also unusual in analysing Plath's early poetry, taking it seriously as part of her development as a writer.

28vwinsloe
Gen 26, 2021, 9:44 am

I am finally getting to Blowout. I hope to get back into reading some non-fiction, which I seemed unable to do much over the last few years.

29Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Gen 26, 2021, 11:34 am

Blowout is amazing. It helps understand what Putin is up to.
I just finished Valentine by Elizabeth Wetmore set in 1970s Texas it's about rape, misogyny, racism, community, and the legal system. Not a feel-good book, but well worth reading.

30vwinsloe
Gen 27, 2021, 10:08 am

>29 Citizenjoyce:. I read Red Notice which was written by the man who invented Magnitsky sanctions and lobbies for them in human rights cases all over the world. Blowout provides more detailed information about how the Russian Oligarchy came to be, and dovetails nicely with Bill Browder's book.

31Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Gen 27, 2021, 11:52 pm

>30 vwinsloe: I should read it.
ETA I put it on hold

32Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Gen 28, 2021, 12:00 am

I finished Breasts and Eggs, an existential Japanese novel by Mieko Kawakami. The one full-on existential scene involving two women is just overwhelmingly depressing. There's also some existentialist musing by an alienated teenaged girl which doesn't drown your spirit to the same degree because, well because she's an alienated teenaged girl. The novel follows two sisters throughout their childhoods and part of their adult life. One is a hostess in a bar, she is the mother of the teenager, the other is a novelist. The breast part refers to the hostess sister's obsession with getting breast implants. The eggs part refers to the novelist sister's questioning whether or not she wants to have a child. I gave the book 4 stars because it has some very interesting ideas and a good look at Japanese culture, but while it is only 448 pages, it does seem to be interminable.

33vwinsloe
Gen 29, 2021, 9:05 am

>31 Citizenjoyce:. Browder is a very unlikely SJW.

34Citizenjoyce
Gen 29, 2021, 4:01 pm

>30 vwinsloe: The copy came in already, so I'll be reading it some time this month. How I wish we could convince people in Congress to do some of this reading.

35SChant
Gen 30, 2021, 5:18 am

Started N. K. Jemisin's The City We Became - so far an entertaining romp of New York vs tentacled horrors. I'm supporting the tentacles!

36vwinsloe
Gen 30, 2021, 7:25 am

>34 Citizenjoyce:. A lot of them want to be oligarchs themselves, unfortunately.

>35 SChant:. That's a book that I need to acquire ASAP.

37Citizenjoyce
Gen 30, 2021, 3:25 pm

>35 SChant: Another confusing book, but I decided just to let it wash into me and grew to love it. I'm not a game player, so I don't have the degree of familiarity some do with avatars. That's what they are, right? The City We Became is a tribute to her great imagination.
I read The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World by Melinda Gates. It's half an amazing story of the power of feminism philanthropy and half a Mickey Rooney - Judy Garland film. Hey kids, if we work together we can put on the play ourselves! Melinda Gates was born into a Catholic family with a homemaker mother and an aerospace engineer father. He always emphasized the importance of involving women in science. Melinda has an abundance of both self-confidence and competence and she is able to look at problems and assume she will be able to find solutions. Voila, she does. One feel-good accomplishment came when they were working to promote family planning in India. They wanted to find a way to encourage condom use among sex workers. When they met with groups of sex workers they found that the main problem the workers wanted to be solved was violence against them. If they tried to get their customers to use condoms they'd get beaten. They couldn't rely on the men to bring condoms, and if they kept condoms on themselves they would be stopped by police and raped and beaten by them because they assumed any woman carrying condoms was a sex worker so that's what she deserved. They instituted a system in which women could call a certain number and a group of women would rush to them to support them. It was so effective that often they could stop both police brutality and brutality by customers and this part of India showed a marked decrease in the spread of HIV. Bill and Melinda called the man they had left in charge of this project and were surprised to find that he had used some of his allotted money to establish places where workers could get together, drink tea and discuss. They'd had no intention of establishing tea rooms, but they knew enough to leave the money with people in the area who could see what was needed, and a way for women to communicate with each other is just what they needed. Confidence, competence and money go a long way. Surprisingly Melinda is still strongly Catholic, but she sees that having men in charge of women's bodies and supposedly celibate men giving advice on marriage and family is both ridiculous and unhelpful. She has no problem being both religious and strongly supportive of women's rights to their own lives and bodies.
I also just finished Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh . I loved her book Eileen but this is Eileen several decades later, and it's both creepy and disgusting. It was a Harper's Bazaar best books of 2020, but I couldn't recommend it to anyone.

38vwinsloe
Gen 31, 2021, 8:11 am

>37 Citizenjoyce:. Thanks for your thoughts on The Moment of Lift. I thought that it covers a lot of the same ground that was uncovered by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, but Melinda Gates is in a position to do something about it. I picked up this book for the very reason that I am on the fence about billionaire philanthropists. I really would rather they pay their fair share of taxes, but there really are no governments in the world right now that care about women and girls in the third world and are in a position to help.

39SChant
Gen 31, 2021, 8:51 am

>37 Citizenjoyce:
Another confusing book, but I decided just to let it wash into me and grew to love it. I'm not a game player, so I don't have the degree of familiarity some do with avatars. That's what they are, right?

Yes, it is a "wash over me" sort of book, isn't it. I'm enjoying it immensely. Also not a gamer but read a lot of cyberpunk in my misspent youth so "avatar" seems right.

40SChant
Modificato: Feb 4, 2021, 7:54 am

Well, 3 books on my wish-list all popped up this week. Maneaters, a feminist-fantasy graphic novel; Terra Nullius by Claire G. Coleman, a science fiction novel about the settlement of Australia and it's devastating effects on the 'Natives'; and Sophia. princess, suffragette, revolutionary, the little-known history of Queen Victoria's fearless god-daughter who, from a life of privilege, fought for change.

That lot should keep me busy through the miserable weather!

41Citizenjoyce
Feb 5, 2021, 12:01 am

Corregidora by Gayl Jones originally published in 1975 was one of the New Yorker best books read in 2020. I know you're supposed to read a book in the spirit of the times in which it was written, so I guess the strong homophobia is to be expected, as is the "oh my man I love him so" attitude. Ursa, born of women who are sexually exploited, is a wonderful singer but more valued for her hole. Women are valued for their holes and for their ability to reproduce. She holds out for human respect as long as she can, but...

42Citizenjoyce
Feb 12, 2021, 4:04 pm

>30 vwinsloe: I finished Red Notice and think Bill Browder comes off as greedy and self-serving. He bemoans the fact that 22 Russian oligarchs managed to cheat the Russian people out of 39% of their public works while he seemed to have been doing exactly the same thing. However, the information about the enactment of the Magnitsky act is priceless. While I think his push to make the Russian government pay for the death of his "friend" and lawyer probably stems from a desire for vengeance rather than from any love of humanity, he nevertheless has accomplished a great deal in making Putin at least slightly responsive to law. Thanks for the recommendation.

43SChant
Feb 13, 2021, 7:40 am

Really enjoyed Octavia Cade's science-fiction novella The Stone Weta, a mosaic of inter-connected snapshots of women scientists trying to maintain the integrity of the data on climate change in the face of repression and disinformation by world governments. It's beautifully written. I'm definitely inclined to read more by this New Zealand writer.

44vwinsloe
Feb 13, 2021, 10:09 am

>42 Citizenjoyce:. Yes, as I said, Browder is a very unlikely social justice warrior. But that he is. I think that you may be a little to harsh on him. I follow him on Twitter, and he has gone a lot further with his idea of Magnitsky sanctions than just retribution against Putin and the Russian oligarchs. He has also persuaded other countries to adopt similar laws and to use them against other global gangsters, such as MBS for death of Jamal Khashoggi.

45Citizenjoyce
Feb 13, 2021, 4:39 pm

>44 vwinsloe: His sponsoring Senator was hoping the law would go global. I'm glad that's happening. He's definitely ruled by his ego. It's good he's putting all that power toward social justice now rather than amassing a fortune by any means necessary.

46Citizenjoyce
Feb 13, 2021, 4:42 pm

>43 SChant: My library system doesn't have a thing by Octavia Cade. Too bad, that looks like a great book. I guess scientists have always had to fight to have the truth recognized, but somehow I think we thought that was over and in the modern age we would value their knowledge.

47Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Feb 14, 2021, 12:59 am

I just finished Actress by Anne Enright and thought it was pretty meh, though it did expose a few things along its plotless meandering. The narrator is the daughter of a famous actress, and she talks about how her mother was mistreated by the men she worked for and with. How the actors she worked with loved to slap and mistreat her in a play, how the director worked to make sure her acting wasn't appreciated. Then today I read this about auteur theory, the theory that the only important person in a movie is a producer, and he can mistreat the actors as he wishes, and he often chooses to mistreat the women actors. https://io9.gizmodo.com/its-well-past-time-to-rethink-auteur-theory-and-the-way-...
I'd known about Hitchcock because of recent films about him, but I didn't know about the others. Once again, maybe the book was better than I thought it was.

48SChant
Feb 14, 2021, 6:53 am

>46 Citizenjoyce: My library system doesn't have a thing by Octavia Cade.

Mine neither - I bought it cheap on Kindle (hangs head in shame) but was so impressed I'm going to look for some of her other work from more ethical sources.

https://ethicalrevolution.co.uk/2017/04/13/top-10-ethical-online-book-sellers/

49vwinsloe
Feb 14, 2021, 10:48 am

>9 overlycriticalelisa:. I finished Normal People and found it to be a much more mature offering than Conversations with Friends. The main characters were exquisitely drawn and nuanced- despite their being so different from me, I liked them and wished them well. I think that the novel is an example of how fiction can make us more empathetic.

50Citizenjoyce
Feb 14, 2021, 2:45 pm

>48 SChant: Thanks for the link.

51SChant
Feb 15, 2021, 9:37 am

>50 Citizenjoyce: Can't get any of Octavia Cade's books from those ethical sources (except a couple quoting £15 for a paperback!) so looks like I'll have to sup with the devil again.

52Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Mar 7, 2021, 9:02 pm

I've truly enjoyed a couple of books in the last month. First is Better Luck Next Time by Julia Claiborne Johnson about a Reno dude ranch in the 1930s that catered to divorcing women. My daughter and I took my grandson to a dude ranch in Colorado during the summers of about 4 years, and they have the cowhands down pat: polite, accomodating, intelligent, resourceful. It brought back fond memories and was thoroughly enjoyable except for one appalling scene. Aside from the nostalgia, it offers yet another glimpse of the interactions between classes of people. Alas, the major drawback is that, once again, teenage girls are shown to be hateful scheming creatures. I was a teenage girl, I raised a teenage girl, I do not find most of them to be as repulsive as they are so frequently written.
The next book I enjoyed even more which is kind of peculiar considering the topic is so oppressive. Amber Ruffin (of Late Night With Seth Meyers fame) has written a book about the daily, casual insults of racism she and her sister (and all US Black people) face. I listened to her narration of You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories about Racism, and I'm sure it's the best way to experience the book because Ruffin paints racism with her giant comedic personality, so all the time you read about one racist insult after another you bask in Ruffin's glow. It's a very weird dichotomy, and it works.

53spiralsheep
Mar 8, 2021, 5:44 am

>52 Citizenjoyce: "about a Reno dude ranch in the 1930s that catered to divorcing women"

Have you ever seen the 1939 film (of the play) The Women? It's very memorable.

54Citizenjoyce
Mar 8, 2021, 9:46 pm

>53 spiralsheep: No, but recently I saw Desert Hearts. The topic lends itself to thought, doesn't it?

55spiralsheep
Mar 9, 2021, 5:42 am

>54 Citizenjoyce: Oh, yes! I'd forgotten the film and I don't think I ever knew it was based on a book, Desert of the Heart. Interesting that all three works seem to be interested in class too.

56Citizenjoyce
Mar 10, 2021, 10:14 pm

>55 spiralsheep: Any book about dude ranches has to be about class. Our visits to the dude ranches were the only times I've spent extended time with the upper class enjoying the kind of concentration and care that they do. It's quite eye-opening
.

57SChant
Mar 13, 2021, 8:12 am

Reading Notes from Deep Time by Helen Gordon - not, as I had presumed, a geology book, more a meditation on the history of geology, conversations with modern-day geologists, trips to sights of geological interest, and a few silly bits about people who think they can predict earthquakes by clouds, headaches, magnetics, heart-pains ...... An easy read, but quite light.

58vwinsloe
Mar 16, 2021, 9:15 am

I've started Priestdaddy after a long excursion into a science fiction trilogy by a man. For some reason, I expected Priestdaddy to be humorous. So far, interesting, but no humor.

59Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Mar 16, 2021, 2:02 pm

>58 vwinsloe: I've thought about reading that. Let us know. Back in the day when we could go places my daughter and I went to the movies very frequently. We'd seen a spate of depressing movies and I wanted to cheer us up by seeing something fun and happy, so I picked In Bruges. It is neither a fun nor happy movie.

60vwinsloe
Mar 17, 2021, 9:01 am

>59 Citizenjoyce:. I loved In Bruges and thought it was funny in a very dark way.

As far as Priestdaddy goes, so I far I am finding Patricia Lockwood's approach to memoir to be interesting since it doesn't start with childhood. Reminding me a little bit of Educated but we'll see.

61SChant
Mar 17, 2021, 9:28 am

>60 vwinsloe: Agree totally about In Bruges. I love Martin McDonagh's work - seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards.

62Citizenjoyce
Mar 17, 2021, 3:08 pm

>60 vwinsloe: >61 SChant: True, but not exactly the light-hearted comedy I was expecting.

63SChant
Mar 21, 2021, 6:10 am

Started Food and Climate Change without the hot air. I came across a YouTube video of physicist Sarah Bridle talking about how when her kids were born she became more concerned about climate change and started to use her skills to analyse foood production. Very impressive, so I bought the book.

64vwinsloe
Mar 27, 2021, 9:22 am

>59 Citizenjoyce:. Definitely worth reading Priestdaddy. It did finally get LOL funny around page 75, as opposed to wry or clever which it was before that. After the humorous point in the book, the author seemed to relax and get lyrical. She revealed herself to be the author of the free verse poem, "Rape Joke" that went viral 7 or 8 years ago now, and I started to pay more attention.

Much of the book dragged for me, seeming to be too vague or too specific, and I wondered whether I am too old (the author is half my age) or too non-Roman Catholic (as a lapsed Congregationalist) for it to resonate with me. But then she writes passages like this:

"I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in that place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am."

In sum: the brilliant parts vastly outweighed the meh parts for me.

65Citizenjoyce
Mar 27, 2021, 7:02 pm

>64 vwinsloe: It sounds good. It's been on my radar for some time, but I haven't made the leap.

66SChant
Apr 1, 2021, 6:41 am

Started Rebel Women Between the Wars by Sarah Lonsdale, brief sketches of some of the less prominent women who were breaking the boundaries of male society and employment in the UK in the 1920's & '30s. In her introduction the author says that she tried to include working-class woment, but that middle-class women were more likely to leave behind documentary evidence for their activities so they are the ones she writes about. I feel there may be a bit of "selection bias" in this - the first chapter is all about women in journalism and literature, the author's own field, and their appears to be quite a lot of content included about the literary world - as historians such as Jill Liddington have managed to write quite respectable tomes about working-class women in the inter-war years.
Still, it will be interesting to read about the less well-known women in non-traditional areas such as engineering and mountaineering that she covers later.

67Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Apr 1, 2021, 3:32 pm

I read a few enjoyable books this past month.
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow is about three estranged sisters in New Salem who are able to wield interesting and various types of magic and, of course, there has to be a trumpian-Gaetzian politician who is anti-witch.
Autonomous my second book by Annalee Newitz is about robots and drugs with some very interesting ideas about gender. The addictive drug is one that gives people extreme pleasure in work, so they work themselves to death not taking time to eat or drink. I'm sure it's one Amazon would like to hand out to its employees.
Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein is a graphic biography by Lita Judge. The pictures are dark and show Mary to be the very young girl she was when taken up by Shelley. Percy Bysse Shelley and Lord Byron do not come off well, nor does Mary's supposedly free-minded father. Of course the evil stepmother is very evil.
The Swallows by Lisa Lutz is about a new teacher at a boarding school, a high school for rich kids where misogyny runs rampant and is a fun game for some of the more well-established elite. I read The Spellman Files some time ago. It's the first in her kind of humorous family detective agency series, and I liked her style, but this is more topic-driven and meaner.
The Brilliant Life of Eudora Honeysett by Annie Lyons is about a prim, regret-filled misanthropic 85-year-old woman who decides to plan her own death. Every time I thought the feel-good story was going in one direction, it swerved a little so was not, in the end, fit for Guidepost but seemed like a possible reality. I'm not completely sure about the 10-year-old neighbor. Precocious children can be difficult to write realistically, so maybe she's a little too much to be true but still enjoyable.

68Citizenjoyce
Apr 6, 2021, 5:24 am

I just finished My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell a novel about a perfectly predatory pedophile at a boarding school. There's much room for discussion in this one as we follow his victim/love interest for decades. And then tonight I read a column by Joyce Maynard about the parallels between her affair with J. D. Salinger (with a 35 year age gap between them) and Woody Allen's escapades. Before MeToo you wouldn't be believed if you spoke out, after MeToo you get death threats.

69vwinsloe
Modificato: Apr 6, 2021, 10:34 am

>68 Citizenjoyce:. My Dark Vanessa is on my wish list. I read Joyce Maynard's memoir At Home in the World quite a few years ago and found it to be weak tea, possibly because she was afraid to be too specific at that time. Do you have a link to the article? I would be interested in reading it.

Edited to add: never mind, if it is the Vanity Fair article, I found it. Despite the salacious title, the parallels are really more in the vicious response to the women's allegations by fans of the men. Which makes sense, knowing that Monica Lewinsky was viciously attacked when she was not even the source of the allegations against Clinton.

One thing that I sincerely hope is that the revelations are a cautionary tale for women (and their mothers) to avoid being groomed by such men in the first place. If so, their speaking out will have more effect than any vengeful motive that is ascribed to it.

70SChant
Apr 6, 2021, 12:02 pm

I'm not usually one for poetry, but the short stories I've read by Octavia Cade have been excellent so thought I'd give Mary Shelley Makes a Monster a go, and, wow - it was mind-blowingly good, and quite strange. It's a long poem, in which Mary Shelley's monster walks through the lives of some of history's great and troubled women writers, sharing bits of body and mind and pain. Excellent.

71Citizenjoyce
Apr 6, 2021, 4:11 pm

The Joyce Maynard article which I thought I had posted. Oops. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/04/joyce-maynard-on-chilling-parallels-woo...
" cautionary tale for women (and their mothers) to avoid being groomed by such men in the first place" Of course, you go all the way through Dark Vanessa saying, "What the heck are you doing?" Some men are very, very good at grooming. They know who to flatter and just how to do it, then, of course, is the "poor me" stance. I think of all the horrible things that have happened to people that I have avoided and realize it's mostly because I wasn't put in the situation in the first place. Luck, I guess.

72vwinsloe
Apr 7, 2021, 9:01 am

>71 Citizenjoyce:. Yes, luck, but I also think maybe awareness? I had a recent conversation with an acquaintance who was anxious about the fact that her daughters were turning 13 and 11. She didn't know how to protect them from predators on the internet or in real life. She was from a religious background, and sheltered her children from anything related to sex. I looked at her and said, GIVE THEM THE INFORMATION THAT THEY NEED in as much detail as possible.

Silence, secrecy and shame is what allows these old creeps to thrive. Every young person should be given the information they need to understand how these guys operate and to avoid them.

One of the things that struck me about Joyce Maynard was that she was 18 years old at the time she took up with Salinger. That would have been about 1971. I think that these days 18 year olds are a lot more worldy, in part, I hope, because of people like her who were not afraid to come forward and tell their story.

73vwinsloe
Apr 7, 2021, 9:03 am

>70 SChant:. I'm convinced. On my wish list! Thanks.

74Citizenjoyce
Apr 7, 2021, 2:23 pm

>72 vwinsloe: I think it's difficult for many people to understand that sex can be a game for some people, no matter what they say or pretend to feel, conquest is all they're after. Just as politics is a game for some who have no interest in governing but want only power and the win. I don't think such attitudes are normal, so it's hard to consider them.

75vwinsloe
Apr 8, 2021, 9:08 am

>74 Citizenjoyce:. I suppose that's true. I am just finishing up The 19th Wife which you and others have recommended to me. The sexual appetites of some people and the damage they inflict on others is just appalling.

76Citizenjoyce
Apr 8, 2021, 4:13 pm

>75 vwinsloe: Right now I'm reading A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum and it's the same idea. Though these are Palestinian and Palestinian-American Muslims instead of American Mormons women are still considered only as wives and slaves, under the control of men until they finally age up the hierarchy. There's not so much about sex, at least not yet, just about control. Fundamentalist religions all seem to be the same in their hatred/fear of women.

77vwinsloe
Apr 9, 2021, 9:30 am

>76 Citizenjoyce:. I've been reading articles lately about the link between fundamentalist religions and mass murder/terrorism which is another facet of the problem. Those young men whose sexuality is repressed and seen as shameful can result in violent outbursts, such as recently in Atlanta.

The parallels in patriarchal fundamentalist religions is striking.

I've just started The Light Brigade which I know has been mentioned in this group. I'm hoping that it will be something totally different.

78ScoLgo
Apr 9, 2021, 12:49 pm

>77 vwinsloe: I really liked The Light Brigade. One of the aspects that I appreciated was the ambiguity of the narrator's gender throughout most of the book. It can be a confusing ride though as there is a lot of time-skipping. Hurley blogged about the process and how she had to extensively flow-chart to keep things straight in her own mind while writing the story. I hope you like it.

79vwinsloe
Apr 10, 2021, 8:28 am

>78 ScoLgo:. Thanks for the heads up. Interesting so far!

80SChant
Apr 11, 2021, 5:40 am

Having a huge fad on Octavia Cade this year! Started reading The August Birds, which deals with a terminally ill child, great and harrowing events in the history of science, and Huginn and Muninn, the ravens of Thought and Memory in Norse mythology. Beautifully written so far.

81Citizenjoyce
Apr 20, 2021, 4:01 pm

I just finished The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James. I was a little reluctant to read it because I don't much like horror, I really don't like books about violence against women, and I had heard it was very scary. I guess if you're afraid of ghosts you would think it was scary. I do know some people who are afraid of ghosts (in the 21st century) but I'm not one of them, so I found it a page-turner and worth the time for a little diversion.

82Sakerfalcon
Apr 21, 2021, 5:37 am

>81 Citizenjoyce: I read this one and would agree with your assessment. I didn't find it especially scary - at least, not for the supernatural elements. What some men do is another matter. It was a good read and I've added one of her earlier novels to my TBR pile, The broken girls.

Currently reading some SF by Elizabeth Bear, Ancestral night, and really enjoying it.

83vwinsloe
Apr 21, 2021, 9:36 am

>82 Sakerfalcon:. Elizabeth Bear's book is on my wish list. Thanks for confirming that it belongs there.

I finished The Light Brigade and thought that it was brilliant. (pun intended)

I am now reading The Book of Essie which has been on my TBR shelf for a while. I think that someone in this group recommended it. Interesting premise.

84Citizenjoyce
Apr 21, 2021, 6:35 pm

>82 Sakerfalcon: You know, I wasn't as freaked out about the violence against women as I usually am because she didn't detail the actual acts except when she described the woman yelling from the car trunk. I know some authors do because they want to make people aware that such things happen, but saying a woman was found dead and that she had been raped is quite sufficient. I don't want the author to put me there as the violence occurs.

85Sakerfalcon
Apr 22, 2021, 5:08 am

>84 Citizenjoyce: Me too. I know what can happen and my imagination doesn't need any encouragement.

86riida
Apr 27, 2021, 5:51 am

i just recently finished The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

the author's prose is beautiful. i kept drawing comparisons with the movie 'pan's labyrinth' and the book 'the binding', but i feel this was better. i loved the characters, but specially Faith, a precocious 14-year old girl living in times when women were looked down on, and young women have it even harsher. it really made me want to see Faith prove her courage and cleverness. On top of this, the narration of the audiobook by Emilia Fox was absolutely sublime! Her performance really pulled me into the book and characters. it was better than watching a movie (although i would not mind a movie adaptation of this book).

i loved this quote too:

“Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies.”

87SChant
Apr 27, 2021, 5:55 am

>86 riida: Completely agree. Hardinge is a wonderful writer for children, and anyone who loves well-crafted prose. I have a whole selection of her books on my shelves and can thoroughly recommend all of them!

88Sakerfalcon
Apr 27, 2021, 10:56 am

>86 riida: >87 SChant: I'm with you both! Hardinge is fantastic at creating unusual characters, plots and worlds, and depicting them in skilful prose. She deserves to be a lot better known.

89riida
Apr 27, 2021, 3:28 pm

>87 SChant: >88 Sakerfalcon: this was my first Hardinge. i am now a fan and will be hunting down her other books ^_^ i might actually get physical copies, including one for The Lie Tree, so i can put them on my shelves!

90Citizenjoyce
Apr 27, 2021, 11:41 pm

>86 riida: what a great quote. I'll check her out.

91Citizenjoyce
Apr 27, 2021, 11:49 pm

I recently finished a book by a man but about Indians and with a female monster and other important female characters. The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones is a horror novel, and the first three people Jones thanks in acknowledgments are women: Ellen Datlow, Louise Erdrich and Elizabeth Lapensée. He shows a real difference in the way his male characters approach life and the way his female characters do. At first, I thought I wouldn't like it because it seemed like just another way to apologize for stressed men who abuse women, but it has some interesting turns.

92vwinsloe
Apr 28, 2021, 9:08 am

I've just started The Wanderers. It seems to be character-driven literary science fiction. I wonder where it is all going, other than Mars.

93riida
Mag 3, 2021, 9:26 am

just finished On Luna Time

this is like the YA version of 'the time traveler's wife'...less intense, less sophisticated, more saccharine...oh the mushy sweetness! its innocent sweetness, though. like good, light cake. it is also not without a plot or a mystery that's beautifully developed. its not all about the romance, too, as the story also revolves around the strong familial relations between mothers and daughters. made me definitely want to read the whole trilogy.

first, though, i need a new yellow dress ;)

95Citizenjoyce
Mag 4, 2021, 4:58 pm

I'm about halfway through Parable of the Sower and I think I'll probably finish, but Octavia Butler is so tough. I feel about this the way I felt reading The Road - that there is too much unnecessarily graphic violence. I did finish that book and won't ever read another one by him. I think this is probably my last Butler. I loved the Xenogenesis series, but I don't need this kind of ugliness in my head.

96vwinsloe
Mag 5, 2021, 8:54 am

>95 Citizenjoyce:, I feel you there. But of the two, I think that Parable of the Talents is the better book. And more hopeful. So at least read that one before calling it quits on Octavia Butler.

97riida
Mag 5, 2021, 9:50 am

>94 Citizenjoyce: so cute ^_^

98Citizenjoyce
Mag 5, 2021, 9:24 pm

>96 vwinsloe: I finished Parable of the Sower, and it did end on a hopeful note. Maybe I'll read Parable of the Talents. I know religion is important as a political tool for group cohesion, but I find the combination of graphic violence and religiosity pretty nauseating.

99vwinsloe
Mag 6, 2021, 8:58 am

>98 Citizenjoyce:. I don't mind earthseed religion. For those who need some sort of spirituality, "God is change" is actually helpful, I think.

100vwinsloe
Mag 8, 2021, 9:29 am

I've finished The Wanderers which was fascinating. The author used the premise of a 7 months long dress rehearsal for a trip to Mars by isolating three engineer astronauts: a Russian man, a Japanese man, and an American woman in a simulation of the voyage to come. The narrative also closely followed two of their children, a teen and a young adult, as well as the Japanese man's wife. Under the guise of this simulated voyage, the reader watched the astronauts and their relatives explore their own identities and how they related to each other. I can't say that the book moved me much emotionally, probably because I am not a parent and much of this book explored parental feelings. But it was original and intellectually stimulating. Still thinking about it.

I started White Fragility out of a sense of responsibility, and I appreciate how Robin DiAngelo has framed the issues.

101Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Mag 8, 2021, 6:03 pm

>100 vwinsloe: My hold for The Wanderers just came in and I couldn't remember why I'd requested it. Thanks for reminding me.
I grudgingly read White Fragility and found it very good. Grudgingly because I've grown pretty sick of all the "Karen" stereotyping.

102SChant
Mag 9, 2021, 8:49 am

Reading It's Not About the Burqa, a collection of essays by Muslim women speaking out for themselves. Last year I saw some of these women speak at a related online event, and they were very articulate and determined.

103Citizenjoyce
Mag 9, 2021, 4:14 pm

>102 SChant: Well, I requested it from the library, but it will be another reluctant read. It seems to me women who gather sexist oppression to themselves are like women who want to reclaim the words cunt and bitch and use them freely about themselves and their friends. The joke's on them.

104SChant
Mag 10, 2021, 3:58 am

>103 Citizenjoyce: I wouldn't say they were trying to 'gather sexist oppression to themselves', more like making their voices heard, declaring how they feel about their lives and communities, what they see as oppressive or not, rather than seeing themselves portrayed through others' eyes. It's very informative.

105vwinsloe
Mag 10, 2021, 10:57 am

>104 SChant:. I took a look and it seems like internalized patriarchy/misogyny to me. I think that we could get much the same from the Phyllis Schafley crowd, no?

Maybe not, I haven't read it, and who am I to invalidate their feelings anyway. But, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/09/asia/afghanistan-girls-school-attack-intl-hnk/ind...

I just can't tolerate the violence against women and girls.

106Citizenjoyce
Mag 10, 2021, 7:45 pm

>105 vwinsloe: That says it better than I did. Phyllis Schlafly, along with Amy Coney Barrett and, who knows, maybe the Duggar mom, have served as lasting examples of how some women can benefit under a strict patriarchy. I'll read the book, but I admit to my strong prejudice against regimes that restrict women.

107SChant
Mag 11, 2021, 3:52 am

>105 vwinsloe:, >106 Citizenjoyce: These are women living as Muslims in the white, western world and stating their own opinions within that milieu, and while I think all religions/spirituality is anti-intellectual tosh I'm curious to know how other women see that part of their lives. It would be interesting to resume this discussion after you have read the book, yes?

108Citizenjoyce
Mag 11, 2021, 6:00 am

>107 SChant: I’ll let you know when I’ve read it.

109Citizenjoyce
Mag 12, 2021, 5:52 pm

>100 vwinsloe: I finished The Wanderers, thanks for recommending it. For a while there I thought it was going to go all Orson Scot Card. I found it a good character-psychological study with some of the disaster response of The Martian.
I finished a few other books.
At Home in the World: A Memoir by Joyce Maynard is a pretty good warning to all the people who like to toy with others for sport, make sure your victim isn't a writer. You would have thought J. D. Salinger could have figured that out, but I guess his ego got in the way.
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha is a study of some Korean women and their society. After Googling, I find that everyone knows that Korea is the plastic surgery capital of the world. I'd already known about eyelid surgery, but apparently, double jaw surgery is a pretty popular thing too. Of course, I had to google before and after pictures. Wow, you know how before and after pictures of nose jobs barely show a change. Well, jaw surgery is a whole different kind of intervention making masculine-looking square-jawed women into heart-faced beauties. Now every time I see one of that type of face I'm going to wonder about the pain behind it. There's lots of pain in this book along with delicately growing relationships, misogyny, and class distinction.
The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk is my favorite kind of fantasy with lots of magic and assumed sexism. Well actually I did get kind of distressed at one point about the oppression of women in this magical culture, but I kept telling myself that it was only a story. The book centers around bargaining season when people bring their marriageable daughters to a round of parties so they can find rich husbands and rich men can find women to pass their magical bloodlines on to their children. In order to avoid giving birth to demon-like children, women wear a collar that destroys their magic. Some only wear it when they're pregnant, but in the main character's society, the collar is worn from the day of marriage until menopause. For obvious Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott reasons our main character, Beatrice, doesn't want to get married, she wants to live her life using her magic and assisting her father in his business. And for these same reasons, of course, her family is having none of that.
The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck is a story of immediate post-WWII Germany and the resistance. We all like to think we would have been part of the resistance, but the past few years have shown us that many of us wouldn't have been.
Now I'm re-reading The Library Book by Susan Orlean for my RL book club. It's such a great book, it's amazing how much of it I've forgotten.

110vwinsloe
Mag 13, 2021, 10:18 am

>109 Citizenjoyce:. Glad that you enjoyed The Wanderers. I found it to be a very unusual read.

I want to confess up front that my teenage years were spent reading and rereading J.D. Salinger, so I am undoubtedly biased. I was dismayed when I read At Home in the World a few years ago, and really didn't know what to make of a young woman (18) whose revelations included Salinger's lack of desire to have sexual intercourse with her and other neurotic quirks. His daughter's book Dream Catcher: A Memoir, which came out shortly after Maynard's, depicted an emotionally distant parent and husband.

Several years later, I read Salinger and saw the documentary which was based on it, and it gave me a much fuller view of the author's life, particularly his experiences in WWII. While it didn't completely redeem his hatred of adult women, it certainly explained his reclusiveness and obvious PTSD. As his character Esme would say, he did not return from the war with all of his faculties intact.

111Citizenjoyce
Mag 13, 2021, 4:53 pm

>110 vwinsloe: Maynard has a bit to say about his damaging experiences in the war. Stories like this are why I was so dismayed when my grandson joined the air force. I'd told him all his life, "Whatever else you do, don't join the armed forces." Obviously, my advice didn't count for much. So far he hasn't had to go to war, he's stationed in northern Florida and he thinks it's a fine occupation. All these kids sign up to get a career. They can get a great education and all they have to do is promise to give their lives for it.

112vwinsloe
Mag 14, 2021, 9:25 am

>111 Citizenjoyce: A couple of Salinger's stories in the Saturday Evening Post magazine in the 1940s as well as other unpublished stories were moving anti-war stories. He had a strong opinion that war was extremely distasteful at best and that those who served in war should not be considered heroes or glorified in any way. Salinger was one of the Ritchie Boys, who was recruited for intelligence behind enemy lines, and he served at Utah Beach in Normandy, at Hürtgen Forest and in the Battle of the Bulge, three of the bloodiest battles in the war, and marched into concentration camps. It left him a broken man.

In any event, I have sort of the same feeling about At Home in the World as I did about the absolutely brilliant short story Cat Person. When is it just a bad date that you really should have seen coming, but went along with it anyway?

113Citizenjoyce
Mag 14, 2021, 4:04 pm

>112 vwinsloe: She definitely had an overwhelming need to be enveloped by another person, and that was her burden to work through. The problem, though, was that this 50 something-year-old man chose an 18-year-old girl-woman because he knew he could manipulate her. My stepfather had a horrible childhood, then he grew up to be a fairly unpleasant man. My step-sister and my half-sister both adored him and forgave his treatment of women because of the pain of his childhood. Being a human is hard, but at some point, you have to at least try to work through all the horrible things that have happened to you so you don't pass them on to other struggling humans. If Salinger had just been a hermit who refused to show his work to his clamoring fans, well, that would have been a problem that he could or could not work through, but instead, he chose to deal with his past by harming women. I can't give him a pass for that.

114vwinsloe
Mag 15, 2021, 9:13 am

>113 Citizenjoyce:, I can't give him a pass either. But again, let's be clear, this was not pedophilia, it was not rape, etc. I suppose the publishers marketing Joyce Maynard's book should be blamed for sensationalizing it, because really it was just a sad affair.



115Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Mag 15, 2021, 4:52 pm

>114 vwinsloe: An exploitative affair. Maybe not one he should go to prison for but certainly one in which he was morally culpable. But, enough about that.
Maybe I have another controversy. I just listened to my first Charlie Jane Anders book, Victories Greater Than Death. Judging from the title you can assume it's pretty melodramatic, which it is, but even more than that it's very, very YA. Had I read the book instead of listening I wouldn't have had an aversion to the characters, but here's the problem. Anders is thrilled that she got Hynden Walch to play all the characters. Some of the monstrous aliens sound like Glinda the Good Witch or Munchkins, so that's fun, but the main character, who, after all, is supposed to save the universe, sounds like she's 13 years old. Walch is the voice of Princess Bubblegum and many, many more cartoon and video characters. I assumed she was about 18. She's 51 and still sounds like a perky 13-year-old, or rather, like no 13-year-old I ever knew. The book is interesting with pertinent social commentary, but that voice. I just can't believe she thinks the voice is a good thing. Maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe teenage girls who love sci-fi would relate, but I don't see how.

116vwinsloe
Mag 16, 2021, 9:19 am

>115 Citizenjoyce:. I read her All the Birds in the Sky and it didn't really work for me, so I have not sought out any more of her writing.

117SChant
Mag 16, 2021, 9:25 am

>116 vwinsloe: Me neither - in fact I couldn't finish it.

118SChant
Mag 22, 2021, 12:14 pm

Started Women vs Hollywood by Helen O'Hara - a highly entertaining look at the unsung heroines who worked as directors, writers and producers as well as actors from the very beginnings of the industry. Very eye-opeining.

119Citizenjoyce
Mag 22, 2021, 3:51 pm

>118 SChant: I checked with Libby to see if they had it. They came up with Bambi vs Godzilla and The Cinema of Hockey. Well, I guess they were in the neighborhood with the first one.

120SChant
Mag 23, 2021, 4:20 am

>119 Citizenjoyce: Hahahah! Not even close!
It is a very new book, only released a couple of months ago in the UK.

121riida
Mag 24, 2021, 9:32 am

just finished quiche of death by M. C. Beaton...

its very difficult for me to come across a modern cozy whodunit that i sincerely enjoy...this one comes close :) i feel like that the puzzle part of the mystery needs a little more work (perhaps it will improve in the later books in the series), but i love the character of Agatha Raisin. i find her a refreshingly fun turn for an amateur sleuth and more endearing than Jessica Fletcher (sorry to her fans!).

of course i'm also biased...i used to live in the UK midlands, and the village of Carsley, the Cotswolds, and the rest of the location just stirred nostalgia in me :)

122SChant
Mag 26, 2021, 6:21 am

Finished Women vs Hollywood and rather enjoyed it. There was some eye-opening stuff about the early years of cinema, where women were more autonomous, becoming directors, writers, and producers as well as actors and stunt-performers, but of course when the money-men got involved in the industry sexism, racism and homophobia crept in and womens' roles become much more circumscribed - same old story.

About to start Material Girls by philosopher Kathleen Stock - an examination of gender-identity and biological sex. I expect it to be thought-provoking.

123vwinsloe
Modificato: Giu 3, 2021, 8:40 am

After an over long and unsatisfactory detour to read a tome written by a man that had been edging its way closer to the top of my TBR pile for years, I have started Gideon the Ninth.

124Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Giu 3, 2021, 8:01 pm

>123 vwinsloe: I recently finished it and was quite disappointed. My least favorite themes in books are strategy, succession, fighting and romance. Gideon has three of them, so right from the get-go it wasn't going to be a favorite. Maybe you'll like it better than I did.

>102 SChant: Well, I finished It's Not About the Burqa, and it seemed to me, for many of them, it definitely is about the burqa or at least the hijab. I really liked the first two essays, the one by the Scottish woman, the one by the lawyer at the end, the twice-divorced woman, and some others. These women all agreed it's not about their clothing, and that while the Muslim religion empowers women, the Muslim culture does not. They complained that misogynists insist on not educating women about their rights leaving them helpless. Two of the essayists were different. Instead of mentioning the misogyny present in their culture, they complain that white feminists are the problem, and well-meaning white feminists are the worst. One details the problems she has had wearing the hijab but states she doesn't care, she is responsible only to her faith and to no one else. If I were hiring someone for an important job, I don't think her dedication to her faith above all would be much of a selling point. Both of these women have to complain about Israel as if it has anything to do with the problem. One woman wears the hijab, the neck veil, and the jilbab and complains about her difficulty with the attire, especially in the heat, but that if she expresses difficulty other people question her faith. One of the anti-white women writers complained that white feminists don't accept her religion. I guess you'd have to count me in on that one. When it's important to wear an uncomfortable article of clothing in order to show your submission to a fictitious being, it might be difficult to find rational women supporting such submission. So, thumbs up for most of the book, a strong thumbs down for some of it.

125SChant
Giu 4, 2021, 5:19 am

>124 Citizenjoyce: Yes, it really is a mixed bag, but that's what I liked about it. It shows that Muslim women are not the homogenous group that they are often portrayed as in the media, but can and do have very varying and sometimes uncomfortable opinions.
As for religion, all of them are bunk as far as I'm concerned, so dress as you please and perform what rituals you like as long as it doesn't impact on anyone else or on your ability to do your job.

126SChant
Giu 4, 2021, 7:21 am

Started Wake: the Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts. It's part memoir of historian Rebecca Hall, and part what she discovered in her researches. It's done as a graphic novel, but I'm not really enjoying the scratchy illustration style so far. The stories look interesting, though.

127SChant
Giu 5, 2021, 8:40 am

Finished Wake: the Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts in one sitting - it's a graphic novel - and was blown away by it. It's part memoir of the historian who researched it, and part historical reconstruction of the events she discovered. I found it emotionally powerful, reclaiming hidden stories from history and showing how they echo down through the ages.

Now reading Sarah Pinsker's short story collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea. Beautifully written so far, and more surrealism than SF&F really. Reminds me of Kelly Link.

128Citizenjoyce
Giu 5, 2021, 3:17 pm

I just finished How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue about a small village in Africa being ecologically devastated by oil production and political corruption. It might be about Uganda or Chad, but Mbue comes from Cameroon which seems to have the same problems. The heroine of the story is Thulu who has witnessed deaths caused both by the oil poisoning her land and by soldiers supporting its rulers. She is strong, intelligent, loving, and hopeful, as are the people she supports. People love her and many follow her even though she is an unnatural woman who doesn't marry or have children. While the book shows the struggle against capitalism and political oppression sexism patiently waits under it all, though it is not shown to be as destructive. I don't know what else to say except that it's a book about a few strong people fighting against corporate and political giants.

129Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Giu 5, 2021, 5:09 pm

>127 SChant: I pretty much read or listen only electronically these days since I hate returning books to the library. Wake: the Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts just came in, and I can hardly read the print since it's so little. But I do love the pictures.

130SChant
Giu 6, 2021, 3:40 am

>129 Citizenjoyce: Funnily enough it's the pictures that I liked least - a sort of scribbly, scratchy style that made it difficult for me to work out what was happening in the frames. I had the same issue with Monstress.

131TuxedoCat
Giu 6, 2021, 5:14 pm

>122 SChant: - I have just bought Material Girls by Kathleen Stock, and I'm looking forward to starting it.

Before I do, I am finishing Difficult Women by Helen Lewis, which has been quite interesting so far. It starts on the topic of Divorce, and looks at Caroline Norton, who campaigned for Victorian women to have rights to see their children following separation and divorce, due to her own marriage to a violent, abusive man. He campaign was successful in passing a bill to allow children to remain with their mother until the age of seven, if she was separated from her husband and had not been found guilty of adultery, and have access to see any children older than seven if they were still with their father at that time.

I'm also reading Bonfire Opera and The Moons of August by Danusha Lameris. I haven't read much poetry for a while but I'm finding hers to be really enjoyable. We have an experience in common which she writes about in a way I feel I can relate to, although the poem that led me to her was one about earthworms.

132Citizenjoyce
Giu 9, 2021, 7:53 pm

>131 TuxedoCat: I'll check out Difficult Women. We've lost so much ground recently, but at least we're not back to Victorian times, yet.
I've just finished Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig and feel something like the way I feel when I read about generals during the Civil War. With all the drinking and poor decision-making, how did we ever accomplish anything? At one point, after yet another scandal involving drunk secret service men, Obama tells the head of his secret service, "You need to hire more women." She said she was trying, but she was thwarted on all sides by conservative misogynists. It seems like whenever you have a group of macho guys in a macho profession drinking and prostitution or sexual abuse is going to abound. Then you get presidents who think the secret service is their own money-making, errand running personal agency. They are overworked and underpaid. Their equipment breaks down and is not repaired or replaced, and they often have attitudes in opposition to the political leanings of the people they are sworn to protect. It seems even more reasonable to me now, after reading the book, that Biden replaced so many of the agents when he took over. Even after 300 secret service agents were infected with Covid on trump's watch, they still loved the guy. At least he wasn't Hillary, whom, of course, many of them couldn't stand.

133SChant
Giu 13, 2021, 9:43 am

Started Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Y Davis, an examination of the work of "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holliday as expressions of the lives and aspirations of Black working-class women of the early part of C20th. Plus, it's also got all of Rainey's and Smith's lyrics transcribed!

134Citizenjoyce
Giu 13, 2021, 2:39 pm

>133 SChant: Wow, what a find.

135SChant
Giu 14, 2021, 4:25 am

>134 Citizenjoyce: Pure serendipity. I was after a copy of Women, Race and Class (read many years ago and thought it was time for a refresh as I can't remember much about it) and came across this! I love the sounds of the old Blues women - so tough and raunchy and tender.

136TuxedoCat
Giu 14, 2021, 12:26 pm

>132 Citizenjoyce: I agree, I feel women have lost a lot of ground recently but slowly I feel we are regaining some of it. I have hope anyway, and I hope you enjoy the book.

I am still reading it and I am about half way through, but I have also started House Rules by Rachel Sontag. It's a memoir based on her memories of her controlling father and enabling (sometimes abusive) mother, and I really feel for her reading her story.

137vwinsloe
Giu 15, 2021, 9:05 am

I finished Gideon the Ninth, and found it to be quite original, although apparently heavily influenced by gamer culture as well as summer blockbuster films. I was somewhat emotionally engaged with the characters though, which seems to be rare for me these days.

I woke up in the wee small hours and couldn't get back to sleep so I grabbed Three Women from the TBR pile. I remember that this book got a lot of hype, but the current rating on LT is about 3.5 stars, so I'll see if I can figure out why.

138SChant
Giu 18, 2021, 8:31 am

I finished Blues legacies and Black Feminism. Interesting ideas but I didn't quite buy into her thesis. Yes, I can see the blues as a reflection of working-class black people's lives; yes I can see them including an exuberant celebration of black women's autonomous sexuality; but as a form of proto-feminist consciousness-raising? No, no evidence for that interpretation.
As for seeing Billie Holliday's performance of the vapid jazz pop-songs that came afterwards as some form of protest - no evidence for that either. And I don't think the author truely believes that either - she spends a whole chapter trying to squeeze Holliday's general body of work into this mold, then a whole other chapter on her one genuine protest song Strange Fruit.

Worth a read, and also has the author's transcription of most of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith's recorded songs, which can sometimes be hard to make out.

139SChant
Giu 19, 2021, 10:32 am

Started The Lives of Lee Miller by her son Antony Penrose. An intriguing woman, involved in many of the great artistic movements of the 20th century, and a very determined war photographer.

140vwinsloe
Giu 20, 2021, 9:17 am

>139 SChant:, I'll have to keep my eye out for that one. Such a fascinating person.

141Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Giu 20, 2021, 5:08 pm

I finished Stacey Abrams's first novel published under her own name, While Justice Sleeps. I haven't read any of her romances but gave this one a go because it was about the supreme court. The plot is very complicated with rare brain diseases, genetic engineering, a truly evil president, evil Homeland Security agents, and too many games and puzzles for me to figure out. She said she wrote it first when Bush was president, but no one would publish it because the premise of a president so evil was too unbelievable. The premise was perfectly believable to me, but there were way too many twists for me to keep up. Also, the goal of the genetic engineering didn't make sense. I did like the characters, though.

142alsocass
Giu 21, 2021, 12:51 am

>137 vwinsloe:
I listened to Gideon the Ninth last year. I did enjoy the attitude of the main character, it was something different. I also loved the description of this weird society full of necromancy and goth attire.

143alsocass
Giu 21, 2021, 12:54 am

I just finished Women Don't Owe You Pretty by Florence Given. While I the sentiments of the book rang true, it was essentially an opinion piece written by a 21yo. There was no referencing, no backing up of anything with statistics.

In contrast to Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez which I also read, that is wholly using evidence and hundreds of footnotes to show where the information was coming from.

144Citizenjoyce
Giu 21, 2021, 5:27 pm

>143 alsocass: I felt exactly as you did about Women Don't Owe You Pretty adding an attractive, white 21-year-old.

145alsocass
Giu 21, 2021, 7:04 pm

>144 Citizenjoyce: To her credit, the author (Florence Given) does admit that she understand her youth and attractiveness allow her to not shave.

I rarely shave (arms or legs), and the times that I do shave my legs are always because I am entering a space where hairy legs just contribute to ugliness which = less respect.

I cut my hair short a few months ago, I had been hesitating because it felt like such a middle-aged woman thing to do.... It took me a while to realise that middle-age is when most women are beginning to recognise and throw off the shackles of patriarchy, a badge of pride, not old age.

146Citizenjoyce
Giu 22, 2021, 2:27 am

>145 alsocass: Funny, because of covid I've let my hair grow. This is the first time in decades I've had shoulder-length hair. I shave because I'm old and it's ingrained. Hairy legs are just icky to me.
I agree the author does realize her privilege, but I always wonder if attractive people ever really understand what an enormous privilege that is in almost every aspect of life.

147vwinsloe
Modificato: Giu 22, 2021, 9:52 am

>146 Citizenjoyce: Same here with the pandemic hair! I've considered cutting it now that I am vaxxed to the max, but it is just so convenient to put in a ponytail in the heat. I really don't like the way that I look with short hair, and medium length is difficult in the summer.

I do hairy legs all year, and then shave a couple of times in the summer when it is shorts season. I would rather not even do it then, but I feel like people are staring at my legs, and I would rather not have the attention.

I don't think that attractive people ever really understand their privilege, but there is a downside to it too, like being stereotyped. And then, of course, there is the inevitable let down when one relies on that privilege and then loses it as she ages.

But I digress. I finished Three Women and I liked it more than I expected which could be just a function of having low expectations. I think that the marketing was somewhat misleading, as it was not so much about women's sexual desire as it was about the exploitation of that desire.

148SChant
Giu 27, 2021, 8:47 am

Finished Sarah Pinsker's Song for a new Day. It was OK but meandered a bit - didn't have the punch of her short stories.

Now starting Yonnondio by Tillie Olsen - a novel that's been on my TBR pile not for weeks, not for months, but for years! About time I got to it.

149vwinsloe
Giu 28, 2021, 8:35 am

I'm just finishing up Behold the Dreamers. While I don't think that this book is as good as the accolades it received, I always enjoy books about the immigrant experience. This treaded a lot of familiar ground.

150Citizenjoyce
Giu 28, 2021, 6:51 pm

>149 vwinsloe: I see I have it on my wish list, but I don't know why. Maybe I'll move it up the list.
I'm halfway through Who Is Maud Dixon which I found out about in a Facebook group. I think this is just what I need right now. Maud Dixon is the pseudonym for a famous novelist (everyone says think Elena Ferrante). That's pretty much all I needed to know to think I'd like it, and I do. It's not about politics or MeToo, but there's a little of that. The main character probably isn't anyone you'd want to be bosom buddies with, but I can see why she does what she does. I guess it's pure escapism, and I'm escaping.

151vwinsloe
Modificato: Giu 30, 2021, 8:43 am

I was early for an appointment this morning and checked my email while sitting in my car. I opened a list of the 2021 Locus Award winners and was skimming them when I saw the title of the best short story: Little Free Library. I'm a Little Free Librarian myself, so I had to read the story then and there. It is delightful, and I look forward to more from this author. Here's a link:

https://www.tor.com/2020/04/08/little-free-library-naomi-kritzer/

152Citizenjoyce
Giu 29, 2021, 6:43 pm

>151 vwinsloe: You're a little free librarian? I think I'd like that. I should get my son to build me something.

153vwinsloe
Giu 30, 2021, 8:02 am

>152 Citizenjoyce:. Yes, I am a proud Little Free Librarian. You can buy LFLs pre-built, or build one from plans found on their site. https://littlefreelibrary.org/build/?gclid=CjwKCAjwrPCGBhALEiwAUl9X0z7Wl44WUoY9h...

Mine was a gift, and it was just a copy of a LFL across town.

I really enjoy it. I am always surprised at the different books that come and go.

154Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Giu 30, 2021, 6:42 pm

>153 vwinsloe: Thanks. I live in a mainly Hispanic community, and there's a druggie a few blocks away from me who steals everything he can get his hands on, so it will be a challenge, but I'd like to give it a try. I have way too many books to keep.
I just finished Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia. After all the complaints about American Dirt that a white woman dare write about the experience of Hispanic immigrants, this is a book I can offer from the "correct" ethnicity. Garcia is not an immigrant herself, though her mother is from Cuba and her father from Mexico she is fully USA, and the novel was begun as her MFA thesis. I like the contrast shown between Cuban immigrants and those from our other southern border. My late sister-in-law was Cuban, and it seems she has the attitude down right. She also clearly shows the experience of substance abuse. Having just read Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe it was interesting to see addiction personalized so well.

155SChant
Lug 1, 2021, 4:28 am

My library requests have just turned up - Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Sinéad O'Connor's autobiography Rememberings.

156vwinsloe
Lug 1, 2021, 10:16 am

>154 Citizenjoyce:. The only problem that I have with my LFL is people wish-cycling books that no one wants, like a 2001 Tennis Rule Book. It sounds like your neighborhood might make you eligible for the LFL Read in Color program, so you can check that out.

A copy of American Dirt showed up on my LFL, so I will read that despite the controversy. I've put Of Women and Salt on my wish list. I've heard that Cuban immigrants lean Republican, particularly if their families were dispossessed after the Cuban revolution. Some of it is also machismo, I'm sure, voting against anything that might weaken the patriarchy.

157Citizenjoyce
Lug 1, 2021, 12:56 pm

>156 vwinsloe: I think Marco Rubio pretty much epitomizes Cuban refugees from the earlier era., lots of money and conservative politics. I loved American Dirt. I think you might too.
>155 SChant: Rememberings looks interesting.

158SChant
Lug 6, 2021, 8:31 am

I have raced through Sinéad O'Connor’s autobiography Rememberings in 2 days. It’s not like your standard “start at the beginning and go on till the end” bio, more like a friend sitting at the kitchen table recalling stories of her life as they come to her – some horrific, some hilarious, and some quite unhinged – but throughout all the tales and ramblings shines through her one true love – making music. A brave woman with a glorious voice.

159Citizenjoyce
Modificato: Lug 8, 2021, 9:11 pm

When I first started The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris I was kind of disappointed thinking it to be another "white people suck" book. The protagonist has a white boyfriend, maybe that was to pacify the "not all white people" crowd. The book is filled with well-educated, upwardly mobile young Black women who have a lot to say about a lot of things and they say it in a young, urban language that Harris doesn't translate for 75-year-old white women. But you know, we old ladies can keep up. Count publishing off my list of dream careers. What with toadying up to the superiors and mind-breaking work the shine is off that profession. Nella Rogers is a brilliant assistant who works for a prestigious publishing house whose strong support of diversity is that they published a book by a Black author just last year. And they hired Nella who wants more than anything to be an editor, but she doesn't seem to get promoted. Then one day what amazing thing should happen but that they hire another young, brilliant, chic Black woman assistant. Nella is very excited thinking they can be friends, but Hazel, the new hire, instead takes over all Nella's work friends because she seems to possess more charisma than Beyonce, Bill Clinton, and Obama combined. What is going on here? And I loved finding out what was going on as I got a detailed tutorial in black hair. It's very hard for me not to stop people on the street and recommend this book to them.
ETA: I thought this would make a great movie and look what I found:
https://deadline.com/2020/04/hulu-overall-deal-tara-duncan-zakiya-dalila-harris-...

160vwinsloe
Lug 9, 2021, 8:57 am

>159 Citizenjoyce:. That sounds interesting! Right now I am about half way through The Yellow House, and I have learned so much about New Orleans East that will apparently be the backdrop for the Hurricane Katrina narrative that will dominate the second half. Broom is such a good writer, and I am starting to feel like I know these people personally.

161Sakerfalcon
Lug 9, 2021, 9:02 am

>159 Citizenjoyce: I've read several enthusiastic reviews of this from people I trust, so am adding it to my Wishlist.

I've just finished reading the mammoth A Bloodsmoor romance by Joyce Carol Oates, which is one of her Gothic novels. It's a long, engrossing read that covers 20 years of American history through the events affecting a family and their 5 daughters. I really enjoyed it.

I'm currently reading Catalyst gate which is SF, and Available dark which is one of Elizabeth Hand's very bleak but compelling crime novels. I've loved her work since discovering Winterlong as a teenager.

162Citizenjoyce
Lug 9, 2021, 3:49 pm

>160 vwinsloe:, >161 Sakerfalcon: Well shoot, neither The Yellow House nor A Bloodsmoor Romance is at my library on audio, so I guess I'll have to wait and see if that changes.
I just finished Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson which is a history of cooking implements from spoons and forks to refrigeration to the kitchen itself. It's fun and interesting, the kind of non-fiction that draws me in with one amazing fact after another. Next up is That Way Madness Lies: 15 of Shakespeare's Most Notable Works Reimagined by Dahlia Adler. I'm one of those plebians who can't get past Shakespeare's language to the enjoyment of his plays, so I have high hopes here.

163Citizenjoyce
Lug 9, 2021, 6:04 pm

Well, that was quick. I've abandoned That Way Madness Lies: 15 of Shakespeare's Most Notable Works Reimagined by Dahlia Adler. Yes she does make the language easy to understand, and she does make the stories inclusive (I hated The Taming of the Shrew for its sexism) but she also makes them bland and boring. Life is short, and there are many books I want to read. On to a rereading of City of Girls for my RL book club.

164vwinsloe
Lug 11, 2021, 9:19 am

>162 Citizenjoyce:. I would love to know the process by which publishers decide to make an audiobook, and which audiobooks libraries purchase for their collections. I've never read anything about it anywhere, and it seems so random.

165Citizenjoyce
Lug 11, 2021, 3:39 pm

>164 vwinsloe: You would think it would be on best selling books, but I've seen some pretty obscure books in audio and some mighty popular ones not, such as the new Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary.

166vwinsloe
Lug 12, 2021, 8:47 am

>165 Citizenjoyce:. Exactly. It seems so random.

167vwinsloe
Modificato: Lug 12, 2021, 9:36 am

We've been getting the continuation button on the bottom of this thread for a while now, so I am going to try to start a new one. Page 12, here we come!
Questa conversazione è stata continuata da What Are We Reading, Page 12.

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