December 2017-ish Reading
Nov. 17th, 2018 02:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aseUnearthed in a gmail draft! Books I read a year ago:
Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing (Victoria Sweet) (2017): Nonfiction memoir / call to consider that American health care is good at crisis intervention and terrible at creating situations where patients avoid crisis, especially in the era of managed care. Sweet traces her path from college through her early practice of medicine, with anecdotes of the encroachment of modern health care on the doctor's ability to provide cohesive long term care for the most vulnerable patients. An enjoyable stop on my path seeking a history of 20th and 21st century medicine.
Spinning (Tillie Walden) (2017): Graphic novel / memoir mostly about figure skating. The focus is on the author's experiences with singles?/synchro figure skating, while dealing with the other forces of adolescence: family, friendships (and loneliness), and love, emphasis on lesbians. Spinning does a good job expressing the feeling of the author's experiences. It's more a narrative of experience than a reflection on those feelings and events. Which isn't a bad thing, it's important to testify that things happened in your life. But the narrative voice doesn't have a lot of interest in doing the big picture: the homogeneity of synchro costumes and the girlfriend's mother who breaks up the young couple; the SAT tutor who assaults Tillie and the sexualization inherent in women's (girls') skintight, short-skirted staking costumes, the makeup masks on the ice and the sense of disconnection or isolation. They're there, they're stated. The overwhelming impression is of disconnection, even of event from event.
Not Your Sidekick (C.B. Lee) (2016): YA with LGBT and superpowers. Jess Tran's parents are heroes, her sister is in hero school, her brother is a budding mad scientist. But by 17, Jess hasn't manifested any powers, and at her age is unlikely to. What she does with this leads to her entanglement in the mystery of disappearing villains, a discovery about one of her closest friends, a lot of yearning for longtime crush Abby Jones, and the discovery that some of the comforting truths of her life might not be all that true.
So I saw the Abby/Jess coming from a mile away, about five pages after I saw M = Abby = daughter of the Mischiefs.
This is a book about women. Jess' mom gets to carry the Tran parents' narrative, especially the decision to conform with the system for their kids' sake. Abby's mom is rescued; Abby's dad remains offscreen. The school rivalries and friendships are largely focused around the girls; one of the people Jess is learning to be nice to is That Guy who runs the LGBT (emphasis on G) club.
The novel does a nice job talking about the compromises Jess' parents have made, in their life in Andover, which is not necessarily as light and sweet as Jess might have thought growing up.
Slow Medicine: The Way to Healing (Victoria Sweet) (2017): Nonfiction memoir / call to consider that American health care is good at crisis intervention and terrible at creating situations where patients avoid crisis, especially in the era of managed care. Sweet traces her path from college through her early practice of medicine, with anecdotes of the encroachment of modern health care on the doctor's ability to provide cohesive long term care for the most vulnerable patients. An enjoyable stop on my path seeking a history of 20th and 21st century medicine.
Spinning (Tillie Walden) (2017): Graphic novel / memoir mostly about figure skating. The focus is on the author's experiences with singles?/synchro figure skating, while dealing with the other forces of adolescence: family, friendships (and loneliness), and love, emphasis on lesbians. Spinning does a good job expressing the feeling of the author's experiences. It's more a narrative of experience than a reflection on those feelings and events. Which isn't a bad thing, it's important to testify that things happened in your life. But the narrative voice doesn't have a lot of interest in doing the big picture: the homogeneity of synchro costumes and the girlfriend's mother who breaks up the young couple; the SAT tutor who assaults Tillie and the sexualization inherent in women's (girls') skintight, short-skirted staking costumes, the makeup masks on the ice and the sense of disconnection or isolation. They're there, they're stated. The overwhelming impression is of disconnection, even of event from event.
Not Your Sidekick (C.B. Lee) (2016): YA with LGBT and superpowers. Jess Tran's parents are heroes, her sister is in hero school, her brother is a budding mad scientist. But by 17, Jess hasn't manifested any powers, and at her age is unlikely to. What she does with this leads to her entanglement in the mystery of disappearing villains, a discovery about one of her closest friends, a lot of yearning for longtime crush Abby Jones, and the discovery that some of the comforting truths of her life might not be all that true.
So I saw the Abby/Jess coming from a mile away, about five pages after I saw M = Abby = daughter of the Mischiefs.
This is a book about women. Jess' mom gets to carry the Tran parents' narrative, especially the decision to conform with the system for their kids' sake. Abby's mom is rescued; Abby's dad remains offscreen. The school rivalries and friendships are largely focused around the girls; one of the people Jess is learning to be nice to is That Guy who runs the LGBT (emphasis on G) club.
The novel does a nice job talking about the compromises Jess' parents have made, in their life in Andover, which is not necessarily as light and sweet as Jess might have thought growing up.