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Tiptree Nation (March Reading)
Apr. 4th, 2011 08:23 pmWell-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich): Strong entry-level feminism primer. If I were trying to do a women's history or women's studies 101 , I'd love to stick this on the book list and cherry-pick case studies. The author coined the title phrase in a graduate paper on colonial women; in the prologue, she reflects on its separation from its original source.
( Liked. )
I'd like this even more if there was more focus on the activism of the late 20th C, but that's out of Ulrich's academic focus. Instead I get many examples outside of my usual historical range, and read about women's history I would not have found on my own.
The Gate of Ivrel (C. J. Cherryh): The themes you don't notice when you're 17 are the most telling when you're 27. Vanye kills his brother, refuses to commit honorable suicide, is exiled and symbolically shorn of his honor, and after two years dodging avenging clan-kin, refuses three offers to be welcomed into a family/social unit (Liell at Irien, Roh and the Chya, Erij on the road to Ivrel), and goes pelting after the woman he cursed for binding him at the beginning of the novel. What I didn't notice were the callbacks to really pulp-ish sword and sorcery; the two-sons-plus-one family dynamics (seriously, what was Vanye's dad thinking? I sense Author's Hand); how much of the novel various characters spend wounded; the body count. I was an innocent young woman.
The first time I read The Gate of Ivrel was around the same time I found The Best of C. L. Moore, so I was ready to draw Morgaine and Jirel comparisons; I wonder if I shouldn't have made a detour through Fritz Lieber or other fantasy novelists first. The setup reads now to me more like a young writer asking, "what if I took these pulp tropes, only I made the mighty leader a woman?" than a reaction to or conversation with Moore's stories.
White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine (Carl Elliott): I cannot for the life of me remember why I put a hold on this. It's an op-ed. Elliott attacks big pharma with the passion of the disenchanted (MD-PhD now teaching bioethics; someone who's smart and organized) to the degree I find myself looking for elided facts, appeals to irreverent authority, appeals to the common man (aka the Jeff Winger Student President Debate speech), and other emotional tricks that obscure the fact I'm probably on Elliott's side. Stop trying to sway me with emotion and give me statistics, and highlight the potholes that are getting skipped to get the book finished. If, quoting Elliott quoting a Carnegie-Mellon study, "coming clean means playing dirty" (p94), what are his motives for writing this book? I finished this thin book with the reflection I wanted to read the original research, or better research on Elliott's examples, not re-written column pieces stitched into hardcover format.
The Midnight Mayor (The Inauguration of Matthew Swift) (Kate Griffin): Sequel to A Madness of Angels; urban fantasy with a high body count and not a phouka or unseelie court in the worldbuilding. Usually I don't find much entertainment in urban fantasy; there's too much love of the fantasy elements and not enough city love. This is not a problem in The Midnight Mayor: London is a character in its own right. Isn't there a lowbrow sci-fi novel where books come to life, embodied as the main character? And Dune is represented by, well, desert and sandworms? When Griffin's writing, London feels a bit like that: alive and sense-of-wonder in its own right. Since that's how I feel about San Francisco, I think this is the best thing ever.
( Spoilers, book 2 and 3. This isn't a perfect novel, but I was entertained. )
"A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Woolf): Nonfiction. An essay which has been on my "to read" list for years. Woolf calls for the elevation of women in writing in a way that makes me think of a later woman's writing, and a progressive / reform political party formed of "the people that matter". If one were teaching Feminism and the Written Word 101, I'd have students read this, then read Audre Lorde's "Master's House" back to back, because Woolf's attiude is exactly what Lorde attacks. If all upper class women of the 1920's were this elitist and focused on their semi-bohemian artsy lives, I'm relieved to be long removed from that time and place.
And yet - without the Virginia Woolf, do you get Lois Bujold? Or many of the post-Woolf authors I like, female and male? Acknowledging both the contributions to a tradition and personal weaknesses in the same person is something I struggle with.
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: A Book By Patton Oswalt: Nonfiction / essay / memoir of a high school D&D / sci-fi geek turned standup comedian, the sort of person who knows people who know that zombies can live underwater, they just don't like it (p98 HC). Oswalt grew up in Sterling, VA, part of the greater DC exurb tedium which I know from intimate personal experience. Title from essay of the same name, which is written in the language of my people: "Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship." (p99) "The Matrix films are about a hero, Neo, who doesn't realize he is a Zombie, and also doesn't realize he's living in a Wasteland, until he's woken by Morpheus, who de-zombifies Neo by bringing him aboard a Spaceship." (p101) "Hey - why do heroes always "wander" the wasteland?" (p103). Light and funny, and sometimes sort of awful, as good comedy so often is.
Among Others (Jo Walton): Fiction: 15 year old Welsh girl at English boarding school, with a limp, a diary, a grievous family situation, and a yen for libraries. Plus or minus the fairies, this was my 1996. It's hard to say if I like Among Others over the feedback squeal; I had to keep reading or I wasn't sure I'd finish it. Some reviewers dislike the mish-mash of genres - boarding school, fantasy, semiautobiographgical mimetic, etc - which I'd say is part of the fun. The only genre stance the novel takes is falling on the fantasy side: in the book world, magic is real (and not very nice).
After skimming half of Paladin of Souls, I reread Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt. The pacing is terrifically uneven, the first half wending along asking "is this my plot? What about this?" and finally turning on Horseriver and the Wounded Woods. One gets the impression Ingrey would very much like this story to be about someone else, please, while he and Ijada neck in the back of the theater; fortunately for me, Ingrey is not the driving - writing - hand.
Numbers game: 8 total finished. 6 new, 2 reread; 4 fiction, 4 nonfiction.
( Liked. )
I'd like this even more if there was more focus on the activism of the late 20th C, but that's out of Ulrich's academic focus. Instead I get many examples outside of my usual historical range, and read about women's history I would not have found on my own.
The Gate of Ivrel (C. J. Cherryh): The themes you don't notice when you're 17 are the most telling when you're 27. Vanye kills his brother, refuses to commit honorable suicide, is exiled and symbolically shorn of his honor, and after two years dodging avenging clan-kin, refuses three offers to be welcomed into a family/social unit (Liell at Irien, Roh and the Chya, Erij on the road to Ivrel), and goes pelting after the woman he cursed for binding him at the beginning of the novel. What I didn't notice were the callbacks to really pulp-ish sword and sorcery; the two-sons-plus-one family dynamics (seriously, what was Vanye's dad thinking? I sense Author's Hand); how much of the novel various characters spend wounded; the body count. I was an innocent young woman.
The first time I read The Gate of Ivrel was around the same time I found The Best of C. L. Moore, so I was ready to draw Morgaine and Jirel comparisons; I wonder if I shouldn't have made a detour through Fritz Lieber or other fantasy novelists first. The setup reads now to me more like a young writer asking, "what if I took these pulp tropes, only I made the mighty leader a woman?" than a reaction to or conversation with Moore's stories.
White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine (Carl Elliott): I cannot for the life of me remember why I put a hold on this. It's an op-ed. Elliott attacks big pharma with the passion of the disenchanted (MD-PhD now teaching bioethics; someone who's smart and organized) to the degree I find myself looking for elided facts, appeals to irreverent authority, appeals to the common man (aka the Jeff Winger Student President Debate speech), and other emotional tricks that obscure the fact I'm probably on Elliott's side. Stop trying to sway me with emotion and give me statistics, and highlight the potholes that are getting skipped to get the book finished. If, quoting Elliott quoting a Carnegie-Mellon study, "coming clean means playing dirty" (p94), what are his motives for writing this book? I finished this thin book with the reflection I wanted to read the original research, or better research on Elliott's examples, not re-written column pieces stitched into hardcover format.
The Midnight Mayor (The Inauguration of Matthew Swift) (Kate Griffin): Sequel to A Madness of Angels; urban fantasy with a high body count and not a phouka or unseelie court in the worldbuilding. Usually I don't find much entertainment in urban fantasy; there's too much love of the fantasy elements and not enough city love. This is not a problem in The Midnight Mayor: London is a character in its own right. Isn't there a lowbrow sci-fi novel where books come to life, embodied as the main character? And Dune is represented by, well, desert and sandworms? When Griffin's writing, London feels a bit like that: alive and sense-of-wonder in its own right. Since that's how I feel about San Francisco, I think this is the best thing ever.
( Spoilers, book 2 and 3. This isn't a perfect novel, but I was entertained. )
"A Room of One's Own" (Virginia Woolf): Nonfiction. An essay which has been on my "to read" list for years. Woolf calls for the elevation of women in writing in a way that makes me think of a later woman's writing, and a progressive / reform political party formed of "the people that matter". If one were teaching Feminism and the Written Word 101, I'd have students read this, then read Audre Lorde's "Master's House" back to back, because Woolf's attiude is exactly what Lorde attacks. If all upper class women of the 1920's were this elitist and focused on their semi-bohemian artsy lives, I'm relieved to be long removed from that time and place.
And yet - without the Virginia Woolf, do you get Lois Bujold? Or many of the post-Woolf authors I like, female and male? Acknowledging both the contributions to a tradition and personal weaknesses in the same person is something I struggle with.
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland: A Book By Patton Oswalt: Nonfiction / essay / memoir of a high school D&D / sci-fi geek turned standup comedian, the sort of person who knows people who know that zombies can live underwater, they just don't like it (p98 HC). Oswalt grew up in Sterling, VA, part of the greater DC exurb tedium which I know from intimate personal experience. Title from essay of the same name, which is written in the language of my people: "Darth Vader is, essentially, a Zombie, born in a Wasteland, who works on a Spaceship." (p99) "The Matrix films are about a hero, Neo, who doesn't realize he is a Zombie, and also doesn't realize he's living in a Wasteland, until he's woken by Morpheus, who de-zombifies Neo by bringing him aboard a Spaceship." (p101) "Hey - why do heroes always "wander" the wasteland?" (p103). Light and funny, and sometimes sort of awful, as good comedy so often is.
Among Others (Jo Walton): Fiction: 15 year old Welsh girl at English boarding school, with a limp, a diary, a grievous family situation, and a yen for libraries. Plus or minus the fairies, this was my 1996. It's hard to say if I like Among Others over the feedback squeal; I had to keep reading or I wasn't sure I'd finish it. Some reviewers dislike the mish-mash of genres - boarding school, fantasy, semiautobiographgical mimetic, etc - which I'd say is part of the fun. The only genre stance the novel takes is falling on the fantasy side: in the book world, magic is real (and not very nice).
After skimming half of Paladin of Souls, I reread Bujold's The Hallowed Hunt. The pacing is terrifically uneven, the first half wending along asking "is this my plot? What about this?" and finally turning on Horseriver and the Wounded Woods. One gets the impression Ingrey would very much like this story to be about someone else, please, while he and Ijada neck in the back of the theater; fortunately for me, Ingrey is not the driving - writing - hand.
Numbers game: 8 total finished. 6 new, 2 reread; 4 fiction, 4 nonfiction.
