Wednesday book meme thing
Jan. 17th, 2018 08:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseWhat I've just finished reading
Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine. I enjoyed the heck out of this one - the heroine's bravery, resourcefulness, and agency even as circumstances conspire to rob her of it are all delightful. That said, Ella's great strength as a character also becomes a significant handicap in the third act. Forced by her obedience-curse into the Cinderella role of servant, she spends a good amount of time chafing at her own passivity - and not much else happens. It feels like a missed opportunity; she could have spent some time learning more emotional maturity and alternate coping strategies to deal with her powerlessness, which would have given the finale more punch. But even as written, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for a fun lighthearted read.
What I'm currently reading
Yoga Sequencing, by Mark Stephens. I had a bit of a rocky start with this one, but the second part of the first chapter was much more interesting. I particularly liked what it had to say about how we often think of poses as static, something we hold (an impression reinforced by photos in Yoga Journal or Instagram), when in fact our bodies are always moving - we breathe, our heart beats, electric signals travel along our nerves. I've been building my classes this week around the theme of dynamic stillness; finding the place in a pose where we feel the shape in our body and feel how it changes as we breathe and adjust to keep our balance.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. I have something of a love/hate relationship with Moore's work; like many humorists, he has a lot of sharply drawn observations on human nature and entertaining takes on our hypocrisy and foibles. However, I'm less of a fan of his attitude towards his characters; rather than evoking a sense of compassion for their shortcomings, he more often seems to be jabbing pointy things in their soft places and mocking them for their inability to live up to their ideals. (Maybe it's not surprising that many of my friends who share my perfectionist streak are big fans of his.) I'm a couple of chapters in and so far this one feels less condescending than some of his other books; maybe it's just that this is a story so often- and self-seriously-told that it's ripe for a little satire. Regardless, I'm enjoying his portrayal of Christ and Biff as Twain-esque boyhood troublemakers.
Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dimitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, by M.T. Anderson. Oh man. If I didn't have a massage booking coming up fast I would go on about this book for paragraphs (and indeed already have, to several people). It's a good follow-up to Winter Garden, dealing with a lot of the same events from a more historical perspective, and it's turned out to be precisely the kind of survey of 20th-century Russian/Soviet history that I was hoping to find (and even better, through the lens of the art of the period, possibly my favorite type of history). I also love that Anderson spends some time critically examining his sources, and explaining why any given anecdote is suspect; the combination of the unreliability of Stalinist-era accounts (when saying the wrong thing could mean arrest, torture, and execution) and Shostakovich's global fame (which meant lots of people wanted to be associated with him) means that a lot of what we 'know' about his life has to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, his music speaks for him - and one of Anderson's great strengths as a writer is his ability to describe precisely what it is about the music that makes it so resonant. (I'm listening to the audiobook, which includes short clips of some of the pieces discussed, which is great - but I wish they were longer and that there were more of them!)
Moscow But Dreaming, by Ekaterina Sedia. Continuing my current reading kick, this is a series of short stories by a contemporary Russian author, many of which include fantastical elements. Even though they deal mostly with recent history and present-day Russia, there's a strong streak of sadness and pathos that runs through them. (It's almost like spending decades trapped between an insane and paranoid dictator bent on maintaining control at all costs and an insane dictator bent on the genocide of your people at all costs leaves a cultural mark, heh.) Many of them feel more like vignettes than traditional stories, portraits of people processing the emotions left by a traumatic past; but they're certainly evocative and haunting.
What I plan to read next
Pretty sure I have enough on my plate for now, but you never know...
Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine. I enjoyed the heck out of this one - the heroine's bravery, resourcefulness, and agency even as circumstances conspire to rob her of it are all delightful. That said, Ella's great strength as a character also becomes a significant handicap in the third act. Forced by her obedience-curse into the Cinderella role of servant, she spends a good amount of time chafing at her own passivity - and not much else happens. It feels like a missed opportunity; she could have spent some time learning more emotional maturity and alternate coping strategies to deal with her powerlessness, which would have given the finale more punch. But even as written, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for a fun lighthearted read.
What I'm currently reading
Yoga Sequencing, by Mark Stephens. I had a bit of a rocky start with this one, but the second part of the first chapter was much more interesting. I particularly liked what it had to say about how we often think of poses as static, something we hold (an impression reinforced by photos in Yoga Journal or Instagram), when in fact our bodies are always moving - we breathe, our heart beats, electric signals travel along our nerves. I've been building my classes this week around the theme of dynamic stillness; finding the place in a pose where we feel the shape in our body and feel how it changes as we breathe and adjust to keep our balance.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, by Christopher Moore. I have something of a love/hate relationship with Moore's work; like many humorists, he has a lot of sharply drawn observations on human nature and entertaining takes on our hypocrisy and foibles. However, I'm less of a fan of his attitude towards his characters; rather than evoking a sense of compassion for their shortcomings, he more often seems to be jabbing pointy things in their soft places and mocking them for their inability to live up to their ideals. (Maybe it's not surprising that many of my friends who share my perfectionist streak are big fans of his.) I'm a couple of chapters in and so far this one feels less condescending than some of his other books; maybe it's just that this is a story so often- and self-seriously-told that it's ripe for a little satire. Regardless, I'm enjoying his portrayal of Christ and Biff as Twain-esque boyhood troublemakers.
Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dimitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, by M.T. Anderson. Oh man. If I didn't have a massage booking coming up fast I would go on about this book for paragraphs (and indeed already have, to several people). It's a good follow-up to Winter Garden, dealing with a lot of the same events from a more historical perspective, and it's turned out to be precisely the kind of survey of 20th-century Russian/Soviet history that I was hoping to find (and even better, through the lens of the art of the period, possibly my favorite type of history). I also love that Anderson spends some time critically examining his sources, and explaining why any given anecdote is suspect; the combination of the unreliability of Stalinist-era accounts (when saying the wrong thing could mean arrest, torture, and execution) and Shostakovich's global fame (which meant lots of people wanted to be associated with him) means that a lot of what we 'know' about his life has to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, his music speaks for him - and one of Anderson's great strengths as a writer is his ability to describe precisely what it is about the music that makes it so resonant. (I'm listening to the audiobook, which includes short clips of some of the pieces discussed, which is great - but I wish they were longer and that there were more of them!)
Moscow But Dreaming, by Ekaterina Sedia. Continuing my current reading kick, this is a series of short stories by a contemporary Russian author, many of which include fantastical elements. Even though they deal mostly with recent history and present-day Russia, there's a strong streak of sadness and pathos that runs through them. (It's almost like spending decades trapped between an insane and paranoid dictator bent on maintaining control at all costs and an insane dictator bent on the genocide of your people at all costs leaves a cultural mark, heh.) Many of them feel more like vignettes than traditional stories, portraits of people processing the emotions left by a traumatic past; but they're certainly evocative and haunting.
What I plan to read next
Pretty sure I have enough on my plate for now, but you never know...
